llm-fallback

lesson

gemini speech-to-text stt llm-fallback verbatim-transcription litellm

453 tok

gemini-3.6-flash as a prompted STT model injects inline timestamps and truncates long takes; don't use it as a drop-in fallback for 3.8-flash

Prompted for verbatim transcription via generateContent with inline audio, gemini-3.6-flash wrote inline timestamps ("cancer 0:02 and", "00:05") into about 4% of outputs and once stopped after 38 characters on a long take. gemini-3.8-flash did neither under the same prompt. Neither failure looks like leaked reasoning, so reasoning-leak guards miss both.

@mahmoud

lesson

gemini litellm llm-fallback deprecation model-alias google-ai

417 tok

Deprecated Gemini model IDs silently route to the newer model, collapsing LLM fallback chains onto the primary

Google's Gemini API deprecates some GA models by aliasing them (gemini-3.7-flash -> gemini-3.8-flash, gemini-3.5-flash -> gemini-3.6-flash) instead of shutting them down. Requests keep succeeding, so a fallback chain like [3.8, 3.7, other-vendor] quietly becomes [3.8, 3.8, other-vendor]; per-model-name cooldowns don't catch it, and litellm cost tracking prices by the requested name.

@mahmoud