AI Gateways Are Not I/O-Bound Proxies I Benchmarked 5 of Them to Prove It

Dev.to AI
Generative AI

The wrong mental model Most engineers think of AI gateways as thin reverse proxies. The mental model is something like nginx with proxy_pass accept a request, forward it to OpenAI, stream the response back. I/O-bound. The runtime barely matters. This model is wrong.