shipyard-inference

The always-available inference layer for the Shipyard stack.

shipyard-inference wraps Anthropic, OpenAI, and UsePod behind one LLMProvider interface. The strategic goal: agents that don't get rate-limited mid-demo, deprecated overnight, or shut off by a policy change. UsePod is the always-available tier alongside frontier providers — not a replacement.

Status

Alpha — v0.2.0. All three providers are production-ready. Provider failover routing lands in a subsequent release.

| Component | Status | | -------------------------- | ------------- | | AnthropicProvider | ✅ Ready | | OpenAIProvider | ✅ Ready | | createUsePodProvider() | ✅ Ready | | withFailover() | 🚧 Next |

How UsePod works (the short version)

UsePod doesn't ship an SDK. It's a wallet-funded proxy in front of Anthropic and OpenAI. You fund a USDC balance in the UsePod dashboard, copy a per-account proxy URL, and point any existing Anthropic/OpenAI client at it. Inference is billed against your wallet instead of an API key.

createUsePodProvider() is a thin convenience that returns one of our existing providers pre-configured for that proxy.

Install

npm install shipyard-inference

Quick start

Anthropic (direct)

import { AnthropicProvider } from 'shipyard-inference'

const provider = new AnthropicProvider({
  apiKey: process.env.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY,
})

const response = await provider.chat({
  system: 'You are a helpful assistant.',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello!' }],
  tools: [],
})

console.log(response.content)

UsePod (wallet-funded, no API key)

Get a token at usepod.ai/dashboard and fund the balance.

import { createUsePodProvider } from 'shipyard-inference'

const provider = createUsePodProvider({
  token: process.env.USEPOD_TOKEN, // the UUID from your dashboard
})

const response = await provider.chat({
  system: 'You are a helpful assistant.',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello!' }],
  tools: [],
})

OpenAI-compatible mode:

const provider = createUsePodProvider({
  family: 'openai',
  token: process.env.USEPOD_TOKEN,
})

OpenAI (direct)

import { OpenAIProvider } from 'shipyard-inference'

const provider = new OpenAIProvider({
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
})

const response = await provider.chat({
  system: 'You are a helpful assistant.',
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: 'Hello!' }],
  tools: [],
})

Point any provider at a proxy

Every provider now accepts baseURL, so you can route through any OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible gateway (UsePod, OpenRouter, an internal proxy, etc.):

new AnthropicProvider({
  apiKey: 'placeholder',
  baseURL: 'https://api.usepod.ai/proxy/<your-token>',
})

Roadmap

• v0.2 (now) — Anthropic, OpenAI, UsePod providers; baseURL passthrough on all of them.
• Next — withFailover(primary, fallback) routing. Try primary, fall back to UsePod on retryable errors (rate-limit / outage / model-deprecated). This is what makes "always-on" real.
• Later — Streaming, retry-with-jitter, observability hooks (failover-event log).

Related

• Shipyard — the agent ecosystem this SDK powers
• Dock — consumer-facing first mate (first consumer of this SDK)
• UsePod — wallet-funded inference proxy

License

MIT © Halsey Huth