ProxAI vs BDFL - Benevolent Delegator for LLMs

ProxAI is a transparent reverse proxy designed to enforce hard hourly and daily spending caps per LLM API client. With a simple change of just one base_url and no SDK required, developers can seamlessly protect their budgets against runaway LLM costs.

The tool works out-of-the-box with major providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, DeepSeek, and 5 others. If a client goes over its set cap, ProxAI immediately responds with a 429 status code before the upstream provider is ever called, ensuring that the worst-case scenario is your predefined cap rather than an unexpected credit card bill.

ProxAI is fully open-source (licensed under AGPL-3.0) and highly portable. It can be self-hosted as a single Go binary or a lightweight ~10 MB Docker image supporting both amd64 and arm64 architectures with zero telemetry. Alternatively, users can take advantage of the hosted beta version available at proxai.eu, which is free and requires no credit card.

BDFL (Benevolent Delegator for LLMs) is an open-source terminal supervisor designed to orchestrate complex coding sessions using AI agents like Codex, Claude Code, and Ollama. Instead of relying on a single AI window, BDFL separates the workflow into specialized roles. Users interact with a 'planning agent' to create versioned, deliberate plans. Once the human user approves the plan—or specific sections of it—BDFL automatically delegates the tasks to isolated 'worker agents' that execute the code in parallel. Beyond just task delegation, the platform handles the heavy lifting of scheduling, running checks, verifying code, and managing integration. Every worker operates in an isolated environment, ensuring that code changes are properly sandboxed and reviewed before being merged. Because it operates entirely locally without any telemetry or centralized tracking, BDFL offers developers a secure, deterministic, and highly observable way to scale their AI-assisted software development.