Working With the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs

Integrate AI into your app — API setup, streaming responses, tool use, cost management, and building real AI features.

16 min readapis, openai, anthropic, ai, streaming, llm

This is where things get exciting. You've learned to build APIs, consume APIs, handle payments, authentication, webhooks, and email. Now we're adding AI — the capability that's changing what's possible in software.

OpenAI and Anthropic provide the two most powerful families of language models available. Integrating them into your app isn't fundamentally different from calling any other API, but there are patterns specific to AI that you need to know — streaming, tool use, token management, and cost control.

The Basics — Making Your First AI API Call

OpenAI

npm install openai

import OpenAI from 'openai';
 
const openai = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
});
 
const response = await openai.chat.completions.create({
  model: 'gpt-4o',
  m

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