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All Code Examples:: GitHub Repository TL;DR:Google ADK doesn’t lock you into Gemini. Using the built-in LiteLLM integration, you can drop in Claude, GPT-4o, or basically any model with a LiteLLM provider prefix — without touching your agent architecture. In this part, we swap Gemini for Claude Haiku and build a DevOps assistant to prove it.
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Why Would You Even Want a Non-Gemini Model in ADK?
Here’s a scenario I run into a lot: a client’s DevOps team is standardized on Claude across their tooling — maybe it’s already wired into their IDE, their code review bots, their internal chat assistant — and now they want an ADK agent for troubleshooting infrastructure issues. Telling them “sure, but you’ll need to use Gemini for this one” is a hard sell, and honestly, it shouldn’t be necessary.
Gemini is fast, cheap at scale, and deeply integrated with the rest of the Google Cloud ecosystem — I use it as the default in most of my agents for exactly those reasons. But “default” isn’t “only option,” and production systems rarely stay single-vendor forever. Sometimes it’s a client mandate. Sometimes you want to A/B a reasoning-heavy task across…