Stephen Brown developed a Hugging Face LLM provider integration for the Kong/kong repository, enabling Kong’s LLM driver to interface directly with Hugging Face’s inference API for both serverless and dedicated LLM instances. He designed and implemented a new provider driver, crafted a provider-specific schema, and built request and response transformations to normalize and route data between Kong and Hugging Face endpoints. Using Lua and leveraging his expertise in API integration and backend development, Stephen’s work expanded deployment options for Kong users, allowing seamless Hugging Face-backed LLM workloads and simplifying architecture while maintaining traceability through focused, reviewable commits.