Line-by-line walkthrough

The import

from litellm.integrations.custom_logger import CustomLogger

LiteLLM ships a base class called CustomLogger. It's the "plug-in template" — LiteLLM already knows how to call methods on this class at specific points in a request's life (before the call, after success, after failure, etc.). You don't build that machinery yourself; you just inherit from it and override the one method you care about.

The class definition

class SanitizeEmptyToolContent(CustomLogger):

This creates your own plug-in by inheriting from CustomLogger. The name is just a label — call it whatever you like. Because it inherits from CustomLogger, it automatically has all the hook methods (pre-call, post-call, logging, etc.) already defined as empty no-ops. You're about to override just one of them.

The method signature

async def async_pre_call_hook(self, user_api_key_dict, cache, data, call_type):

You must keep all five parameters in the signature even if you don't use most of them, because LiteLLM calls this method expecting that exact shape.

Getting the messages list

messages = data.get("messages", [])

data is a dictionary. .get("messages", []) means: "give me the value under the key "messages"; if that key doesn't exist, give me an empty list instead of crashing." So messages becomes the array of message objects — [{"role": "system", ...}, {"role": "user", ...}, {"role": "assistant", ...}, {"role": "tool", ...}] — that opencode sent.

Looping through every message

for msg in messages:

This walks through the list one message at a time. On each pass, msg is one dictionary, e.g. {"role": "tool", "content": "", "tool_call_id": "call_abc123"}.

Reading the content and checking if it's empty