7 ways I make Claude Code use fewer tokens without hurting the results

Some services have fixed prices regardless of usage, but AI tools like Claude Code do not.

Claude Code is considered a top coding interface, but it originally only works with Anthropic's API and billing. Users can, however, configure it to work with other models. According to Dev.to, there are multiple ways to do this, including using a community tool called claude-code-router, which allows for per-task routing rules and request transformers, but requires running and maintaining a local proxy with a JSON config.

Another option is to point Claude Code at an Anthropic-compatible gateway, which can serve multiple models through one API key. An example of such a gateway is Opper, an EU-hosted service that allows users to switch between models. This setup requires setting two environment variables, ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL and ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, with the user's Opper API key.

Brief written by urgent.news from XDA Developers, Dev.to — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.