One terminal, two trust levels — running Claude Code against a real subscription and a cheap proxy

Part of an ongoing series on model routing and trust tiering for agentic coding tools. This one's the boring, working half — no bug hunt, just a setup that's been running clean across two machines. The problem Claude Code does one thing well: careful, scoped edits with a real plan-then-execute loop behind them, backed by a subscription you're already paying for. Not every task needs that. Exploratory reads, "summarize this directory," draft-and-discard scratch work — most of that doesn't need the most capable model watching every token. The fix is a second, cheaper backend for that category of work. The catch: Claude Code only speaks Anthropic's Messages API. It has no built-in notion of "same tool, different model." So the question is how to point it somewhere else without giving up the interface. The stack Trusted agent: claude — real Anthropic subscription, default session Cheap agent: claude-cheap — same CLI, routed through a self-hosted proxy Proxy: LiteLLM, translating Anthropic-format requests to DeepSeek V4 (pro for Sonnet-tier calls, flash for Haiku-tier) served through an OpenRouter API Transport: a persistent SSH tunnel from a small VPS back to each machine The proxy itself wasn't new. It's the same LiteLLM instance already routing a separate content pipeline I run. The actual work here was wiring Claude Code to it: a shell function and a few environment variables. The core trick and it took me a few week to learn this is to point ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL at LiteLLM's /v1/messages endpoint, not the OpenAI-compatible path LiteLLM also exposes. Claude Code only understands the Anthropic shape, so the OpenAI-shaped endpoint fails in ways that look like a client bug and aren't. Once LiteLLM sits on the right endpoint and translates underneath, Claude Code has no idea it isn't talking to Anthropic. The one bug worth flagging Claude Code's Plan Mode attaches a context_management parameter to its requests. Anthropic's API handles it. Most other backends don't recogniz