The three-identity system is clever. I have seen this exact lock-in bite people who were just experimenting.
There is another approach I have been using that sidesteps the whole mess: route Claude Code through a third-party provider entirely. Synthetic.new gives you an Anthropic-compatible endpoint, so Claude Code thinks it is talking to Anthropic while actually hitting open-weight models like Kimi K2.5. No API key confusion, no billing mode switching, and the flat $30/month rate means no surprise charges.
This works! Thanks a lot
Glad, was useful!
The three-identity system is clever. I have seen this exact lock-in bite people who were just experimenting.
There is another approach I have been using that sidesteps the whole mess: route Claude Code through a third-party provider entirely. Synthetic.new gives you an Anthropic-compatible endpoint, so Claude Code thinks it is talking to Anthropic while actually hitting open-weight models like Kimi K2.5. No API key confusion, no billing mode switching, and the flat $30/month rate means no surprise charges.
Wrote it up properly here https://reading.sh/how-to-get-3x-claude-rate-limits-for-30-a-month-1d3fdb8658df since the setup is one shell function. Does not solve the problem for people who need actual Claude, but for daily coding work the tradeoff has been worth it.
Interesting; let me try and share my learnings here!