claude-mode

Switch Claude Code system-wide between Anthropic, OpenRouter, Z.AI, and a local LM Studio server — with named per-tier model presets. Windows / PowerShell 5.1, no external dependencies.

claude-mode                       # interactive menu
claude-mode anthropic             # subscription login
claude-mode openrouter            # remote gateway      (preset: default)
claude-mode zai                   # Z.AI GLM coding plan (preset: zai)
claude-mode lmstudio              # local server         (preset: lmstudio)

Works for the CLI, the VS Code extension, and the desktop app from a single switch. Restart Claude Code afterwards — nothing else.

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The interactive menu

Run claude-mode with no arguments. The mode you're already in is omitted — there's nothing to switch to:

claude-mode   (currently: openrouter / default)
  switch mode:
   1) Anthropic  - your subscription login, no gateway
   2) Z.AI       - GLM coding plan
   3) LM Studio  - local server, offline, free

   4) show full status
   5) edit presets
   6) run doctor
   0) quit

Pick a provider and it lists that provider's presets with the default marked; Enter accepts it. Option 5 walks preset → tier → new model ID, and if you edit the preset that's currently live it re-applies immediately.

When stdin is redirected (scripts, CI) the menu is skipped and status prints instead, so claude-mode is still safe in a pipeline.

Why settings.json and not a profile export

Three ways to make this persist. I picked the second.

1. Export the variables from $PROFILE. The obvious move, and the wrong one here. It only covers processes launched from a PowerShell session that loaded the profile — which is exactly not how you use Claude Code. The VS Code extension is spawned by VS Code, not by your shell, so it would never see the exports. Same for the desktop app, cmd.exe, and any terminal opened before the switch. Worse, the failure is silent: you switch to anthropic, a shell opened five minutes ago still has ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL set, and that session quietly keeps billing OpenRouter.

2. Rewrite the env block in ~/.claude/settings.json. ← chosen Claude Code reads this file on every startup, from every launch context. One write, and the next claude — CLI, extension, desktop — picks it up. A switch is atomic: one file, one source of truth. claude-mode anthropic deletes the managed keys rather than blanking them, so nothing can linger and break native auth. The cost is that config is global rather than per-terminal.

3. Persistent User-scope environment variables (setx). Also global and reboot-proof, but strictly worse: new processes only, values sit in the registry in plaintext, and a stale entry silently outranks whatever claude-mode writes. This tool treats them as a fault condition — status and doctor flag them and offer removal, backing the old value up first.

The claude wrapper in the profile is a safety net, not the mechanism. It strips inherited process-level copies of all thirteen managed variables before launching claude.exe. Everything still works without it — including in VS Code, which never loads the profile.

Why API keys are not in settings.json

settings.json is a config file you'll hand-edit, diff, and possibly paste into a bug report. A sk-or- or Z.AI token does not belong there.

Keys are stored DPAPI-encrypted in ~/.claude-mode/vault/*.cred — encrypted against your Windows account on this machine, so copying the file elsewhere or reading it as another user yields nothing — with the file ACL restricted to you. Claude Code receives the key at runtime through apiKeyHelper, which decrypts and prints it. settings.json holds only the base URL and model IDs.

In anthropic mode the helper is removed from settings.json and returns nothing when state says anthropic — belt and braces. LM Studio's lmstudio token is a placeholder, not a secret, so it's written inline and the helper stays out of it.

Commands

claude-mode                            interactive menu
claude-mode status                     active mode, preset, model map

claude-mode anthropic                  native login (deletes all managed keys)
claude-mode openrouter [preset]        default preset: default
claude-mode zai [preset]               default preset: zai       (alias: z.ai, z-ai)
claude-mode lmstudio [preset]          default preset: lmstudio

claude-mode presets                    list presets (* = active)
claude-mode preset show <name>
claude-mode preset new <name> [from]   copy an existing preset
claude-mode preset set <name> <tier> <model-id>
claude-mode preset all <name> <model-id>     point every tier at one model
claude-mode preset rm <name>

claude-mode set-key [ref]              store a key (hidden prompt, DPAPI)
claude-mode models [filter]            models available from the active provider
claude-mode doctor                     verify auth, endpoint, model ids, stray env vars

Omitting the preset uses a fixed per-provider default, not "most recently used" — so claude-mode openrouter always means default.

Presets shipped

preset	provider	opus	sonnet	haiku	fable
default	openrouter	deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash	qwen/qwen3.7-flash	openrouter/free	z-ai/glm-5.2
cheap	openrouter	deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro	deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash	qwen/qwen3.7-flash	openai/gpt-5.6-luna-pro
claude-via-or	openrouter	anthropic/claude-opus-5	anthropic/claude-sonnet-5	anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5	anthropic/claude-fable-5
zai	zai	glm-5.2	glm-5.2	glm-4.7	glm-5.2
lmstudio	lmstudio	kwaipilot_kat-coder-v2.5-dev (all tiers)
lmstudio-qwen	lmstudio	qwen3.6-35b-a3b-uncensored-heretic-native-mtp-preserved (all tiers)

Presets are plain JSON in ~/.claude-mode/presets/. A preset declares its provider; claude-mode lmstudio default is rejected rather than silently pointing a local URL at remote model IDs.

Context windows and early auto-compaction

Symptom: switch to a gateway and the session starts auto-compacting almost immediately, even though every model involved has a huge context window.

Cause: behind a custom ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, Claude Code has no way to resolve a third-party model ID like deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash to a context length. It falls back to a conservative default and starts compacting against that, not against the model's real 1M window. Z.AI's own docs work around this by setting CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=1000000 — they hit the same thing.

Fix: every preset carries a contextTokens field, which writes both knobs (confirmed present in CLI 2.1.221):

CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_CONTEXT_TOKENS   = <contextTokens>
CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW  = <contextTokens>

preset	contextTokens
default, cheap, claude-via-or, zai	1,000,000
lmstudio, lmstudio-qwen	262,144

doctor cross-checks the declared window against each tier's actual model window and names any tier that falls short — default maps haiku to openrouter/free (200k), which it flags as harmless since haiku only runs short background tasks. Switching without contextTokens prints a warning.

Adjust per preset:

# edit ~/.claude-mode/presets/<name>.json  ->  "contextTokens": 262144
claude-mode doctor      # re-checks declared vs actual

Z.AI mode

Replaces npx @z_ai/coding-helper — and does something it doesn't: maps a distinct model to each Anthropic tier instead of forcing one model everywhere.

Per Z.AI's Claude Code docs:

setting	value
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL	https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
auth	your Z.AI API key — kept in the DPAPI vault, delivered via apiKeyHelper
API_TIMEOUT_MS	3000000
CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW	1000000
CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC	1

All three extra variables are confirmed present in CLI 2.1.221. Setup:

claude-mode set-key zai      # paste your key from https://z.ai/manage-apikey/apikey-list
claude-mode zai
claude-mode doctor           # sends a 1-token request to prove the key works

LM Studio mode

Per LM Studio's docs: base URL http://127.0.0.1:1234 (base only — Claude Code appends /v1/messages), token lmstudio, plus CLAUDE_CODE_ATTRIBUTION_HEADER=0. Gateway discovery stays off; the Anthropic surface is /v1/messages only.

Model IDs are not what the UI shows

LM Studio's /v1/models lists only loaded instances under their display alias. kat-coder-v2.5 is such an alias — once the model idle-unloads it vanishes, and a request using that name returns 400 No models loaded. The JIT-loadable ID is the model key, kwaipilot_kat-coder-v2.5-dev. claude-mode reads /api/v0/models instead, which lists every installed model with its load state, so models and doctor show IDs that actually work.

The [Server Error] ... Unable to generate parser for this template spam

Cause: some GGUF chat templates hard-assert message ordering —

{%- if message.role == "system" %}
    {%- if not loop.first %}
        {{- raise_exception('System message must be at the beginning.') }}

Runtimes that auto-generate a tool-call parser probe the template with synthetic message sequences; those probes trip the assertion and the request dies. It's a model-template bug, not a Claude Code or claude-mode bug — it's been reported against several models (LM Studio #1999, llama.cpp #20733).

Scanning your installed models' templates:

model	template
qwen3.6-35b-a3b-uncensored-heretic-native-mtp-preserved	clean
qwen3.6-35b-a3b	clean
qwen2.5-coder-7b-instruct, google/gemma-4-12b-qat	clean
kwaipilot_kat-coder-v2.5-dev	asserts
qwen/qwen3.5-9b, prism-ml/bonsai-27b	assert

doctor now reports this per model, and models flags affected entries with TEMPLATE RISK. The fix is to use a model without the flag — which is exactly the lmstudio-qwen preset, verified end-to-end with a cold JIT load, streaming, and tool calls.

Honest caveat: KAT-Coder's template does contain the assertion, but I could not reproduce the failure against it here — cold JIT, streaming, tools, system blocks, and multi-turn tool_result all succeeded. Whether it trips seems to depend on which parser strategy the runtime picks. If it spams, switch:

claude-mode lmstudio lmstudio-qwen

Other notes: use a model with >25k context (doctor warns below that), and the model must be installed — JIT loading handles "not loaded" fine.

If you enable authentication in LM Studio, move that preset to a vault key:

claude-mode set-key lmstudio
# then in ~/.claude-mode/presets/lmstudio.json:
#   "auth": { "mode": "vault", "keyRef": "lmstudio" }

CLI version

Verified against claude.exe 2.1.221 by scanning the binary — every variable this tool writes is referenced by it:

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL · ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN · ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_{OPUS,SONNET,HAIKU,FABLE}_MODEL · CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL · CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_GATEWAY_MODEL_DISCOVERY · CLAUDE_CODE_ATTRIBUTION_HEADER · CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW · CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC · API_TIMEOUT_MS · apiKeyHelper

(On 2.1.89 the fable and gateway-discovery vars did not exist; the update to 2.1.221 added both.)

Setup

cd c:\Users\smoido\Projects\cli\claude-code-switcher
.\install.ps1

Installs to ~/.claude-mode/ (ACL: you only), drops claude-mode.cmd into ~/.local/bin (already on your User PATH, next to claude.exe), and adds a marked block to ~/Documents/WindowsPowerShell/profile.ps1. ~/.claude/settings.json is not touched by the installer — only by an actual mode switch, which backs it up to ~/.claude-mode/backups/ first (last 20 kept).

If the profile doesn't load: Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned.

Restarting sessions

Claude Code reads all of this once at startup. A switch does not affect a running session — that's how the process loads config, not something scripting can change.

• CLI — exit and relaunch claude
• VS Code — Ctrl+Shift+P → Developer: Reload Window
• Desktop app — quit and reopen

claude-mode status shows what the next launch will use.

Layout

~/.claude-mode/
  claude-mode.ps1              main script
  state.json                   mode, active preset, and the exact env keys last written
  presets/*.json               provider + model maps
  vault/*.cred                 DPAPI-encrypted keys (openrouter, zai, ...)
  backups/                     settings.json snapshots + removed env-var values
  bin/claude-key-helper.cmd    apiKeyHelper shim
~/.local/bin/claude-mode.cmd   PATH entry point (works from any shell)
~/Documents/WindowsPowerShell/profile.ps1
                               claude-mode + claude functions, between markers

state.json records which env keys the last switch actually wrote, so a custom extraEnv key (Z.AI's timeouts, LM Studio's attribution header) is removed when you switch away — even though no other preset knows that key exists.

Uninstall

claude-mode anthropic                              # clean settings.json first
Remove-Item ~\.claude-mode -Recurse -Force
Remove-Item ~\.local\bin\claude-mode.cmd
# then delete the block between the >>> claude-mode >>> markers in profile.ps1