So you have heard people rave about Claude Code. Maybe you have also heard people mention OpenRouter in the same breath, usually followed by some combination of environment variables and a screenshot of a terminal. If you are new to any of this, it can feel like everyone skipped a step and jumped straight to the jargon.
This guide is that missing step. We will go slow where it matters, explain the confusing bits, and by the end you will actually understand what is happening instead of just copy pasting commands and hoping.
The two things, quickly
Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal coding agent. It reads your files, edits code, runs commands. By default it talks straight to Anthropic's servers.
OpenRouter is a switchboard. It a switchboard for AI models. Instead of every app needing its own separate connection to every AI provider, OpenRouter sits in the middle and lets you route requests to different models through one account, one dashboard, and one place to watch your spending. (Even free and open source models!)
