I've been learning Claude Code for agentic development lately, but I didn't want to burn through paid API credits while I was still figuring out how the tool actually works. Every wrong prompt, every abandoned session, every "let me just try this real quick" costs money when you're hitting the Anthropic API directly.
So I spent a weekend building a small LiteLLM proxy that lets the Claude Code CLI talk to Amazon Nova on AWS Bedrock instead. Same agent loop, same tool calling, same workflow you'd get with Claude Code normally just pointed at a different backend, running on AWS credits instead of API billing.
The problem I was actually trying to solve
I looked at the usual options for cheap/free agentic coding practice and none of them held up for real sessions:
Ollama locally - needs a beefy machine with real RAM and GPU headroom. Most people don't have that sitting around, and I didn't want to buy it just to practice.
