Stop Hitting Your Claude Code Quota. Route Around It Instead.

Every week there's a new HN thread about it: "Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out." The advice is always the same: set up Ollama as a fallback, accept that the local model is worse, keep using Claude Code for the important stuff. Treat quota exhaustion like a power outage. Have a backup. Here's the problem with that framing: it treats quota exhaustion as inevitable. It isn't. What's actually eating your quota If you've used Claude Code for more than a day, you know the pattern. You start a session, work on something complex, and most of the exchange is fine. But then there's this steady trickle of smaller requests: "Read this file and tell me what it does" "What's the signature of this function?" "Show me line 47 to 53 of config.py" "Does this import already exist?" These prompts go to Sonnet. Or Opus. They cost the same per token as your hardest architectural questions. Roughly 60-70% of Claude Code requests in a typical session are simple tasks. Reading fil