SkiApi Part 2: Point Claude Code at skiapi.dev to Run Qwen3-Coder-Next and DeepSeek 3.2 for Free

This is the second episode of the SkiApi series, covering how to hook your local Claude Code up to the third-party endpoint skiapi.dev and swap in the free Qwen3-Coder-Next and DeepSeek 3.2 to run on. The core logic is simple: Claude Code honors the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL environment variable, and wherever you point it, that’s where the CLI fires its requests. skiapi.dev exposes an Anthropic-compatible interface, so work that would normally go through the official paid route gets routed straight to the freeloaded models instead, without touching the CLI itself and without any reverse engineering.

The config lives in two places, both under the %USERPROFILE%.claude directory. In config.json you set apiProvider to third-party, put skiapi.dev in apiBaseUrl, and swap apiKey for the token you copied. In settings.json you point ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN and ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL over as well, and while you’re at it flip CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC to 1 to cut down on useless telemetry traffic. The model field says claude-opus-4-6, but the backend is actually running skiapi’s model; the name is just there for the CLI to look at.

The generality of this trick is the real point: any client that reads ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL can be wired over just by swapping the base url and adding a token, and one config can be reused across other tools. The cost gets spelled out too: all your requests pass through skiapi as a middle layer, and your token and context are in its hands. If you want free, you have to accept that trust cost.