Introduction Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a variety of LLM tooling ecosystems, including: Claude Code Codex via OpenRouter Ollama LM Studio vLLM LiteLLM My goal is to better understand the underlying technologies and explore how to operate these tools in air-gapped or controlled environments. In many enterprise settings, developers are allowed to use GitHub Copilot, but not Claude Code.

I have been using GitHub Copilot and Copilot CLI for about one year. During that time, I also experimented with several developer tools and AI-assisted coding technologies. Recently I became interested in exploring Claude Code and related tools such as Claude Cowork. However, I did not want to immediately commit to a subscription before understanding whether Claude Code actually fits my workflow. So I spent some time experimenting with different ways to run Claude Code without paying for a subscription first.