Cameo proxy puts cheap models inside Claude Code

The author's starting problem was uneven supply: Claude Code's subscription tokens run out quickly even though Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 are, in the author's words, good enough to call SOTA, while spare capacity sits unused on other models. Free MiMo quota from Xiaomi, occasional cheap access to other Chinese models, and a friend's abandoned GLM subscription were all available but awkward to reach.

Two earlier attempts failed for different reasons. The first, driving another harness through the TUI tool herdr, worked but let the two harnesses approve each other's permission checks, bypassing the permission system entirely and sitting outside Claude Code's permission mechanism and Codex's sandbox. The second, wrapping the author's own harness paimon behind a skill, never convinced Claude Code to treat paimon as a true subagent, and tracing paimon's session history cost so many steps that simple tasks may have burned more tokens than they saved.

The breakthrough was recognizing that many of these cheap models are Anthropic API compatible, so no protocol translation is needed — the same reason the author skipped Claude Code Router as more feature-rich and complex than required. Codex support was deliberately dropped, since Codex has fully moved to the Responses API while most of these models only offer the older Chat Completions API.