Project Motivation and Principles
· 6 min read
As early as the day after Claude Code was released (2025-02-25), I began and completed a reverse engineering attempt of the project. At that time, using Claude Code required registering for an Anthropic account, applying for a waitlist, and waiting for approval. However, due to well-known reasons, Anthropic blocks users from mainland China, making it impossible for me to use the service through normal means. Based on known information, I discovered the following:
- Claude Code is installed via npm, so it's very likely developed with Node.js.
- Node.js offers various debugging methods: simple
console.logusage, launching with--inspectto hook into Chrome DevTools, or even debugging obfuscated code usingd8.
My goal was to use Claude Code without an Anthropic account. I didn't need the full source code—just a way to intercept and reroute requests made by Claude Code to Anthropic's models to my own custom endpoint. So I started the reverse engineering process:
- First, install Claude Code: