Claudecode Minimax Stack — Design skill for Claude Code

Make Claude Code Free/Cheaper with MiniMax M3

This guide routes Claude Code's API calls through **MiniMax M3 instead of Anthropic** — same Claude Code UI, same skills, same workflow.

MiniMax M3 is an open-weight model with a ~1M-token context window that scores near the top of the open field on SWE-Bench Pro — at a small fraction of frontier pricing. It exposes an **Anthropic-compatible endpoint**, so Claude Code can talk to it directly.

There are two ways to set this up:

Route	Cost to start	Proxy needed?	Best for
Option A — MiniMax Direct	$25 min top-up	❌ No	The simplest setup (mirrors the DeepSeek stack)
Option B — OpenRouter	$5 min top-up	✅ Tiny local router	The cheapest way in

Pick one. **Both keep your normal Claude Code completely untouched** — plain `claude` keeps using your usual backend; M3 only activates when you pass `--bare --settings`.

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Option A — MiniMax Direct (simplest, no proxy)

1. Get a MiniMax API key

1. Go to https://platform.minimax.io
2. Sign up, complete verification, and add a balance ($25 minimum top-up at the time of writing)
3. Open API Keys → create a key, copy the value (starts with sk-)

2. Save the key locally

mkdir -p ~/.config/mg-minimax && chmod 700 ~/.config/mg-minimax
echo 'export MINIMAX_API_KEY="sk-your-minimax-key-here"' > ~/.config/mg-minimax/key.env
chmod 600 ~/.config/mg-minimax/key.env
source ~/.config/mg-minimax/key.env

3. Create a Claude Code settings override

Most Claude Code installs already have something configured (Anthropic OAuth login, Vertex AI, or AWS Bedrock). Inline env-var prefixes get overridden by those configs — the reliable approach is a `--settings` override file.

cat > ~/.config/mg-minimax/claude-minimax-settings.json <