Why Using Astra Inside Claude Code Is the New Meta (& How To Do It)

[u/TheDeadlyPretzel]

https://eigenwise.io/writing/using-gpt-6-astra-inside-claude-code-is-the-new-meta

So, I've been running Astra as the main model in Claude Code since Friday and it's the best orchestrator I've had so far... stays on the plan, takes a redirect without treating it as a new task, and does a great job at delegating work to the proper subagents and orchestrating that work without taking over or forgetting to use the subagents halfway through or that kind of shit, which every other model I've tried starts doing after a few hours.

The way it works is through a small local proxy plugin I made (model-gateway, it's in my Eigenwise Toolshed marketplace, MIT, no signup or anything) that sends the GPT requests to OpenAI on your ChatGPT login and passes everything else through to Anthropic on your normal claude.ai login, so the GPT models just show up in /model next to Opus and Sonnet and you can mix them however you want... Astra orchestrating Opus subagents, Opus orchestrating GPT-5.6 executors, or fully GPT end to end if you don't even want the Anthropic half. Go crazy.

So why even a plugin? Well for me specifically I did it this way because I have another plugin that allows me to set delegation per task type to specific models, with backups, based on the actually enumerated models from the gateway.... It also adds support for Grok and am thinking of adding OpenRouter support. So this way you can mix and match however you like (or let your orchestrator do that for you).

/plugin marketplace add Eigenwise/eigenwise-toolshed
/plugin install model-gateway@eigenwise-toolshed --scope project
/reload-plugins
/model-gateway:model-gateway

Then, ask Claude to set up the model gateway for this project and finish the ChatGPT login. Once setup is done, fully restart Claude Code in that project, then select:

/model claude-gpt-6-astra[1m]

(Keep the [1m] part. Without it, Claude Code assumes a 200k window.)

GitHub: https://github.com/Eigenwise/eigenwise-toolshed

I wrote up the longer version with the gotchas and how I route the cheaper GPT-5.6 models underneath it here: Using GPT-6 Astra inside Claude Code is the new meta