Conductor × Portkey is now live

In March 2026, Anthropic began throttling Claude Code sessions during peak hours, causing Max plan users to quickly exhaust their session limits, a move confirmed to manage increasing demand. Conductor, a tool in the Claude Code ecosystem, revolutionizes workflow with features like git worktree isolation, diff review, and parallel session execution, built by Charlie and Jackson who are daily users. It operates above the API layer with orchestration and session handling, while Portkey manages the underlying aspects such as costs, logs, and budget limits, and both tools are designed to complement each other. Users must configure ANTHROPIC_* environment variables correctly, with specific emphasis on setting the ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to an empty string to ensure proper routing through Portkey. The setup emphasizes observability with comprehensive logging, budget controls to prevent overspending, cross-provider failovers for resilience, and support for over 1600 models through a unified interface, with caching to optimize costs and latency. Users are encouraged to consult the full setup guide and seek support through the Portkey Discord or by reporting issues on the gateway repository.

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