A 429 can mean 'slow down for a moment' or 'you are out of quota until a human acts'. The two look identical in a log until you check one header, and the difference decides whether retrying helps or just burns time.
When several credentials are present at once, which one does Claude Code actually use? The official authentication precedence list answers that, and it explains most 'my key stopped working' reports.
Putting a coding agent into a pipeline is not hard to start and easy to get wrong. Three things decide whether it works: how non-interactive mode is invoked, how credentials get in, and where the permission boundaries sit when nobody is watching.
Caching is not a switch you flip; it is prefix reuse, and only a matching rendered prefix hits. Here is what actually gets reused, the writers that silently break the cache, and how to verify hits in your own usage data.
Status codes are a small vocabulary with a large gap between reading them and acting on them. This guide sorts LLM API errors by layer, separates the retryable from the pointless, and maps where OpenAI and Anthropic disagree on the same problem.
Pointing Cursor at an OpenAI-compatible endpoint comes down to three things that have to match: the endpoint address, a working key, and model IDs that exist on that endpoint. Here is the setup, the error triage, and a five-item verification pass.
Changing a key or switching providers rarely fails because the new value was wrong. It fails because the same credential lives in four places. Here is how to change the right surface in Claude Code, Codex CLI, and CC Switch, verify the change took, and decide what happens to your sessions.
Compatible is not a single switch. This checklist breaks the claim into three layers worth verifying separately, the protocol surface, the feature surface, and the behavior surface, with eight concrete checks you can run against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Model retirements are a recurring operations event. This playbook covers the vocabulary to get right, an inventory workflow, an alias layer, golden-set testing, staged cutover, and a preflight check that makes the next migration uneventful.
Four tools, one key: how to point Codex CLI, Claude Code, CC Switch, and Cursor at a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and the three mistakes that break the connection.
Separate application quality from AI-search visibility. Record retrieval, citations, and test conditions before drawing conclusions from model answers.