Gateway Routing

The Prism plugin has two operating modes that control how your Claude API requests are routed. Both modes capture telemetry and run PRISM scoring — the difference is whether requests go straight to Anthropic or pass through the Optra gateway on the way.

The two modes

Direct mode (enableGateway: false)

Your Claude API requests go directly to api.anthropic.com. The plugin still captures telemetry and prompt text in the background — Ingest still receives the data — but there is no Optra hop in the request path.

Gateway mode (enableGateway: true, default)

At session start, the plugin writes these env vars into $CLAUDE_ENV_FILE:

ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=<gateway-url>
ANTHROPIC_CUSTOM_HEADERS="X-Gateway-Api-Key: gck_…
x-prism-source: claude-code"

Claude Code picks them up and routes every API call through the Optra gateway, which forwards to Anthropic. The gateway URL is resolved from a cached config endpoint (24-hour TTL) keyed to your gck_*; you don’t configure URLs by hand.

What each mode gives you today

	Direct	Gateway
OTEL telemetry + prompt capture	✓	✓
PRISM scoring (Speed / Skill / Efficiency)	✓	✓
In-terminal status line, nudges, alerts	✓	✓
All /prism:* commands	✓	✓
Throttle detection	✓	✓
Rightsizing recommendations	✓	✓
Server-side request/response logging	—	✓
Small extra latency per call	—	one gateway hop

The only user-visible difference in steady state today is a small per-call latency bump from the extra hop, and the fact that request/response pairs are visible server-side in gateway mode.

Governance — coming soon

The gateway is the intended plug-in point for Optra’s governance layer: budget caps, guardrails (DLP, PII, prompt injection, content filtering), and model access control. Those features are under development and are not available yet. Gateway mode doesn’t unlock them today — it just puts your traffic on the path where they will land when they ship.

See Three Pillars → Governance for the planned feature set.

Toggling

Run /prism:status and say “toggle gateway” (or “switch routing”). The command flips enableGateway in ~/.prism/config.json; restart Claude Code for the change to take effect (the env vars are read at process init).

Or edit the config directly:

{
  "enableGateway": false
}

When to pick each mode

Scenario	Recommended
Personal use	Either. Direct if you’re sensitive to every millisecond of latency.
Preparing a team for governance features	Gateway — so your traffic is already routed by the time the feature ships.
Debugging a latency issue	Direct, temporarily, to rule the gateway hop out.
Testing the gateway against local Optra services	Gateway — with PRISM_INGEST_URL overridden to localhost for dev.

Network-restricted environments: both modes require outbound access to the Ingest service and (in gateway mode) to the gateway URL. If you can’t reach either, Prism won’t function. Telemetry-only doesn’t avoid that — it still calls Ingest.