Most of March was spent on one thing: building a self-healing network so Claude Code could actually stay online from China.

Development Hell

Most Claude Code tutorials assume you have a clean, fast, unmonitored internet connection. I don’t. I’m in Shenzhen, where the GFW actively detects and kills proxy protocols, WebSocket connections get terminated every 90 seconds, ISPs throttle proxy traffic at night, Anthropic’s API returns 403 for Chinese IPs, and company WiFi stacks another layer of DPI on top. Claude Code would connect, work for 60 seconds, and die. Every single time.

The core problem is simple: Anthropic bans API requests from proxy exit IPs that look like shared datacenter or airport nodes. Consumer VPNs and most proxy subscriptions route through exactly those kinds of nodes. So Claude Code would connect, work for a minute, and get cut off. Every time.

What actually saved me was an old MacBook Pro (2020, T2 chip) sitting at home. I wiped it, installed Ubuntu Server, and set up mihomo (a Clash.Meta fork) on it, connected via Tailscale. It was using the same airport proxy nodes that kept getting banned from my main setup — but from this machine they weren’t getting banned by Anthropic. My guess is the traffic pattern was clean enough: low concurrency, no bursts, the exit IPs hadn’t been flagged yet. I still don’t fully understand why, but it solved the ban problem.

The real fix, though, is a stable residential IP — what you actually need to never get flagged. I’m currently testing EqualDCDN, which provides exactly that. Still early, but if it holds up, the Old Mac workaround becomes unnecessary.

Not getting banned doesn’t mean not getting disconnected. Airport nodes themselves go down, ISPs throttle at night, company WiFi blocks certain ports. So I wrote a 3,500-line vpn CLI that automatically scans for a working path and reconnects when the connection drops. It maintains multiple routes, detects which network environment I’m in (home WiFi, hotspot, office), and picks the right failover order for that scenario. When Claude Code hits a network error, a PostToolUse hook triggers the CLI to find a new path automatically.

Six failover levels total. Roughly 95% of network failures self-heal without me noticing. When absolutely everything is down, I fall back to OpenCode + OpenRouter — inferior experience, but it keeps me productive.

I spent more time on networking in March than on actual coding. But by month’s end it mostly just ran — occasional drops that fixed themselves. When you’re running AI agents from behind the GFW, your network is the single most important piece of infrastructure you have.