5 Free Tools That Turn Claude Code Into a Stack

On its own, Claude Code forgets everything between sessions, re-reads your files every time, and stops when your limit hits. These five free tools fix each of those. Together they make it feel like a stack that runs itself.

1. OmniRoute: never get cut off

OmniRoute is a free gateway that plugs Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents into hundreds of AI providers through one endpoint, many of them free. When your Claude limit hits, it switches to the next model on its own. It also compresses prompts before they are sent.

OmniRoute

2. claude-mem: memory across sessions

claude-mem captures what Claude does during a session, compresses it, and injects the relevant parts back into future sessions. You stop re-explaining your project every morning. It keeps everything in a local database and has a web viewer so you can see what it remembers.

npx claude-mem install

claude-mem on GitHub

3. Headroom: stop burning context

Headroom sits between your agent and the model and compresses the context that gets sent, so the same tool output and file contents are not pushed through again and again. Less noise reaches the model, and your limit lasts longer.

Headroom on GitHub

4. Claude Code Setup: the right automations for your project

Anthropic's own plugin. It scans your codebase and recommends the one or two most useful additions in each category: MCP servers, skills, hooks, subagents and slash commands. It is read-only, so it only recommends, it never changes your files.

/plugin install claude-code-setup@claude-plugins-official

Claude Code Setup plugin

5. Task Observer: skills that improve themselves

Task Observer is a meta-skill by Eoghan Henn. It watches your work sessions, notices the corrections and judgement calls you make, and turns them into improvements to your skills, including itself. Over time your skills get better without you writing a line of them.

1. Open the repo and copy the task-observer skill folder into your skills directory.
2. Work as normal. Review the improvements it proposes at the end of a session.

One Skill to Rule Them All on GitHub

The order to add them

Start with claude-mem, because memory is the thing you notice first. Add OmniRoute if you keep hitting limits. Run Claude Code Setup once on each project. Add Headroom when your sessions get long. Add Task Observer last, once you have a few skills worth improving.