Supercharge Coding with Claude Code & Bedrock’s Prompt Caching
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Amazon Bedrock's prompt caching, now generally available, significantly boosts performance and reduces costs for AI applications, especially coding assistants. This is perfectly demonstrated by its integration with Anthropic's Claude Code, a powerful coding agent accessible via terminal, IDEs (VS Code, Jetbrains), or the Claude Code SDK. Claude Code excels at multi-file code writing and bug fixing, answering architecture questions, executing tests, navigating Git history, and interacting with command-line tools (AWS CLI, Terraform, Kubernetes). Its key advantage is seamless workflow integration; users point it to their project directory and use natural language commands. Bedrock's prompt caching works by inserting checkpoints in prompts, saving model state and reusing it for subsequent requests with the same prefix. This drastically reduces latency and token costs, particularly beneficial for iterative development and complex codebases. The article details a setup process, including installing the Claude Code package, configuring environment variables for Bedrock integration, and enabling/disabling prompt caching. Experiments show notable cost and time savings with caching, especially when building a simple calculator application; costs dropped from $0.1029 to $0.0827 and execution time reduced from 1m 17.5s to 42.3s. The combination is even more impactful with complex projects; caching prevents repeated processing of large codebases. The article also discusses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) which extends Claude Code's capabilities by connecting it to external tools and data sources, further enhancing efficiency. The integration with AWS offers additional advantages, including IAM Identity Center for access control, generative AI gateways for cost tracking, and automated environment variable configuration for streamlined team deployments. However, a potential drawback is the need for an AWS account and appropriate IAM roles. Overall, Claude Code paired with Bedrock's prompt caching offers a cost-effective and efficient approach to AI-assisted software development, ideal for developers working on large or complex projects.
