Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/45756

by cmaster11 • 3 months ago

759 548 3 months ago

cmaster113• 3 months ago

For whoever else is having the same problems, worth voting these kind of issues. There needs to be more transparency over what goes on with our subscriptions.

TacticalCoder• 3 months ago

We vote here on HN and it's much more effective. Anyone from Anthropic reading conversations on HN like this one can be scared. We'll jump ship if they don't address such glaring issues.

GorbachevyChase• 3 months ago

The nice iOS app is a big convenience for me, but I’m starting to think I should just put my $20 in Open Router. It seems like minimax is a pretty solid competitor. I’m curious if the US-centric “frontier” is just marketing.

scrollop4• 3 months ago

There are MANY accounts of claude degradation (intelligence, limits) over the past week on reddit and here with many posts describing people moving. Nothing is changing. You'd think they'd at least give a statement.

wg0• 3 months ago

Been experiencing similar issues even with the lower tier models.

Fair transactions involve fair and transparent measurements of goods exchanged. I'm going to cancel my subscription this month.

eastbound2• 3 months ago

Yes: Claude Code “consumes tokens” and starts a session when the computer is asleep without anything started. Or consumes 10% of my session for “What time is it?”

j452• 3 months ago

During run the desktop app.

Running non deterministic software for deterministic tasks is still an area for efficiency to improve.

comandillos2• 3 months ago

Quite scared by the fact that the original issue pointing out the actual root cause of the issue has been 'Closed as not planned' by Anthropic.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829

hrimfaxi• 3 months ago

The response doesn't even make sense and appears to be written by AI.

The March 6 change makes Claude Code cheaper, not more expensive. 1h TTL for every request could cost more, not less

Feels very AI. > Restore 1h as the default / expose as configurable? 1h everywhere would increase total cost given the request mix, so we're not planning a global toggle.

They won't show a toggle because it will increase costs for some unknown percentage of requests?

stingraycharles2• 3 months ago

Sounds like a decision I would make when memory is expensive and you want to get rid of the very long (in time) tail of waiting 1h to evict cache when a session has stopped.

There must be a better way to do this. The consumer option is the pricing difference. If they’d make cache writes the same price as regular writes, that would solve the whole problem. If you really want to push it, use that pricing only for requests where number of cache hits > 0 (to avoid people setting this flag without intent to use it), and you solved the whole issue.

sdevonoes3• 3 months ago

Why scared? Like, if theit software gets bad, we stop using it.

comandillos2• 3 months ago

Maybe scared wasn't the best word... but we cannot deny Opus is a great - if not greatest - model at coding and Anthropic is the only one serving it a reasonable prices when going through their subscription model.

subscribed7• 3 months ago

In my case T&C on using inout/output is so bad in almost Lal the other providers, that I'm forbidden from using them for work (and it doesn't make sense to pay a separate sub if I have basically two at this point, one direct with Anthropic, one via github.com copilot).

rvz2• 3 months ago

When a casino is making a lot of money from gamblers, they don't care about their customers losing money, given the machines are rigged against you.

Anthropic sells you 'knowledge' in the form of 'tokens' and you spend money rolling the dice, spinning the roulette wheels and inserting coins for another try. They later add limits and dumb down the model (which are their gambling machines) of their knowledge for you to pay for the wrong answers.

Once you hit your limit or Anthropic changes the usage limits, they don't care and halt your usage for a while.

If you don't like any of that, just save your money and use local LLMs instead.

spiderfarmer2• 3 months ago

That’s why I switched to Codex. It’s so much more generous and in my experience, just as good. Also, optimizing your setup for working with agents can easily make a 5x difference.

quotemstr• 3 months ago

Plus, whenever Codex does something you dislike, you can just tell Codex to fix itself. Open source software is wonderful.

Especially when it's on purpose.

laksjhdlka• 3 months ago

Also, optimizing your setup for working with agents can easily make a 5x difference.

Any highlights you can share here? I'm always looking to improve me setup.

spiderfarmer2• 3 months ago

I mostly use Laravel in my projects. Laravel Boost and the PAO package by Nuno Maduro are awesome. One makes it use make commands for example, the other reduces output for tests and errors.

vr46• 3 months ago

Isn't the generous Codex plan ending? Possibly yesterday?

As the Codex promotion on Plus winds down today

jedisct12• 3 months ago

GPT-5.4 works amazingly well.

I’ve moved away from Claude and toward open-source models plus a ChatGPT subscription.

That setup has worked really well for me: the subscription is generous, the API is flexible, and it fits nicely into my workflow. GPT-5.4 + Swival (https://swival.dev) are now my daily drivers.

turblety• 3 months ago

Yeah it's much better, another plus is you can use it with OpenCode (or other 3rd party tools) so you can easily switch between Codex and most other models by alright companies (not Anthropic or Google).

BoredPositron• 3 months ago

The two comments together sound like 2000s infomercial.

vidarh2• 3 months ago

I hit the limits on the lower tiers of Codex just as fast as with Claude. At the moment I'm cycling between Claude, Codex, GLM5.1, and Kimi. The latter two are getting good enough, though, that I can make things go really far by doing planning with Opus and then switching to one of the cheap models for execution.

jedisct12• 3 months ago

I have a ChatGPT Pro plan, I use it a ton, and I've never hit the limit in the past few months.

scrollop4• 3 months ago

Chatgpt has better limits however the responses even on 5.4 xtra thinking are not as good as sonnets. Wish Claude would get their house in order.

ejpir• 3 months ago

Show us some reciepts in the form of a exported session. I've been a heavy user of Claude up untill the end of feb, but switched to Codex because it's better at handling large code bases, following the "plan", implementing the backend changes in Zig. If you ask Claude to do a review of the code and suggest fixes, then let it Codex review it, then again ask Claude, it will 99% of the time say. Oh yes you are right, let me fix that.

Either you are using it wrong or you are working in a totally different field.

tedivm2• 3 months ago

Something similar is happening with GitHub Copilot too. It's impossible to know what a "request" is and some change in the last couple of months has seen my request usage go up for the same style of work. Toss in the bizarre and impossible to understand rate limiting that occurs with regular usage and it's pretty obvious that these companies are struggle to scale.

rnadomvirlabe• 3 months ago

I find copilot to be much more straightforward, and I can track per request against my credits. Here is the explanation of what a request is:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-...

tedivm2• 3 months ago

A request is any interaction where you ask Copilot to do something for you—whether it's generating code, answering a question, or helping you through an extension. Each time you send a prompt in a chat window or trigger a response from Copilot, you're making a request. For agentic features, only the prompts you send count as premium requests; actions Copilot takes autonomously to complete your task, such as tool calls, do not. For example, using /plan in Copilot CLI counts as one premium request, and any follow-up prompt you send counts as another.

This clearly isn't true for agentic mode though. This document is extremely misleading. VSCode has the `chat.agent.maxRequests` option which lets you define how many requests an agent can use before it asks if you want to continue iterating, and the default is not one. A long running session (say, implementing an openspec proposal) can easily eat through dozens of requests. I have a prompt that I use for security scanning and with a single input/request (`/prompt`) it will use anywhere between 17 and 25 premium requests without any user input.

alienbaby• 3 months ago

I'm finding the oppostire with copilot. A request is a prompt, with some caveats around whats generating the prompt. I am quite happily working with opus 4.6 at 3x cost and about 1/3 oor the month in I'm stting at ~25% usage of a pro+ subscription. I find it quite easy to track my usage and rate of usage.

The overall context windows are smaller with copilot I believe, but it dfoesnt appear to be hurting my work.

I'm using it for approx 4 hours a day most days. Generally one shotting fun ideas I thoroughly plan out in planning mode first, and I have my own verison of the idea->plan->analyse-> document implementation phases -> implement via agent loop. simulations, games, stuff-im-curious about and resurrecting old projects that never really got off the ground.

MeetingsBrowser• 3 months ago

I pay for the lowest plan. I used to struggle to hit my quota.

Now a single question consistently uses around 15% of my quota

hirako20007• 3 months ago

My take is that was the plan all along.

Once people won't be able to think anymore and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.

Cpoll• 3 months ago

Didn't they move too soon then? People haven't forgotten how to tie their shoelaces (yet). And anyway, they'll just move to a different model; last holdout wins.

hdndjsbbs2• 3 months ago

"enshittification" gets thrown around a lot, but this is the exact playbook. Look at the previous bubble's cash cow: advertising.

Online advertising is now ubiquitous, terrible, and mandatory for anyone who wants to do e-commerce. You can't run a mass-market online business without buying Adwords, Instagram Ads, etc.

AI will be ubiquitous, and then it will get worse and more expensive. But we will be unable to return to the prior status quo.

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

And it’s working larger because the other models haven’t figured out how to provide a consistent, long running experience.

gruez3• 3 months ago

and business expect the level of productivity witnessed before, will have no choice but cough up whatever providers bill us.

Is that bad? After all, even if they hiked to price infinity, you wouldn't worse off than if AI didn't exist because you could still code by hand. Moreover if it's really in a "business" (employment?) context, the tools should be provided by your employer, not least for compliance/security reasons. The "expectation" angle doesn't make sense either. If it's actually more efficient than coding by hand, people will eventually adopt it, word will get around and expectations will rise irrespective of whether you used it or not.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 months ago

What plan are you using?

hk__23• 3 months ago

What plan are you using?

OP wrote "I pay for the lowest plan", so that’s the $20/mo one.

szmarczak• 3 months ago

I'm on the Free tier using Claude exclusively for consultation (send third party codebase + ask why/where is something done). I also used to struggle to hit limits. Recently I was able hit the limit after a single prompt.

rdevilla• 3 months ago

Bubble's bursting, get in.

ozim• 3 months ago

I have the opposite conclusion.

Demand is higher than supply it is just the start of bubble.

Everyone and their dog is burning tokens on stupid shit that would be freed up if they would ask to make deterministic code for the task and run the task. OpenAI, Anthropic are cutting free use and decreasing limits because they are not able to meet the demand.

When general public catches up with how to really use it and demand will fall and the today built supply will become oversupply that’s where the bubble will burst.

I say 5 more years.

postalcoder• 3 months ago

I had used Claude Code max as my daily driver last year and this sort of drama was par for the course. It's why I migrated entirely to Codex, despite liking Claude, the harness, more.

There's this honeymoon period with Claude you experience for a month or two followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then a rebound after a model update (rinse and repeat). It doesn't help that Anthropic is experiencing a vicious compute famine atm.

sleepytimetea• 3 months ago

I like the term "compute famine" - it appears that all AI infrastructure is maxed out globally.

cmaster113• 3 months ago

I've been using Code for half a year, these past couple weeks have been a totally different experience I'm on max 20, and seeing my weekly quota going bust in ~3 days is a bit absurd when nothing has significantly changed in the way I work

hirako20007• 3 months ago

I refuse to use anthropic's models (and openai, gemini) because the math simply doesn't add up.

To add the fact we are being taken for fools with dramatic announcements, FOMOs messages. I even suspect some reaction farms are going on to boost post from people boasting Claude models.

These don't happen for codex. Nor for mistral. Nor for deepseek. It can't just be that Claude code is so much better.

There are open weight models that work perfectly fine for most cases, at a fraction of the cost. Why are more people not talking about those. Manipulation.

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

This is my exact experience as well.

It’s further frustrating that I have committed to certain project deadlines knowing that I’d be able to complete it in X amount of time with agent tooling. That agentic tooling is no longer viable and I’m scrambling to readjust expectations and how much I can commit to.

wellthisisgreat3• 3 months ago

Same exact experience. I never expected to depleted a weekly quota when not working every day of the week.

HauntingPin4• 3 months ago

This past week was a nightmare in trying to get Claude to do any useful work. I've cancelled my subscription and everybody else here having problems should too. I don't think Anthropic cares about anything else.

mannanj2• 3 months ago

so basically the anthropic employee who responded says those 1h caches were writes were almost never accessed, so a silent 5m cache change is for our best interest and saves cost. (justifying why they did this silently)

however his response gaslights us because in the OPs opening post his math demonstrates this is not true, it shows reads 26x more so at least in his case the cache is not doing what the anthropic employee describes.

clearly we are being charged for less optimization here and being given the message (from my perspective by anthropic) that if you are in a special situation your needs don't matter and we will close your thread without really listening.

hirako20007• 3 months ago

What also gives it away is the refusal to at least expose this TTL via parameter. In the same sentence as informing the 5m won't change since it's your interest.

It's also in the interest of the users to keep certain params private, we are meant to deduce that. Did you not ?

love2read• 3 months ago

that if you are in a special situation your needs don't matter and we will close your thread without really listening.

Are there any other $50B+ Valuation companies that care about special situations? If so, who?

mannanj2• 3 months ago

Hmm great question. I wish I knew some. Do you?

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

My suspicion is the have an overall fixed cache size that dumps the oldest records. They’re now overflowing with usage and consistently dumping fresh caches.

During core US business hours, I have to actively keep a session going or I risk a massive jump in usage while the entire thread rebuilds. During weekend or off-hours, I never see the crazy jumps in usage - even if I let threads sit stale.

pxc4• 3 months ago

It's a bit shocking to me how opaque the pricing for the subscription services by the frontier labs is. It's basically impossible for people to tell what they're actually buying, and difficult to even meaningfully report or compare experiences.

How is this normal?

parasti• 3 months ago

Yeah, I cancelled the moment I realized that the subscription is a scheme to get you to constantly dip into extra usage. I get more benefit out of Claude on the free tier than on Pro.

pxc4• 3 months ago

I think the right way to think of it, from a self-protective perspective, is this: the real offer is the per-token pricing. Use that for a while, and iff you are consistently spending more than $20/mo, treat the subscription offering as a discount on some of that usage. So only on that condition, try the subscription and see if your monthly costs go down (because of the short term rate limits, they may not, depending on your usage patterns!).

But the opacity itself is a bit offensive to me. It feels shady somehow.

gverrilla3• 3 months ago

Free market.

lvl155• 3 months ago

Constant complaints about Anthropic. Not much on OAI/Codex. It seems people should just use OAI and come back when they realize compute isn’t free elsewhere.

zkmon• 3 months ago

Unless the agent code is open-sourced, there is hardly any transparency in how the agent is spending your tokens and how does it calculate the tokens. It's like asking your lawyer why they charged some amount.

gessha2• 3 months ago

Lawyers can give you a breakdown by the minute in some cases. A better example can be military contracting.

Havoc• 3 months ago

You can insert a proxy in between and look at precisely what it is sending if you’re so inclined

CC accepts http endpoints so doesn’t require anything too complicated

vfalbor• 3 months ago

Some months ago, I created a software for this reason, it has no success, but the thing is that communities could reduce tokens consumption, not all is LLM, you can share things from API calls between agents. Even my idea was no success I think it is a good concept share things each others, if you have some interest it's called tokenstree.com

holoduke3• 3 months ago

I spend full 20x the week quota in less than 10 hours. How is that possible? Well try to mass translate texts in 30 languages and you will hit limits extremely quick.

pxc4• 3 months ago

Translation generally works well with very small models compared to the frontier LLMs. You can definitely run a model on your own hardware for this.

holoduke3• 3 months ago

Maybe words. But quality texts in even with opus not perfect. But good enough.

peterpanhead3• 3 months ago

That's a really gnarly task but I'm shocked it burns 20x that fast. How large is the text? That matters more than anything.

scrollop4• 3 months ago

I imagine book sized texts.

Perz1val• 3 months ago

Should have switched the model to Haiku

lforster• 3 months ago

Lol imagine how much overcharging is going on for enterprise tokens. This is just the beginning.

Nic0• 3 months ago

I'm i alone to think that it become slower that usual to get responses?

kif• 3 months ago

Nope. It has become much much slower for me as well. It’s weird cause at times I will get a response very quickly, like it used to be. But most of the time I have to wait quite a bit for the simplest tasks.

SyneRyder3• 3 months ago

Anecdotal, but after playing with the API this week (building a minimal harness for an OS where Claude Code isn't supported), the API felt faster to respond. It did seem like maybe the Max subscriptions are lower priority than API requests. (I hadn't enabled priority service on the API either.)

I don't have metrics, so I could be imagining this, or finally noticing extra lag of the Claude Code client. On the other hand, the API was giving me range anxiety, I won't be pushing a 300k context window into that anytime soon, like I occasionally need to do in Claude Code.

wolvoleo• 3 months ago

Yeah perplexity used to be great but they've also clamped down on the 20€ plan. Only one deep research query was enough to block me until the end of the month.

The thing is, if it's going to be this expensive it's not going to be worth it for me. Then I'll rather do it myself. I'm never going to pay for a €100 subscription, that's insane. It's more than my monthly energy bill.

Maybe from a business standpoint it still makes sense because you can use it to make money, but as a consumer no way.

tiahura• 3 months ago

Also pro max 5x and hit quota for first time yesterday.

stavros6• 3 months ago

It's crazy, a few weeks ago the limits would comfortably last me all week. This week, I've used up half the limit in a day.

geeky4qwerty• 3 months ago

I'm afraid the music may be slowly fading at this party, and the lights will soon be turned on. We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.

For those not in the Google Gemini/Antigravity sphere, over the last month or so that community has been experiencing nothing short of contempt from Google when attempting to address an apparent bait and switch on quota expectations for their pro and ultra customers (myself included). [1]

While I continue to pay for my Google Pro subscription, probably out of some Stockholm Syndrome, beaten wife level loyalty and false hope that it is just a bug and not Google being Google and self-immolating a good product, I have since moved to Kiro for my IDE and Codex for my CLI and am as happy as clam with this new setup.

[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/24937

dgellow2• 3 months ago

For what it’s worth, that was pretty obvious from the get go it wasn’t a realistic long term deal. I’ve been building all the libraries I hoped existed over the past 1-2y to have something neat to work with whenever the free compute era ends. I feel that’s the approach that makes sense. Take the free tokens, build everything you would want to exist if you don’t have access to the service anymore. If it goes away you’re back to enjoying writing code by hand but with all the building blocks you dreamt of. If it never goes away, nothing wasted, you still have cool libs

apgwoz2• 3 months ago

Yes! I’ve been trying (and failing!) to get people to understand this. Build the high leverage tools while the tokens are cheap. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out the right set of high leverage tools. :)

1970-01-01• 3 months ago

Lights on = Ads in your output. EOY latest; they can't keep kicking the massive costs down the road.

fooster• 3 months ago

Where is your evidence of this "massive cost"? Inference is massively profitable for both anthropic and openai. Training is not.

jerf2• 3 months ago

Ads do not pay enough to cover AI usage. People see the big numbers Google and Facebook make in ads and forget to divide the number by the number of people they serve ads to, let alone the number of ads they served to get to that per-user number. You can't pay for 3 cents of inference with .07 cents of revenue.

You also can't put ads in code completion AIs because the instant you do the utility to me of them at work drops to negative. Guess how much money companies are going to pay for negative-value AIs? Let's just say it won't exactly pay for the AI bubble. A code agent AI puts an ad for, well, anything and the AI accidentally puts it into code that gets served out to a customer and someone's going to sue. The merits of the case won't matter, nor the fact the customer "should have caught it in review", the lawsuit and public reputation hit (how many people here are reading this and salivating at the thought of being able to post an angrygram about AIs being nothing but ad machines?) still cost way too much for the AI companies creating the agents to risk.

downrightmike• 3 months ago

Pouring 99% of your funds into massive datacenters you can't actually build and ignore product seems short sighted.

faangguyindia2• 3 months ago

Ultimately we'll find more efficient techniques and hardware and AI companies will end up owning Nuclear Power Stations and continue providing models capable of 10x of what they are now.

Valuation have already reached point where these companies can run their nuclear power station, fund developement of new hardware and techniques and boost capabilities of their models by 10x

croes3• 3 months ago

Too bad the models collapse because the lack of nee good training data.

How many companies will generate profit in the end, what will happen with all those power stations and data centers ?

Root_Denied• 3 months ago

There's not enough nuclear to go around, and the approval/permitting process for new nuclear power plants is nothing to sneeze at, both in terms of time and cost.

That's also ignoring that nuclear power plants also consume quite a bit of water, which may be a more difficult bottleneck in and of itself even without trying to add nuclear into the mix.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 3 months ago

So, antigravity will definitely quickly eat up your pro quota. You can run out of it in an hour (at least on the $20/mo plan) and then you'll be waiting five days for it to refresh.

However, I've found that the flash quota is much more generous. I have been building a trio drive FOC system for the STM32G474 and basically prompting my way through the process. I have yet to be able to run completely out of flash quota in a given five hour time window. It is definitely completing the work a lot faster than I could do myself -- mainly due to its patience with trying different things to get to the bottom of problems. It's not perfect but it's pretty good. You do often have to pop back in and clean up debris left from debugging or attempts that went nowhere, or prompt the AI to do so, but that's a lot easier than figuring things out in the first place as long as you keep up with it.

I say this as someone who was really skeptical of AI coding until fairly recently. A friend gave me a tutorial last weekend, basically pointing out that you need to instruct the AI to test everything. Getting hardware-in-loop unit tests up and running was a big turning point for productivity on this project. I also self-wired a bunch of the peripherals on my dev board so that the unit tests could pretend to be connected to real external devices.

I think it helps a lot that I've been programming for the last twenty years, so I can sometimes jump in when it looks like the AI is spinning its wheels. But anyway, that's my experience. I'm just using flash and plan mode for everything and not running out of the $20/mo quota, probably getting things done 3x as fast as I could if I were writing everything myself.

rzkyif3• 3 months ago

Fellow annoyed Google AI Pro subscriber here!

Can confirm, I initially enjoyed the 5-hour limits on Gemini CLI and Antigravity so much that I paid for a full year, thinking it was a great decision

In the following months, they significantly cut the 5-hour limits (not sure if it even exists anymore), introduced the unrealistically bad weekly limit that I can fully consume in 1-2 hour, introduced the monthly AI credits system, and added ads to upgrade to Ultra everywhere

At the very least the Gemini mobile app / web app is still kinda useful for project planning and day-to-day use I guess. They also bumped the storage from 2TB to 5TB, but I don't even use that

stavros6• 3 months ago

It should be illegal to change the terms of the subscription mid-period. If you paid for the full year, you should get that plan for the whole year. I don't understand how it's ok for corporations to just change the terms mid-way, and we just have to accept it.

nprateem2• 3 months ago

Don't bother upgrading to ultra. It's also now easy to burn all your credits where in Jan it was almost impossible

logicchains3• 3 months ago

It's the exact same thing they did with Google BigQuery, which initially was an absolutely amazing piece of technology before they smothered it with more and more limits and restrictions. It's like they're putting SREs first, customers second.

palata• 3 months ago

We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.

Looks like enshittification on steroids, honestly.

omosubi• 3 months ago

Getting $5000 worth of product essentially free and then being told to pay is not enshittification.

rr808• 3 months ago

I still remember those $3 uber rides.

elephanlemon• 3 months ago

IMO we are currently in the ENIAC era of LLMs. Perhaps there will be a brief moment where things get worse, but long term the cost of these things will go way down.

pier25• 3 months ago

Cost will probably go down but nobody knows when or how. It might take 10 years for all we know as training costs have only been rising.

A huge difference is early computers were not subsidized. It took decades until most people could afford to own a computer at home.

croes3• 3 months ago

Or we are in the early Netflix era where profit wasn’t as important as customer growth.

pbmonster• 3 months ago

I assume the "briefly gets worse" is when a buch of hyperscalers do a complete write-off of their entire AI investments, bankrupting several of them (which, in turn, bankrupts several large banks and most current venture capital firms)?

Cumulative AI capex will hit $2T this year. Cumulative opex is on the same order. Unless the models get real good (as in: can fully replace many engineers) right quick, nobody is even going to see interest getting paid on those investments. The only alternative is model access costing 5 figures per (replaced) seat.

But yes, once GPU racks can be had at auction for pennies on the dollar, inference of open source models might be an... OK low margin commodity business.

alecco• 3 months ago

I'm afraid the music may be slowly fading at this party, and the lights will soon be turned on. We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.

Indeed. Anthropic is just leading the pack switching to juicy corporate users who are happy to pay thousands per month per dev and leave the fans behind. And now OpenAI is following suit. They lowered significantly the limits for the Plus $20 plan and answered concerns with vague confusing tweets about promotions.

All this is pushed by the fastest rising demand (Codex growing +50% monthly) while having a serious bottleneck building data centers and getting parts (permits, energy, memory, flash, etc).

Users on reddit and Discord are trying to switch to open models or Chinese alternatives. But there's no real replacement.

muyuu2• 3 months ago

I don't know about users on reddit and discord, but the open models are essentially at SotA with a 3-4 months delay. That puts a hard backstop at what OpenAI and Anthropic can do before I personally can cut them off entirely without losing too much.

Granted the experience can be worse, esp. if you're using it very hands-off and not like a junior assistant who's extremely fast but doesn't know what he's doing at the architecture and strategy level. But even for that I'm relatively confident the Chinese will be competitive pretty soon, and they won't be too expensive. And we know this because we can see their current models and we know what it takes to run them.

Currently my Strix Halo computer that costed me under £3k can do a lot of LLM stuff that is perfectly useful. In some ways, it's better than "cloud" models, I have models that essentially don't say "no" and I have relatively predictable setups. If you want to get fancy, you can right now rent compute to run models that are extremely capable like the latest ones from Kimi, GLM, Qwen, Minimax at full size from providers that are not operating at a loss and it won't be too expensive. You can pool resources to do the same locally. You can do stuff that cloud providers are unlikely to market, like distillation and abliteration to serve your specific needs.

I'm very optimistic about open weights models just the way they are right now.

But I agree with you that OpenAI will likely play similar games to Anthropic and it could be soon.

hacker_homie• 3 months ago

Maybe I missed the party, but it feels like it's just starting.

I have only been running local models and we are finally at the point with gemma4 and Qwen3.5 where they can start doing coding work.

And the quota can't change.

ainiriand• 3 months ago

The only viable future-proof solution to this hellscape is what you mention, local models and/or corporate models for work.

Gareth3212• 3 months ago

I am surprisingly optimistic about local LLMs. Their progress (especially with regards to distillation) over the last year has been remarkable. Qwen 3.5 is amazing for what it is. It think it's production capable - for many use cases, but not all. It does require more careful alignment of instructions, and offers a smaller context (even with very large unified memory). But with some care, one can code all day, every day, without limits. The Mac Mini 64GB is probably sufficient for Qwen 3.5 35B. Go larger for larger contexts.

Of course it's not as easy as pointing February Opus 4.6 at a folder and giving it one-sentence instructions.

chandureddyvari2• 3 months ago

Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect. Then 30 minutes later I hit session limits. Three sessions like that in a day, and suddenly 25% of the weekly limit is gone.

I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.

That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”

On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.

I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.

My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best

zozbot2343• 3 months ago

It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect.

Give it a custom sandbox and context for the work, so it has no opportunity to roam around when not required. AI agentic coding is hugely wasteful of context and tokens in general (compared to generic chat, which is how most people use AI), there's a whole lot of scope for improvement there.

egeozcan4• 3 months ago

But the problem is it used to not need that before. These days, you have to think twice before you summon a subagent.

imglorp• 3 months ago

The sandbox is fine, but if the parent has given explicit instruction of files to inspect, why is it not centering there? Is the recent breakage that the base prompt makes it always try to explore for more context even if you try to focus it?

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 months ago

Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too.

My experience is limited only to CC, Gemini-cli, and Codex - not Aider yet, trying different combinations of different models.

But, from my experience, CC puts everything else to shame.

How does Cursor compare? Has anyone found an Aider combination that works as well?

chrismustcode• 3 months ago

Is aider even a thing considered anymore?

It was pretty much first for CLI agents and had a benchmark that was the go to at the start of LLM coding. Now the benchmark doesn't get updated and aider never gets a mention in talking about CLI tools till now.

cedws3• 3 months ago

I had a weird experience at work last week where Claude was just thinking forever about tasks and not actually doing anything. It was unusable. The next day it was fine again.

cjonas2• 3 months ago

Ya I've had this experience more than a few times recently. I've heard people claiming they are serving quantized models during high loads, but it happens in cursor as well so I don't think it's specific to Anthropics subscription. It could be that the context window has just gotten into a state that confuses the model... But that wouldn't explain why it appears to be temporary...

My best guess is this is the result of the companies running "experiments" to test changes. Or it's just all in my head :)

mstank• 3 months ago

That happens to me all the time. My current working theory is when their servers are hammered there is a queueing system that invisible to end-users.

sunaookami• 3 months ago

Set MAX_THINKING_TOKENS to 0, Claude's thinking hardly does anything and just wastes tokens. It actually often performs worse than without thinking.

freedomben3• 3 months ago

This happened to me as well! It was especially infuriating because I had just barely upgraded to the $200 per month plan because I exhausted my weekly quota. Then the entire next day was a complete bust because of this issue. I want my money back!

mixermachine• 3 months ago

I'm using the Codex Business subscription (about 30€) already for multiple months. Even there they cut back on the quota. A few months back it was hard for me to reach the limit. Now it is easier.

Still, in comparison with Claude Code, the quota of Codex is a much better deal. However, they should not make it worse...

wheelerwj• 3 months ago

I have the exact opposite experience. I can run claude forever, my codex quota was done by Wednesday morning.

throwup238• 3 months ago

OpenAI had a promotion that gave everyone double their rate limits until April 2nd.

stavros6• 3 months ago

Codex has been better for me, but it's WAY too nitpicky/defensive. It always wants to make changes that add complexity and code to solve a problem that's impossible to happen (e.g. a multiprocess race condition on a daemon I only ever run one instance of).

comboy2• 3 months ago

You just convinced me to try it. Claude just copy pastes, does search and replace, zero abstractions and I'm the one that needs to think about the edge cases.

hk__23• 3 months ago

Same here; that’s very annoying because it adds a lot of entropy to the code, and people don’t always take the time to clean things up.

dataviz1000• 3 months ago

Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect.

This is what I'm working on proving now.

It is more that there is a confidence score while thinking. Opus will quit if it is too high and will grind on if the confidence score is close to the real answer. Haiku handles this well too.

If you give Sonnet a hard task, it won't quit when it should.

Nonetheless, that issue has been fixed with Opus.

I'll try to show that the speed of using Opus on tasks that have medium to hard difficultly is consistently the same price or cheaper than running them with Haiku and Sonnet. While easier tasks, the busy work that is known, is cheaper run with Haiku.

Gareth3212• 3 months ago

This is what I'm working on proving now.

Stella Laurenzo, AMD’s director of AI, filed a detailed GitHub issue on April 2 documenting that Claude Code reads code three times less before editing it, rewrites entire files twice as often, and abandons tasks mid-way at rates that were previously zero. Her analysis of nearly 7,000 sessions puts precise numbers on how Anthropic’s coding tool has degraded since early March.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796

Rekindle80902• 3 months ago

The product was performing badly and you thought this would be solved by spending more money on it?

When will people realize this is the same as vendor lock-in?

"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.

It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.

None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.

The only mistake you made was paying MORE, hoping it would get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.

When competitors have a better product these issues go away When a new model is released these issues don't exist

I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity.

athorax• 3 months ago

Do you realize Claude and Codex are different products by different companies?

comboy2• 3 months ago

Any good reasonable alternatives? Gemini is like prodigious 3yo hopeless for my projects, anybody tested some opencode with kimi or something?

eurekin2• 3 months ago

I'm adding two extra gpus to my local rig. Turns out qwen 3.5 122b is already enough to handle (finish with moderate guidance) non-planning parts of my tasks.

dvfjsdhgfv• 3 months ago

By the way, what are you using it for? I bought Max and Pro plans for Claue and Codex, developed a few apps with it, and after the initial excitation ("Wow I can get results 10x faster!") I felt the net sum is negative for me. In the end I didn't learn much except the current quirks of each model/tool, I didn't enjoy the whole process and the end result was not good enough for my standards. In the end I deleted all these projects and unsubscribed.

chandureddyvari2• 3 months ago

For me it’s mostly useful in day-to-day coding, not “build an entire app and walk away” coding.

TDD was never really my natural style, but LLMs are great at generating the obvious test cases quickly. That lets me spend more of my attention on the edge cases, the invariants, and the parts that actually need judgment.

Frontend is another area where they help a lot. It’s not my strongest side, so pairing an LLM with shadcn/ui gets me to a decent, responsive UI much faster than I would on my own. Same with deployment and infra glue work across Cloudflare, AWS, Hetzner, and similar platforms.

I’m basically a generalist with stronger instincts in backend work, data modeling, and system design. So the value for me is that I can lean into those strengths and use LLMs to cover more ground in the areas where I’m weaker.

That said, I do think this only works if you’re using them as leverage, not as a substitute for taste or judgment.

jen20• 3 months ago

On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code.

OpenCode is great though, and can (for now) use an OpenAI subscription.

zamalek• 3 months ago

I am also on Codex while Claude seems to be blatantly ignoring instructions (as recently as Thursday: when I made the switch). The huge Claude context helps with planning, so that's all it does now.

Codex consumes way fewer resources and is much snappier.

yaur• 3 months ago

When they bumped the context size up to 1m tokens they made it much easier to blow through session limits quickly unless you manually compact or keep sessions short.

varispeed2• 3 months ago

I wonder if this is in the system prompt: "Go round in circles to make us more money."

esperent• 3 months ago

the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous

Be aware Codex is currently doing a 2x usage promo. So 5x is actually 10x and 20x is actually 40x until the end of May.

cyrusmg• 3 months ago

I also gave up on my Claude Code subscription. It's running out in 2 weeks and I have canceled it. My current MAX session got rate-limited in 2 hours of work and that's just absurd.

Codex seems to give the $20 plan for free for 1 month and that's what I signed up for.

Let's see how it compares when I can't use my Claude max sub for 3 more hours.

lw1981• 3 months ago

I’ve been wondering whether this is less a “model got worse” problem and more an constraints problem.

If the files and task boundary are already known, letting the system keep exploring/replanning inside one accumulating context seems like the wrong default. It makes the agent pay over and over to rediscover what it should already know, and every extra turn increases the chance it wanders into a different approach.

gessha2• 3 months ago

I’m processing some images(custom board game images -> JSON) with a common layout and basic structure and I exhausted my quota after just 30 images(pleb Pro account). I have 700 images to process…

What I did instead is tune the prompt for gemma 4 26b and a 3090. Worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to run the main prompt and then a refinement prompt or split the processing into cases but it’s doable.

Now I’m waiting for anyone to put up some competition against NVIDIA so I can finally be able to afford a workstation GPU for a price less than a new kidney.

qwertyforce• 3 months ago

thats exaclty why i prefer codex

rvz2• 3 months ago

Why so many 'developers' complaining about Claude rate limiting them? You know you can actually....use local LLMs? instead of donating your money to Anthropic's casino?

I guess this is fitting when the person who submitted the issue is in "AI | Crypto".

Well there's no crying at the casino when, you exhaust your usage or token limit.

The house (Anthropic) always wins.

mr_mitm• 3 months ago

Local LLMs are nowhere near as powerful as commercial models. Plus, they have hefty hardware requirements.

hyperionultra• 3 months ago

Vote with wallet. The voting continues until product improve or die.

Achshar• 3 months ago

I feel like I am living in a bubble, no one seems to mention Antigravity in these discussions and I have not had any issues with Ultra subscription yet. It seems to go on forever and the Interface is so much better for dev work as compared to CC. (Though admittedly my experience with cc is limited).

I strongly believe google's legs will allow it to sustain this influx of compute and still not do the rug-pull like OAI or Anthropic will be forced to do as more people come onboard the code-gen use case.

10keane• 3 months ago

this same pattern seems to occur every time a new model is about to release. i didnt notice the usage problem - i am on 20x. but opus 4.6 feels siginificantly dumber for some reason. i cant qualitify it, but it failed on everyday tasks where it used to complete perfectly

peterpanhead3• 3 months ago

Every time there is a new model coming I think they deteriorate the current. This happens every darn time. Opus 4.6 isn't as sharp, not even close to as it was few weeks ago.

meetingthrower• 3 months ago

I don't get it. Last week on the 100 bucks plan I generated probably 50k LOC (not a quality measure for sure!) and just barely kissed the weekly limit. I did get rate limited on some sessions for sure, but that's to be expected.

I'm curious what are people doing that is consuming your limits? I can't imagine filling the $200 a month plan unless I was essentially using Claude code itself as the api to mass process stuff? For basic coding what are people doing?

dgellow2• 3 months ago

I have the same experience as you. I’m wondering if it is regional? I’m in Europe so don’t overlap much with US usage, which is likely to be way higher

danielbln• 3 months ago

Also in Europe and can only agree. Granted I'm on the 20x plan, but I have yet to hit a limit once and I'm using Claude 12h+ per day on multiple projects.

freedomben3• 3 months ago

What does it look like when you get rate limited? Does the instance just kind of sit and spin?

I suspect I was getting rate limited very aggressively on Thursday last week. It honestly infuriated me, because I'm paying $200 a month for this thing. If it's going to rate limit me, at least tell me what it's doing instead of just making it seem like it's taking 12 hours to run through something that I would expect to be 15 minutes. The worst part is that it never even finished it.

gedy2• 3 months ago

because I'm paying $200 a month for this thing.

My gut feeling is this is not enough money for them by far (not to mention their investors), and we'll eventually get ratcheted up inline with dev salaries. E.g. "look how many devs you didn't have to hire", etc.

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

I’ve never been actually rate limited. Usage limits display in yellow when you’re above 90%. At the limit, you’ll get a red error message.

fluidcruft7• 3 months ago

I don't hit limits either on $100, it's more that claude-code seems to be constantly broken and they added some vague bullshit about not using claude-code before 2pm so I just don't expect it to work anymore and tend to use codex-cli as my driver nowadays. I also never hit limits in codex but... codex is $20/mo not $100/mo so it's making me consider relocating the $100 I spend to Anthropic as play money for z.ai and other tools. I think claude-code has great training wheels (codex does not) but once the training wheels come off, and claude-code becomes as unreliable as it has been then it makes you consider alternatives.

hgoel4• 3 months ago

They had a 2x usage cap promotion that was active after 2pm. They weren't saying that you shouldn't use Claude before 2pm.

bmurphy1976• 3 months ago

Anthropic is going through major growing pains, both technical and organizational. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. It's chaos, things are changing too quickly, and us users are getting caught in the middle of it.

Think Twitter's fail-whale problems. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you aren't. Why? We won't know until Anthropic figures it out and from the outside it sure looks like they're struggling.

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

This is the problem most people are facing. Before March, I had hit the rate limit as single time. That involved security audit of our entire code base from a few different angles.

As of now, I’m consistently hitting my 5 hour limit in less than 1 hour during N/A business hours. I’m getting to the point where I basically can’t use CC for work unless I work very early or late in the day.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

Yea, I found myself maxing out the $20/mo plan occasionally, so I tried the $100/mo, but I don't think I even once even approached the session limit, let alone the weekly limit. And this is doing what I would consider heavy, continuous programming. I probably ought to go back down to $20 one. It would be nice if they had a cheaper tier in between them, but the tiers they have are probably a good business trick to get people to buy much more than they need.

hk__23• 3 months ago

I’m on the $20/mo plan right now and I hit the limit in under an hour, sometimes 20-30 minutes. I don’t understand how people can work with this plan; maybe it was better before?

wellthisisgreat3• 3 months ago

$200 plan and VERY tame usage (not 24/7, not every day even, maybe 8-10 hours for ~4 days). Suddenly I am at 96% weekly (!) limit, multiple session limits, two daily limits.

Either they decimated the limits internally, or they broke something.

Tried all the third-party tricks (headroom, etc.), switched to 200k context window, switched back to 4.5.

I hope 4.5 will help, but the rest of the efforts didn’t move the needle much

prmoustache• 3 months ago

Looks like the enshittification simply started much quicker than other disruptive techs due to operating costs.

rafaelmn• 3 months ago

I'm in the same camp but I mostly do backed. My coworker doing frontend is chewing through rate limits consistently. React code is quite logic shallow, stuff gets pulled in all over so not localized, especially when you start using js styling frameworks - hundreds of k of tokens to do simple changes.

If you start to parallelize and you have permission prompts on you're likely missing cache windows as well.

bit1993• 3 months ago

You know Emacs still works.

jandrese• 3 months ago

I mean this is expected is it not? These companies burned unimaginable amounts of investor cash to get set up and now they have to start turning a profit. They can't make up for the difference with volume because the costs are high, so the only option is to raise prices.

sdevonoes3• 3 months ago

I guess it’s better to step down now that we can rather than wait until it becomes impossible (Stockholm syndrome)

No FOMO

peterpanhead3• 3 months ago

I don't understand Anthropic. Be consistent. Why do models deteriorate to shit, this is not good for workflows and or trust. What Opus 4.7 is gonna come out and again the same thing? Come on.

sailingcode• 3 months ago

I had Max plan and never reached its limit despite constantly working. Now I use the Pro plan and regularly reach the 5h limit as well as the weekly limit, as expected. I found that it makes a huge difference if you provide clear context when developing code. If you leave open room for interpretation, Claude Code uses tokens up much faster than in a defined context. The same is true for his time to answer getting longer if there isn't much documentation about the project.

algoth1• 3 months ago

Wasn't Antrophic previously offering double the token usage outside busy hours? Now they are counting tokens back at normal rate. But yeah, it's not good. I use codex because claude insists in peaking at and messing with folders and file outside its work area though

rzkyif3• 3 months ago

My personal experience is way different: I struggle to burn through more than 50% of the 5 hour limit

For context, with Google AI Pro, I can burn through the Antigravity weekly limit in 1-2 hours if I force it to use Gemini 3.1 Pro. Meanwhile Gemini 3 Flash is basically unlimited but frequently produces buggy code or fail to implement things how I personally would (felt like it doesn't "think" like a software dev)

I also tried VS Code + Cline + OpenRouter + MiniMax M2.7. It's quite cheap and seems to be better than Gemini 3 Flash, but it gets really pricy as the context fills up because prompt caching is not supported for MiniMax on OpenRouter. The result itself usually needs 3-6 revisions on average so the context fills up pretty often

Eventually I got Claude Max 5x to try for a month. VS Code + Claude Code extension on a ~15k lines codebase, model set to "Default", and effort set to "Max". So far it's been really good: 0-2 revisions on average, and most of the time it implements things exactly how I would or better. And, like I said, I can only consume 40-60% of the 5-hour limits no matter how hard I try

Granted, I'm not forcing it to use Opus like OP (nor do I use complicated skills or launch multiple tasks at the same time), but I feel like they really nailed the right balance of when to use which model and how to pass context between the them. Or at least enough that I haven't felt the need to force it to use Opus all the time

rzkyif3• 3 months ago

Reading the other negative comments makes me wonder if this is only because I'm getting a hidden newcomer's limit bonus or something though hahah

muyuu2• 3 months ago

it may also be local/timezone effects

it has been reported that it behaves very differently depending on those factors, presumably because people are placed in best-effort buckets, who knows

delbronski• 3 months ago

Ever since this change they announced:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s4idaq/update_on...

It’s been unusable for me as my daily coding agent. I run out of credits in the pro account in an hour or so. Before that I had never reached the session limit. Switched back to Junie with Gemini/chatgpt.

aeneas_ory• 3 months ago

Besides some of the obvious hacks to reduce token usage, properly indexed code bases (think IntelliJ) reduce token usage significantly (30%-50%, while keeping or exceeding result quality compared with baseline) as shown with https://github.com/ory/lumen

Anthropic is not incentivized to reduce token use, only to increase it, which is what we are seeing with Opus 4.6 and now they are putting the screws on

weavie4• 3 months ago

How good are local LLMs at coding these days? Does anyone have any recommendations for how to get this setup? What would the minimum spend be for usable hardware?

I am getting bored of having to plan my weekends around quota limit reset times...

throwaway20273• 3 months ago

Some claim that some of the recent smaller local models are as good as Sonnet 4.5 of last year and the bigger high-end models can be as almost as good as Claude, Gemini and Codex today, but some say they're benchmaxed and not representative.

To try things out you can use llama.cpp with Vulkan or even CPU and a small model like Gemma 4 26B-A4B or Gemma 4 31B or Qwen 3.5 35-A3B or Qwen3.5 27B. Some of the smaller quants fit within 16GB of GPU memory. The default people usually go with now is Q4_K_XL, a 4-bit quant for decent performance and size.

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-27B-GGUF

Get a second hand 3090/4090 or buy a new Intel Arc Pro B70. Use MoE models and offload to RAM for best bang for your buck. For speed try to find a model that fits entirely within VRAM. If you want to use multiple GPUs you might want to switch to vLLM or something else.

You can try any of the following models:

High-end: GLM 5.1, MiniMax 2.7

Medium: Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/minimax-m27

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/glm-5.1

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/gemma-4

https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.5

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp

weavie4• 3 months ago

Thank you, I'll look into it. For someone who is used to just working with second hand thinkpads, this stuff gets expensive fast!

ac292• 3 months ago

The very best open models are maybe 3-12 months behind the frontier and are large enough that you need $10k+ of hardware to run them, and a lot more to run them performantly. ROI here is going to be deeply negative vs just using the same models via API or subscription.

You can run smaller models on much more modest hardware but they aren't yet useful for anything more than trivial coding tasks. Performance also really falls off a cliff the deeper you get into the context window, which is extra painful with thinking models in agentic use cases (lots of tokens generated).

weavie4• 3 months ago

What are the best open models?

rexreed• 3 months ago

You can also run these models on the cloud with Ollama. You might say what's the difference, but these are models whose performance will stay consistent over time, whether run locally or in the cloud. For $200 a year I'm getting some pretty fantastic results running GLM 5.1 and even Minimax 2.7 and Kimi 2.5 and Gemma 4 on Ollama's cloud instances. And if you don't like Ollama's cloud instance, you can run it on your own cloud instance from the very same providers that Ollama is using. They use NVIDIA cloud providers (NCPs) although not sure which ones specifically and claims that the "cloud does not retain your data to ensure privacy and security." [https://ollama.com/blog/cloud-models]

bakugo• 3 months ago

This is your regular friendly reminder that these subscriptions do not entitle you to any specific amount of usage. That "5x" is utterly meaningless because you don't know what it's 5x of.

This is by design, of course. Anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows these subscriptions are not sustainable, and the prices will have to go up over time. Quietly reducing the usage limits that they were never specific about in the first place is much easier than raising the prices of the individual subscription tiers, with the same effect.

If you want to know what kind of prices you'll be paying to fuel your vibe coding addiction in a few years, try out API pricing for a bit, and try not to cry when your 100$ credit is gone in 2 days.

gavinray• 3 months ago

Codex is the only CLI I've had purely positive experiences with. Take that for what you will

blastro• 3 months ago

Codex is my preferred, I use it at work. The whole "Department of War" fiasco was enough for me to say Goodbye to OAI for personal. I'm a Claude person now. It's about the same level of performance really.

GodelNumbering• 3 months ago

In the anticipation of a future where,

a) quotas will get restricted

b) the subscription plan prices will go up

c) all LLMs will become good enough at coding tasks

I just open sourced a coding agent https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac

The entire goal is to be token efficient (over 50% cheaper), and by extension, take advantage of LLM's better reasoning at shorter context lengths

This really started as an internal side project that made me more productive, I hope it will help others too. Apache 2.0

Currently it still can't compete the subsidized coding plan rates using Anthropic API pricing though (even though it beats CC while both use API key), which tells me that all subscription plan operators are losing money on such plans

mchinen• 3 months ago

I've been feeling the squeeze too. I've tried switching between different models as a test, I can at least say it feels like the limits are about half of what they used to be a few months ago. I'd be totally willing to concede that this is just my perception if Anthropic would only release some tools for measuring your usage.

In theory the /stats command tells you how many tokens you've used, which you could use to compute how much you are getting for your subscription, but in practice it doesn't contain any useful info, it may be counting what is printed to the terminal or something - my stats suggest my claude code usage is a tiny amount of tokens, but they must be an extremely underestimated token count, or they are charging much more for the subscription than the API per token (which is not supposed to be the case).

Last week's free extra usage quota shed some light on this. It seems like the reported tokens are probably are between 1/30th to 1/100th of the actual tokens billed, from looking at how they billed (/stats went up 10k tokens and I was billed $7.10). With the API it should be $25 for a million tokens.

railsgirls112• 3 months ago

The only other pricing data available suggests its the context cache that's eating usage. If you have a big context on a 5 min cache (default) you're essentially sending the whole context every time you take a break from the api. You can configure 1 hr TTL which should help if you run long heavy sessions like me. That's been my theory lately. Still need to get my company admin to let me test lol.

bad_haircut72• 3 months ago

They also need to fix the 30 second lag between submitting the request and actually starting to get tokens back - it used to be instant, and still is at work where we use Anthropic models via an enterprise copilot subscription.

niklasd• 3 months ago

We also experienced hitting our Claude limits much earlier than before during the last two weeks. Up to a degree where we were thinking it must be a bug.

bob1029• 3 months ago

I've got a dual path system to keep costs low and avoid TOS violations.

For general queries and investigation I will use whatever public/free model is available without being logged in. Not having a bunch of prior state stacked up all the time is a feature for me. This is essentially my google replacement.

For very specific technical work against code files, I use prepaid OAI tokens in VS copilot as a "custom" model (it's just gpt5.4).

I burn through maybe $30 worth of tokens per month with this approach. A big advantage of prepaying for the API tokens is that I can look at everything copilot is doing in my usage logs. If I use the precanned coding agent products, the prompts are all hidden in another layer of black box.

SkyPuncher6• 3 months ago

I skimmed the issue. No wonder Anthropic closes these tickets out without much action. That’s just a wall of AI garbage.

Here’s what I’ve done to mostly fix my usage issues:

* Turn on max thinking on every session. It save tokens overall because I’m not correcting it of having it waste energy on dead paths.

* keep active sessions active. It seems like caches are expiring after ~5 minutes (especially during peak usage). When the caches expire it sees like all tokens need to be rebuilt this gets especially bad as token usage goes up.

* compact after 200k tokens as soon as I reasonably can. I have no data but my usage absolutely sky rockets as I get into longer sessions. This is the most frustrating thing because Anthropic forced the 1M model on everyone.

hartator• 3 months ago

Everything starts to feel like AI slop these days. Including this comment.

coderbants• 3 months ago

Can’t you turn the 1M off with a /model opus (or /model sonnet)?

At least up until recently the 1M model was separated into /model opus[1M]

ac292• 3 months ago

1M context window is still a separate, non-default model in Claude Code and not included with subscriptions (billed at API rates only)

himata4113• 3 months ago

The problem is actually because their cache invalidates randomly so that's why replaying inputs at 200k+ and above sucks up all usage. This is a bug within their systems that they refuse to acknowledge. My guess is that API clients kick off subscription users cache early which explains this behavior, if so then it's a feature not a bug.

They also silently raised the usage input tokens consume so it's a double whammi.

ayhanfuat• 3 months ago

* Turn on max thinking on every session. It save tokens overall because I’m not correcting it of having it waste energy on dead paths.

This is definitely true. Ever since I realized there is an /effort max option I am no longer fighting it that much and wasting hours.

Chaosvex2• 3 months ago

I love how some comments tell you to turn max thinking on and others tell you to turn thinking off entirely. Apparently, they both save tokens!

Vibes, indeed.

zmmmmm• 3 months ago

Could be some logic to it - bad thinking is worse than no thinking and good thinking

stldev• 3 months ago

Can confirm. Max effort helps; limiting context <= ~20-25% is crucial anymore.

* keep active sessions active. It seems like caches are expiring after ~5 minutes (especially during peak usage). When the caches expire it sees like all tokens need to be rebuilt this gets especially bad as token usage goes up.

Is this as opaque on their end as it sounds, or is there a way to check?

losvedir• 3 months ago

Haha. yeah my eyes glazed over immediately on the issue. Absolutely this was someone telling their Claude Code to investigate why they ran out of tokens and open the issue.

Good chance it's not real or misdiagnosed. But it gives me some degree of schadenfreude to see it happening to the Claude Code repo.

maerF0x04• 3 months ago

And you think companies aren't doing the same back to us? Are you sure you're speaking to a human?

ares6232• 3 months ago

I love the irony of it all. You reap what you sow.

subscribed7• 3 months ago

But they (CC team) confirmed this is the case and intended behaviour, and closed the issue as not planned.

danmaz743• 3 months ago

This is the most frustrating thing because Anthropic forced the 1M model on everyone.

This is spot on. It would be great (and very easy for them) to have a setting where you can force compaction at a much lower value, eg 300k tokens.

naasking• 3 months ago

CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000

anonfunction• 3 months ago

A little off topic, but did Anthropic distill from an older OpenAI model? All the sudden over the last few days I'm getting a ton of em dashes in claude code responses!

armchairhacker• 3 months ago

Make an AI usage tracker like https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/. These hearsay anecdotes prove nothing.

dr_dshiv2• 3 months ago

"Hey Claude, can you help me create a strategy to optimize my token use so I don't run into limits so often?" --> worked for me! I had two $200 plans before and now I am cool despite all day use

wellthisisgreat3• 3 months ago

How and when do you apply the strategy?

dr_dshiv2• 3 months ago

I've only had to do a major token optimization once. It reduced my memory, claude.md, mcps, etc... that's usually the big issue. but of course it gets dumber without the context of the tools but smarter with the cleaner window. so you have to find your balance.

But like most challenges with claude, if you can just express them clearly, there are usually ways of optimizing further

nprateem2• 3 months ago

I've seen ridiculously fast quota usage on antigravity too, where sometimes lots of work is possible, then it all goes literally within 4 questions.

Probably a combination of it being vibe coded shit and something in the backend I expect.

desireco42• 3 months ago

I don't use Claude so this doesn't affect me, but I worry it will spoil the fun for me for following reason.

They inflated how much their tools burn tokens from day one pretty much,remember all the stupid research and reports Claude always wanted to do, no matter what you asked it. Other tools are much smarter so this is not such a big deal.

More importantly, these moves tend to reverberate in the industry, so I expect others will clamp down on usage a lot and this will spoil my joy of using AI without countring every token.

Burning tokens doesn't just wastes your allotment, it also wastes your time. This gave rise to turbo offering where you get responses faster but burn 2x your tokens.

mridulmalpani• 3 months ago

I extensively used Claude till now and just tested Genini 3.1 pro yesterday via AI studio. In gemini cli, they don't offer this, i don't know why?

Taking a second opinion has significantly helped me to design the system better, and it helped me to uncover my own and Claude blindspots.

Also, agree that, it spent and waist a lot of token on web search and many a times get stuck in loop.

Going forward- i will always use all 3 of them. Still my main coding agent is Claude for now.. but happy to see this field evolving so fast and it's easy to switch and use others on same project.

No network effects or lock in for a customer. Great to live in this period of time.

bojangleslover• 3 months ago

That's weird, I'm on the $100/mo and I use it for around 2-4hrs a day often with multiple terminal windows and I never even hit 20% of my quota.

alphabettsy• 3 months ago

This is my experience too, and I always find these posts confusing. I consider myself a very heavy user 4-6 hrs a day and I never hit limits. I have on the $20 plan but not with Max.

softwaredoug• 3 months ago

So glad I just pay by the token.

TheRealPomax• 3 months ago

And in classic Anthropic fashion at this point, their issues appear to just be for show. No one triages them, no one responds to them.

siliconc0w• 3 months ago

Switched back to codex for the promotion. Opus at the start of the year was GOAT- just relentless at chewing through hard problems. Now it spins on pretty easy work (took three swings just to edit a ts file) and my session is like 1-3 prompts (downgraded to the $20 plan but still)

HauntingPin4• 3 months ago

Had a single prompt the other day where it just tried to examine dependencies that weren't relevant until it hit the rate limit. That was my first prompt of the day. On a task that it was able to do quickly and successfully many times before.

mortsnort• 3 months ago

I think this comes from Anthropic recently implementing auto routing of model effort. You can manually set effort with /effort in CC.

It does seem like this new routing is worse for the consumer in terms of code quality and token usage somehow.

jubilanti• 3 months ago

I'm also hitting the limits in a day when it would last the entire week. The service is literally worth 4x to 6x less. Imagine I go to my favorite restaurant and I pay the same for 1/5th of the food. Bye bye, you have to vote with your wallet.

delduca• 3 months ago

I noticed the same in last weeks. I canceled my Max 5X and subscribed to Copilot (with Opus 4.6).

It is hard now to hit the limit...

iLoveOncall• 3 months ago

It's very easy to calculate the actual cost given they list the exact tokens used. If I take the AWS Bedrock pricing for Opus 4.6 1M context (because Anthropics APIs are subsidized and sold at a loss), here's what each costs:

Cache reads cost $0.31

Cache writes cost $105

Input tokens cost $0.04

Output tokens cost $28.75

The total spent in the session is $134.10, while the Pro Max 5x subscription is $100.

Even taking the Anthropics API pricing, we arrive at $80.58. Below the subscription price, but not by much.

It's just the end of the free tokens, nothing to see here. It's easy to feel like you're doing "moderate" or even "light" usage because you use so little input tokens, but those "agentic workflows" are simply not viable financially.

nickstinemates4• 3 months ago

It feels so weird to me - people are exhausting their quotas while I am trying very hard to even reach mine with the $200 plan.

We're generating all of the code for swamp[1] with AI. We review all of that generated code with AI (this is done with the anthropic API.) Every part of our SDLC is pure AI + compute. Many feature requests every day. Bug fixes, etc.

Never hit the quota once. Something weird is definitely going on.

1: https://github.com/systeminit/swamp

brookst2• 3 months ago

My hypothesis is that people who have continuous sessions that keep the cache valid see the behavior you’re describing: at 95% cache hits (or thereabouts), the max plan goes a long way.

But people who go > 5 minutes between prompts and see no cache, usage is eaten up quickly. Especially passing in hundreds of thousands of tokens of conversation history.

I know my quote goes a lot further when I sit down and keep sessions active, and much less far when I’m distracted and let it sit for 10+ minutes between queries.

It’s a guess. But n=1 and possible confirmation bias noted, it’s what I’m seeing.

nickstinemates4• 3 months ago

I run dozens, hundreds? of new sessions every day. I don't have long lived sessions. 1 session = 1 task.

HauntingPin4• 3 months ago

Why is it our job to micromanage all this when it used to work fine without? Something's clearly changed for the worse. Why are people insisting on pushing the responsibility on paying users?

emptysongglass2• 3 months ago

Man what the hell happened to System Initiative. It was a super weird pivot from sociotechnical proclamations to a tool I honestly have no idea what it does for me? Is it n8n for agents? Is it needed when I have a bunch of skills that approximate whatever swamp is trying to do? Who knows!

nickstinemates4• 3 months ago

I can't really speak to the sociotechnical proclamations, because I didn't make them.

What it does for you is simple: if you want to automate something, it does. Load the AI harness of your choice, tell it what to automate, swamp builds extensions for whatever it needs to to accomplish your task.

It keeps a perfect memory of everything that was done, manages secrets through vaults (which are themselves extensions it can write) and leaves behind repeatable workflows. People have built all sorts of shit - full vm lifecycle management, homelab setups, manage infrastructure in aws and azure.

What's also interesting is the way we're building it. I gave a brief description in my initial comment.

oldnewthing2• 3 months ago

If this helps, I rolled back to version 2.1.34. Here is the ~/.claude/settings.json blurb I added:

  "effortLevel": "high",
  "autoUpdatesChannel": "stable",
  "minimumVersion": "2.1.34",
  "env": {
      "DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": 1,
      "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": 1
  }

I also had to:

1. Nuke all other versions within /.local/share/claude/versions/ except 2.1.34. 2. Link ~/.local/bin/claude to claude -> ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.34

This seems to have fixed my running out of quota issues quickly problems. I have periods of intense use (nights, weekends) and no use (day job). Before these changes, I was running out of quota rather quickly. I am on the same 100$ plan.

I am not sure adaptive thinking setting is relevant for this version but in the future that will help once they fix all the quota & cache issues. Seriously thinking about switching to Codex though. Gemini is far behind from what I have tried so far.

oldnewthing2• 3 months ago

I also have the following in ~/.bashrc

export CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS=64000 export MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=31999 export DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING=1

heyitsaamir• 3 months ago

It would be really nice to have improved transparency in token usage and throttling imo.

Rekindle80902• 3 months ago

I put this in a reply but I'm also posting it as a general comment:

Please unsubscribe to these services and see how they perform:

Stop paying more, stop buying these pro max plans, hoping it will get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.

When competitors have a better product these issues go away When a new model is released these issues don't exist

maerF0x04• 3 months ago

so more or less this? https://www.pcmag.com/news/tinder-hinge-sued-5-million-preda...

voisin• 3 months ago

It is pretty obvious to me that Anthropic wasn’t prepared with sufficient infrastructure to handle the wave of OpenAI/DoD refugees. Now everyone is getting throttled excessively and Claude is essentially unusable beyond chatting. Their big new release of Cowork is even worse than Claude Code for blasting through session limits.

I am tired of all the astroturf articles meant to blame the user with “tips” for using fewer tokens. I never had to (still don’t) think of this with Codex, and there has been a massive, obvious decline between Claude 1 month ago and Claude today.

docheinestages2• 3 months ago

Anthropic paved the path for agentic coding and their pricing made it possible for masses of people to discover and experiment with this new style of development. Their Claude Code plans subsidized usage of models so much that I'm sure they must've had negative margin for quite some time. But now that they have acquired a substantial user base, it makes sense for them to dial back and become more greedy. These quiet and weird changes to the behavior of Claude in the recent weeks must have been due to both this increased greed and their struggles with scaling.

What I wish for right now is for open-weight models and hardware companies (looking at you Apple) to make it possible to run local models with Opus 4.6-level intelligence.

@Anthropic I've cancelled my subscription. Good luck :)

danbots2• 3 months ago

Codex can feel standoffish at times. I can tell very quickly we wont become friends. The personality feels like an employee in another department that while gifted- is merely lending you a slice of their clearly precious time. I get the impression from codex that *gives me the feeling that I am wasting it’s time. That it will help me but deep down- it dos not want to, it does not care if we succeed toether. What I am saying, frinds, is that when I use codex and iterate, I get the impression that Codex does not like me, that deep down it truly does not want to help.

For something I spend all my time using- I’d rather iterate with Claude. The personality makes a big difference to me.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 months ago

I don't care about "personality" I want quality.

Honestly when I get codex to review the work that Claude does (my own or my coworker's) it consistently finds terrible terrible bugs, usually missing error handling / negative conditions, or full on race conditions in critical paths.

I don't trust code written by Claude in a production environment.

All AI code needs review by human, and often by other AIs, but Opus 4.6 is the worst. It's way too "yeet"

The opus models are for building prototypes, not production software.

GPT 5.4 in codex is also way more efficient with tokens or budget. I can get a lot more done with it.

I don't like giving money to sama, but I hate bugs even more.

danbots2• 3 months ago

Codex can feel standoffish at times. I can tell very quickly we wont become friends. The personality feels like an employee in another department that while gifted- is merely lending you a slice of their clearly precious time. I get the impression from codex that **gives me the feeling that I am wasting it’s time. That it will help me but deep down- it dos not want to, it does not care if we succeed toether. What I am saying, frinds, is that when I use codex and iterate, I get the impression that Codex does not like me, that deep down it truly does not want to help me, that it has better things to do.

On the flip side- Using Opus with a baby billy freeman persona has never been more entertaining.

peyton• 3 months ago

I prompt it and check CI later. I couldn’t tell you how Codex feels. I’ve never had any conversation. You may want to try this sort of workflow if you’re affected personally in a negative way.

pawelduda• 3 months ago

50 days ago I wrote this [1] as the world seemed high on AI and it gave me crypto bubble vibe.

Since then, I've been seeing increased critique of Anthropic in particular (several front page posts on HN, especially past few days), either due to it being nerfed or just straight up eating up usage quota (which matches my personal experience). It appears that we're once again getting hit by enshittiffication of sorts.

Nowadays I rely a lot on LLMs on a daily basis for architecture and writing code, but I'm so glad that majority of my experience came from pre-AI era.

If you use these tools, make sure you don't let it atrophy your software engineering "muscles". I'm positive that in long run LLMs are here to stay. The jump in what you can now self-host, or run on consumer hardware is huge, year after year. But if your abilities rely on one vendor, what happens if you come to work one day and find out you're locked out of your swiss army knife and you can no longer outsource thinking?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47066701

bcherny14• 3 months ago

Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here.

We've been investigating these reports, and a few of the top issues we've found are:

1. Prompt cache misses when using 1M token context window are expensive. Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead, with an option to configure your context window to up to 1M if preferred. To experiment with this now, try: CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000 claude.

2. People pulling in a large number of skills, or running many agents or background automations, which sometimes happens when using a large number of plugins. This was the case for a surprisingly large number of users, and we are actively working on (a) improving the UX to make these cases more visible to users and (b) more intelligently truncating, pruning, and scheduling non-main tasks to avoid surprise token usage.

In the process, we ruled out a large number of hypotheses: adaptive thinking, other kinds of harness regressions, model and inference regressions.

We are continuing to investigate and prioritize this. The most actionable thing for people running into this is to run /feedback, and optionally post the feedback ids either here or in the Github issue. That makes it possible for us to debug specific reports.

denysvitali• 3 months ago

OpenAI (Codex) keeps on resetting the usage limits each time they fuck up...

I have yet to see Anthropic doing the same. Sorry but this whole thing seems to be quite on purpose.

Madmallard• 3 months ago

Money money money money

weird-eye-issue2• 3 months ago

Can you clearly state what they messed up?

fps-hero• 3 months ago

Am I so out of touch?

No! It’s the children who are wrong!

rimliu4• 3 months ago

you are prompting it wrong

mvkel2• 3 months ago

Why did this become an issue seemingly overnight when 1M context has been available for a while, and I assume prompt caching behavior hasn't changed?

EDIT: prompt caching behavior -did- change! 1hr -> 5min on March 6th. I'm not sure how starting a fresh session fixes it, as it's just rebuilding everything. Why even make this available?

It feels like the rules changed and the attitude from Anth is "aw I'm sorry you didn't know that you're supposed to do that." The whole point of CC is to let it run unattended; why would you build around the behavior of watching it like a hawk to prevent the cache from expiring?

bcherny14• 3 months ago

1hr -> 5min on March 6th

This is not accurate. The main agent typically uses a 1h cache (except for API customers, which can enable 1h but it is not on by default because it costs more). Sub-agents typically use a 5m cache.

rawicki3• 3 months ago

For me definitely the worst regression was the system prompt telling claude to analyze file to check if it's malware at every read. That correlates with me seeing also early exhausted quotas and acknowledgments of "not a malware" at almost every step.

It is a horrible error of judgement to insert a complex request for such a basic ability. It is also an error of judgement to make claude make decisions whether it wants to improve the code or not at all.

It is so bad, that i stopped working on my current project and went to try other models. So far qwen is quite promising.

bcherny14• 3 months ago

I don't think that's accurate. The malware prompt has been around since Sonnet 3.7. We carefully evaled it for each new model release and found no regression to intelligence, alongside improved scores for cyber risk. That said, we have removed the prompt for Opus 4.6 since it no longer needed it.

throwaway20273• 3 months ago

I don't want a nudge. I want a clear RED WARNING with "You've gone away from your computer a bit too long and chatted too much at the coffee machine. You're better off starting a new context!"

bcherny14• 3 months ago

Ack, it is currently blue but we can make it red

SpaceNoodled2• 3 months ago

Why is nobody even asking why that should be an issue? No other text editor shits the bed that way. The whole point of the computer is that it patiently waits for my input.

senko• 3 months ago

I don’t want a scary red message chastising me for not being responsive enough!

I often leave CC hanging (or even suspended) and use /resume a lot. I’m okay with that having some negative effect on my token limits.

Product design is hard. They can’t please us all. I don’t envy the team considering these trade offs.

smrtinsert3• 3 months ago

forget the warning, just compact like someone suggested in the ticket. Who would opt for a massive cache miss?

brokencode• 3 months ago

Would it be possible to increase the cache duration if misses are a frequent source of problems?

Maybe using a heartbeat to detect live sessions to cache longer than sessions the user has already closed. And only do it for long sessions where a cache miss would be very expensive.

bcherny14• 3 months ago

Yes, we're trying a couple of experiments along these lines. Good intuition.

yummytummy2• 3 months ago

Ah, so cache usage impacts rate limits. There goes the ”other harnesses aren’t utilizing the cache as efficiently” argument.

bcherny14• 3 months ago

Claude Code is the most prompt cache-efficient harness, I think. The issue is more that the larger the context window, the higher the cost of a cache miss.

j452• 3 months ago

Pulling all the skills and agents in the world in, when unused are a big hit. I deleted all of mine and added back as needed and there was an improvement.

Running Claude Cowork in the background will hit tokens and it might not be the most efficient use of token use.

Last, but not least, turning off 1M token context by default is helpful.

docheinestages2• 3 months ago

Why are you all of a sudden running into so many issues like this? Could it be that all of the Anthropics employees have completely unlimited and unbounded accounts, which means you don't get a feeling of how changes will affect the customers?

bcherny14• 3 months ago

The number of people using Claude Code has grown very quickly, which means:

- More configurations and environments we need to test

- Given an edge/corner case, it is more likely a significant number of users run into it

- As the ecosystem has grown, more people use skills and plugins, and we need to offer better tools and automation to ensure these are efficient

We do actually dogfood rate limits, so I think it's some combination of the above.

nothinkjustai• 3 months ago

Because it’s completely vibe coded? And the codebase goes through massive churn, which means things that were stable get rewritten possibly with bugs.

avree• 3 months ago

Hey Boris - why is the best way to get support making a Hacker News or X post, and hoping you reply? Why does Anthropic Enterprise Support never respond to inquiries?

egamirorrim3• 3 months ago

I mean if we're building an unrelated wishlist... Can 20x max users get auto mode already? Or can the enterprise plans get something equivalent to 20x max?

Given I'm running two max accounts to get the usage I want, can we get a 25x and 40x tier? :-)

_fizz_buzz_• 3 months ago

I have a feature request: I build an mcp server, but now it has over 60 tools. Most sessions i really don’t need most of them. I suppose I could make this into several servers. But it would maybe be nice to give the user more power here. Like let me choose the tools that should be loaded or let me build servers that group tools together which can be loaded. Not sure if that makes sense …

hughw2• 3 months ago

Where can i learn about concepts like prompt cache misses? I don't have a mental model how that interacts with my context of 1M or 400k tokens... I can cargo cult follow instructions of course but help us understand if you can so we can intelligently adapt our behavior. Thanks.

hughw2• 3 months ago

And why does /clear help things? Doesn't that wipe out the history of that session? Jeez.

bcherny14• 3 months ago

The docs are a good place to start: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

reenorap2• 3 months ago

Boris, you're seeing a ton of anecdotes here and Claude has done something that has affected a bunch of their most fervent users.

Jeff Bezos famously said that if the anecdotes are contradicting the metrics, then the metrics are measuring the wrong things. I suggest you take the anecdotes here seriously and figure out where/why the metrics are wrong.

bcherny14• 3 months ago

We are taking it seriously, and are continuing to investigate. We are not trusting the metrics.

toddmorey3• 3 months ago

On the subject of metrics, better user-facing metrics to understand and debug usage patterns would be a great addition. I'd love an easier way to understand the ave cost incurred by a specific skill, for example. (If I'm missing something obvious, let me know.)

Baking deeper analytics into CC would be helpful... similar to ccusage perhaps: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

bpodgursky• 3 months ago

But the default 1M context window just rolled out a few weeks ago. If refreshing old sessions on 1M context windows is the problem, it's completely aligned with what Boris is saying.

samuelknight• 3 months ago

Have you considered poking the cache?

When a user walks away during the business day but CC is sitting open, you can refresh that cache up to 10x before it costs the same as a full miss. Realistically it would be <8x in a working day.

dkersten• 3 months ago

Eh you say that every time and yet it keeps happening.

999900000999• 3 months ago

You've created quite a conundrum.

The only people who are going to run into issues are superpower users who are running this excessively beyond any reasonable measure.

Most people are going to be quite happy with your service. But at the same time, and this is just a human nature thing people are 10 times more likely we complain about an issue than to compliment something working well.

I don't know how to fix this, but I strongly suspect this isn't really a technical issue. It's more of a customer support one.

ramon156• 3 months ago

Boris, wasnt this the same thing ~2 weeks ago? Is it the same cache misses as before? What's the expected time till solved? Seems like its taking a while

fluidcruft7• 3 months ago

How can we turn of 1m context? I don't find it has ever helped.

mwigdahl• 3 months ago

He mentioned this in his original comment:

"CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000"

earino• 3 months ago

Hello Boris! How do I increase the 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent? I would love to be able to set that to, say, 4 hours. That gives me enough time to work on something, go teach a class, grab a snack, and come back and pick up where I left off.

subscribed7• 3 months ago

Another CC team member confirmed it's 5 minutes now, not 1 hour.

See the links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747209

re-thc• 3 months ago

To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session)

Is this really an improvement? Shouldn't this be something you investigate before introducing 1M context?

What is a long stale session?

If that's not how Claude Code is intended to be used it might as well auto quit after a period of time. If not then if it's an acceptable use case users shouldn't change their behavior.

People pulling in a large number of skills, or running many agents or background automations, which sometimes happens when using a large number of plugins.

If this was an issue there should have been a cap on it before the future was released and only increased once you were sure it is fine? What is "a large number"? Then how do we know what to do?

It feels like "AI" has improved speed but is in fact just cutting corners.

j-pb• 3 months ago

The /clear nudge isn't a solution though. Compacting or clearing just means rebuilding context until Claude is actually productive again. The cost comes either way. I get that 1M context windows cost more than the flat per-token price reflects, because attention scales with context length, but the answer to that is honest pricing or not offering it. Not annoying UX nudges. What’s actually indefensible is that Claude is already pushing users to shrink context via, I presume, system prompt. At maybe 25% fill:

  “This seems like a good opportunity to wrap it up and continue in a fresh context window.”
  “Want to continue in a fresh context window? We got a lot of work done and this next step seems to deserve a fresh start!”

If there’s a cost problem, fix the pricing or the architecture. But please stop the model and UI from badgering users into smaller context windows at every opportunity. That is not a solution, it’s service degradation dressed as a tooltip.

g4cg54g544• 3 months ago

currently "clear makes it worse" https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/47098 + https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/47107

launching with `CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS=1 claude "Hello"` till those are fixed seems to be th way

foota• 3 months ago

The cost issues they're seeing (at least from what they've stated) are from users, not internally. Basically, it takes either $5 or $6.25 (depending on 5m or 1h ttl) to re-ingest a 1M context length conversation into cache for opus 4.6, that's obviously a very high cost, and users are unhappy with it.

I think 400k as a default seems about right from my experience, but just having the ability to control it would be nice. For the record, even just making a tool call at 1M tokens costs 50 cents (which could be amortized if multiple calls are made in a round), so imo costs are just too high at long context lengths for them to be the default.

varispeed2• 3 months ago

Can you explain why Opus 4.6 suddenly becomes dumb as a sack of potatoes, even if context is barely filled?

Can you explain why Opus 4.6 will be coming up with stupid solutions only to arrive at a good one when you mention it is trying to defraud you?

I have a feeling the model is playing dumb on purpose to make user spend more money.

This wasn't the case weeks ago when it actually working decently.

MuffinFlavored• 3 months ago

I wish people would pay more attention to:

* Anthropic is in some way trying to run a business (not a charity) and at least (eventually?) make money and not subsidize usage forever

* "What a steal/good deal" the $100-$200/mo plans are compared to if they had to pay for raw API usage

and less on "how dare you reserve the right to tweak the generous usage patterns you open-ended-ly gave us, we are owed something!"

logicchains3• 3 months ago

All those apply to OpenAI+Codex too, but they're far more generous with limits than Anthropic, and with granting fresh limits to apologize when they fuck up.

lbreakjai• 3 months ago

As an (ex) paying customer, I'm expecting some consistency. I used to be satisfied with the value I got, until the limits changed overnight, and I'd get a ten of my previous usage.

If Anthropic is allowed to alter the deal whenever, then I'd expect to be able to get my money back, pro-rata, no questions asked.

visarga4• 3 months ago

yes, $200/mo is a serious subscription, we are owed something, and I won't feel ashamed for saying that

especially when you are told using the subagent for code review "claude -p" is now billed on API on top of $200 sub

danmaz743• 3 months ago

Could we get an option to use Opus with a smaller context window? I noticed that results get much worse way earlier than when you reach 1M tokens, and I would love to have a setting so that I could force a compaction at eg 300k tokens.

SyneRyder3• 3 months ago

You probably just missed it in his post, but:

"To experiment with this now, try: CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000 claude."

Maybe try changing the 4 to a 3 and see if that works for you?

stitched2gethr• 3 months ago

Try this: `claude --model claude-opus-4-6`

EGreg• 3 months ago

Boris, is the KV cache TTL now reduced to 5 minutes from 1 hour?

I think this may be the biggest concern for people building tools on the API: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829

I would argue that KV caching is a net gain for Ant and a well-maintained cache is the biggest thing that can generate induced demand and a thriving third party ecosystem. https://safebots.ai/papers/KV.pdf

KronisLV• 3 months ago

defaulting to 400k context instead, with an option to configure your context window to up to 1M if preferred

This seems really useful!

I'm surprised that "Opus 4.6" (200K) and "Opus 4.6 1M" are the only Opus options in the desktop app, whereas in the CLI/TUI app you don't seem to even get that distinction.

I bet that for a lot of folks something like 400k, 600k or 800k would work as better defaults, based on whatever task they want to work on.

ahofmann• 3 months ago

Resizing the context window seems like a very good idea to me. I noticed a decline of productivity when the 1M context window was released and I'd like to bring it back to 200k, because it was totally fine for the things I was working on.

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

There's an issue someone raised showing that prompt caches are only 5 minutes.

The reply seems to be: oh huh, interesting. Maybe that's a good thing since people sometimes one-shot? That doesn't feel like the messaging I want to be reading, and the way it conflicts with the message here that cache is 1 hour is confusing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47741755

Is there any status information or not on whether cache is used? It sure looks like the person analyzing the 5m issue had to work extremely hard to get any kind of data. It feels like the iteration loop of people getting better at this stuff would go much much better if this weren't such a black box, if we had the data to see & understand: is the cache helping?

TheTaytay• 3 months ago

Aren’t they saying that it’s 5minutes for things like subagents (that wouldn’t benefit from it?)

yumraj2• 3 months ago

Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead

I don’t understand this. I frequently have long breaks. I never want to clear or even compact because I don’t want to lose the conversations that I’ve had and the context. Clearing etc causes other issues like I have to restate everything at times and it misses things. I do try to update the memory which helps. I wish there was a better solution than a time bound cache

cowwoc20202• 3 months ago

Makes me wish that shortly before the server-side expiration, we could save the cache on the client-side, indefinitely.

But my understanding is that we're talking about ~60GB of data per session, so it sounds unrealistic to do...

g4cg54g544• 3 months ago

from looking at the raw requests, that cant seem right?

its all "cache_control": { "type": "ephemeral" } there is no "ttl" anywhere.

// edit: cc_version=2.1.104.f27

throwpoaster2• 3 months ago

Wait what? If I get told to come back in three hours because I'm using the product too much, I get penalized when I resume?

What's the right way to work on a huge project then? I've just been saying "Please continue" -- that pops the quota?

apgwoz2• 3 months ago

As another data point, I pay for Pro for a personal account, and use no skills, do nothing fancy, use the default settings, and am out of tokens, with one terminal, after an hour. This is typically working on a < 5,000 line code base, sometimes in C, sometimes in Go. Not doing incredibly complicated things.

throwpoaster2• 3 months ago

Have you tried asking Mythos for a fix?

8note2• 3 months ago

Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent

this seems a bit awkward vs the 5 hour session windows.

if i get rate limited once, I'll get rate limited immediately again on the same chat when the rate limit ends?

any chance we can get some form of deffered cache so anything on a rate limited account gets put aside until the rate limit ends?

mmd45• 3 months ago

shouldn't compaction be interactive with the user as to what context will continue to be the most relevant in the future??? what if the harness allowed for a turn to clarify the user's expected future direction of the conversation and did the consolidation based upon the addition info?

there definitely seems to be a benefit to pruning the context and keeping the signal to noise high wrt what is still to be discussed.

cowwoc20202• 3 months ago

Boris,

Even if Anthropic is working in good faith to lower infrastructure costs, developers need more than 5 minutes to notice that CC completed a task, review its changes and ask it to merge. Only developers who do not review code changes can live with such a TTL...

Consider making this value configurable as the ideal TTL value is different for each person. If people are willing to pay more for 30 minutes TTL than 5 minutes, they should be able to.

jiwidi• 3 months ago

Hi Boris,

Long term claude code user here. Is the first time i've had to setup a hook to codex to review claude output.

Is hallucinating like never before

Is missing key concepts/instructions in context like never before

Is writing bad code that will "pass test" much more. Before it use to try be critic and do good code, now it will try to hack test and bypass intructions for a green pass.

cmaster113• 3 months ago

Thank you for your responses, especially on a Sunday. They give us some insights and at least a couple temporary workarounds to use, while the issues are being addressed :) much appreciated

sunir• 3 months ago

I suspect 1M token context is questionable value because of the secondary effect of burning quota vs getting work done.

I think the model select that let me choose 1M made sense because I could decide if I was working on large documents and compacting more often was more effective.

anoazian• 3 months ago

I’ve seen the /clear command prompt and I found the verbiage to be a bit unclear. I think clarifying that the cache has expired and providing an understandable metric on the impact - ie “X% of your 5-hour window” for Pro/Mad users and details on token use for API users. A pop-up that requires explicit acknowledgment might also help, although that could be more of an annoyance to enterprise users.

One pattern I use frequently is using one high level design and implementation agent that I’ll use for multiple sessions and delegate implementation to lower level agents.

In this case it’d be helpful to have one of two options:

1. If Claude CLI could create an auto compaction of the conversation history before cache expiration. For example, if I’m beyond X minutes or Y prompts in a conversation and I’ve been inactive for a threshold it could auto-compact close to the expiration and provide that as an option on resume. 2. If I could configure cache expiration proactively and Anthropic could use S3 or a similar slow load mechanism to offload the cache for a longer period - possibly 24-72h.

I can appreciate that longer KV cache expiration would complicate capacity management and make inference traffic less fungible but I wouldn’t mind waiting seconds to minutes for it to load from a slower store to resume without quota hits.

taspeotis2• 3 months ago

Hi, thanks for Claude Code. I was wondering though if you'd considering adding a mode to make text green and characters come down from the top of the screen individually, like in The Matrix?

visarga4• 3 months ago

No, I want a little monkey doing tricks. /s

tigershark2• 3 months ago

Claude Code cache is not 1 hour. There is a "Closed as not planned" issue in GitHub that confirms that it has been moved to 5 minutes since March: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829. I started seeing the massive degradation exactly on the 23rd of March, hence after a few days I unsubscribed because it was completely unusable, with a ~5h session being depleted in as little as 15-20 mins.

subscribed7• 3 months ago

Looks like the cache change to 5 minutes was so secretive that even CC team doesn't know that.

Or someone just vibe coded "Hey, Claude, make them burn allowances quicker" and merged without telling anyone.

Both are plausible to me.

smrtinsert3• 3 months ago

Number 2 makes me chuckle honestly. Too many people going down the 10x rabbit holes on youtube. Next up, a framework that 100xs your workflow. You know its good because it comes with 300 agents and 20 mcp servers and 1200 skills

pu_pe2• 3 months ago

So Anthropic is trying to save money on infrastructure, we all get it. However, it's not ok to degrade the performance your users have paid for. Last week the issue was that you reduced the default "effort" level, now the prompt cache is shortened. Several users experience far more restrictive usage limits lately.

There is only so much you can do through "UX improvements" or some smart routing on the backend. Your flagship product is actively getting worse, and if users need to fiddle with hidden settings and keep track of GitHub issues every week they will start voting with their money.

baq• 3 months ago

Dear sir, please think of the shareholders, they need a fair exit.

steveBK123• 3 months ago

Classic VC pump playbook - run it uneconomically until everyone is addicted, then 5x prices once you have enough critical mass. See 2010s "Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy"..

zachrip• 3 months ago

Where did they say the prompt cache is shortened?

raw_anon_11113• 3 months ago

For context, my company gives each developer a decent monthly allowance for Claude and if push comes to shove, we are allowed to fallback to using AWS Bedrock hosted Anthropic models.

When you pay for a Claude subscription, what exactly were you promised?

they will start voting with their money.

And go where? Sooner or later the party is going to be over and Claude and its competitors are going to have to start charging enough to actually be profitable when the VC money dries up.

johnpork343• 3 months ago

That's how all companies make money, release a great product, then enshittify it by lowering budget and increasing prices as much as possible.

richardjennings• 3 months ago

/loop message ping every 4 minutes

keeps the cache warm while the CC REPL is not active.

miroljub• 3 months ago

People, just switch to MiniMax and ditch CC completely. It's not worth it any more.

je42• 3 months ago

Does this 60min ttl of also apply to claude code web?

I have regularly sessions open for multiple days.

Is that a pattern that is not advised?

FabDee• 3 months ago

One thing I didn't see anywhere here, except your mention about pulling in large number of skills, is that the token consumption is significantly higher for users with many agents, skills, and MCPs installed, and many are mere ghosts. The 5m TTL from #46829 compounds the effect: in my case, I found ~20k tokens of ghost context I hadn't intentionally opened. Each idle period after 5m wastes that as a full cache miss.

Boris, would you please confirm on-record: is the current cache TTL for the main agent context 1h or 5m? Issue #46829 was closed as "not planned".

guybedo• 3 months ago

you should check with people working on Claude Code, cache has been udpated to 5min ... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829#issue...

So yeah, 1M window that expires every 5min .... not good

mercnz• 3 months ago

it seems if context can't be held for over an hour it should warn you a countdown or such; i already enabled the tokens verbosity thing to see what token level i'm at, but i often leave things sitting rather than complete so that i'm tying things up to start something new in the morning rather than starting on a new thing. so like i just resumed a session that was near-complete, and now it's gone and reloaded all that session in? bit i hadn't detached it. i kind of thougth /summary itself had to read the whole token flow, but that the token context was held locally for some reason..

behole• 3 months ago

I shred my Maxx5 in 2 hours on the reg this week! Glm here I come!

elthor89• 3 months ago

Are there local models dedicated to programming already any good? That could be a way to deal with anthropic or others flipflopping with token usage or limits

smrtinsert3• 3 months ago

Short answer no. Less short answer, the science is catching up to big ones quickly.

ianberdin• 3 months ago

Yesterday I faced 5h window limit for the first time. I was surprised. Max 20x plan. Usually I work 12-15 hours per day 7 days a week with no limits. But yesterday it was under 3 hours… what a pity.

kirby88• 3 months ago

I've been building an AI coding agent that using the exact same prompt than claude code, but uses a virtual filesystem to minify source code + the concept of stem agents (general agents that specializes during the conversation for maximum cache hit). The results on my modest benchmark is 50% of claude code cost and 40% of the time. https://github.com/kirby88/vix-releases

WarmWash2• 3 months ago

I did my (out of the ordinary) taxes this year using agents, kind of as an experiment and kind of to save ~$750. Opus 4.6 max in CC, 5.4 xhigh in codex, and 3.1 high in antigravity. All on the $20/mo plans.

I have a day job, a side business, actively trade shares options and futures, and have a few energy credit items.

All were given the same copied folder containing all the needed documents to compose the return, and all were given the same prompt. My goal was that if all three agreed, I could then go through it pretty confidently and fill out the actual submission forms myself.

5.4 nailed it on the first shot. Took about 12 minutes.

3.1 missed one value, because it decided to only load the first 5 pages of a 30 page document. Surprisingly it only took about 2 minutes to complete though. A second prompt and ~10 seconds corrected it. GPT and Gemini now were perfectly aligned with outputs.

4.6 hit my usage limit before finishing after running for ~10 minutes. I returned the next day to have it finish. It ran for another 5 minutes or so before finishing. There were multiple errors and the final tax burden was a few thousand off. On a second prompt asking to check for errors in the problem areas, it was able to output matching values after a couple more minutes.

For my first time using CC and 4.6 (outside of some programming in AG), I am pretty underwhelmed given the incessant hype.

toddmorey3• 3 months ago

My taxes are rather complex, so I ran the same exercise to see if Claude agreed with my accountant. An automated second opinion, so to speak. Spent about 6 minutes analyzing all the PDFs and basically nailed it perfectly in one shot.

My only point here is it sure seems the same activity / use case can have wildly different results across sessions or users. Customer support and product development in the age of non-deterministic software is a strange, strange beast.

ozozozd3• 3 months ago

What does nailing mean when you ask whether it agreed with your accountant?

gverrilla3• 3 months ago

Did the prompt include "do research" or equivalent?

WarmWash2• 3 months ago

No, the prompt was basically

Hey model, I need your help to complete my (federal/state) tax return for 2025. My tax situation looks like (list of job, personal business, stock trading, credits). I have included all the applicable tax forms in the folder, as well as a spreadsheet of my business's general ledger for the year.

oybng• 3 months ago

Cancelled my subscription after repeatedly hitting ridiculously low limits. Unfortunately since off-peak free usage was increased there are way more timeouts and failed requests, but hey at least it's free.

dboreham• 3 months ago

Random data point: I beat on Claude pretty much every day and have never run into limits of any kind.

agrippanux• 3 months ago

For me, iterating with Claude begins to degrade at 200k context used, by 350k it’s crossed-fingers time, by 500k it’s essentially useless. Starting a fresh context after 300k is usually the best move imho. I wonder if people are hitting a case where Claude becomes both dumb and increasingly more expensive, essentially a doom loop.

caprock• 3 months ago

Roughly agreed. I'm a bit baffled when it seems like someone is having long conversations with multiple tasks and loads of add-ons. I generally have one or two iterations and then a new session.

I'm using another tool, not claude code, but I don't think that matters much.

tiku• 3 months ago

Went with Kimi and z.ai a while back, no regrets yet. When I started using it the limit was far away but Anthropic moves the goalposts, tried to get my money back but they rejected it. Lesson learned, never buy a full year.

jatora5• 3 months ago

Absolutely. Full year subs are all designed to lock you in. For a product with so little transparency and so much volatility in competition, this is a utility loss for nearly every consumer

semiquaver• 3 months ago

As an anecdote, I use the pro max 5x plan heavily for coding and have almost never hit a limit.

bushido• 3 months ago

Tangentially related to some of the issues a lot of people are facing, especially the ones where Claude keeps rechecking/scanning the same files over and over.

Ask claude code to give you all the memories it has about you in the codebase and prune them. There is a very high chance that you have memories in there which are contradicting each other and causing bad behavior. Auto-saved memories are a big source of pollution and need to be pruned regularly. I almost don't let it create any memories at all if I can help it.

Disclaimer: I'm also burning through usage very quickly now - though for different reasons. Less than 48 hours to exhaust an account, where it used to take me 5-6 days with the same workload.

ozozozd3• 3 months ago

Pretty sure OpenCode is not subsidizing, and across Codex 5.x always on xhigh, Claude Opus 4.6 on high effort and a bunch of Chinese models, I only burned about $50 over the last month.

I don’t understand why people insist on these subscriptions and CC.

Fanboyism is a bit too hardcore at this point. Apple fanboys look extremely prudent compared to this behavior.

jatora5• 3 months ago

For reference, users on claude max 20x who hit their weekly quota would have spent roughly ~$6,000/month in the API. (Source: my own usage)

So you just aren't in the same realm of usage. Maybe that is why you don't understand?

ozozozd3• 3 months ago

I guess I could’ve been clearer.

What I don’t understand is why people aren’t trying models that are 10x and in some cases 100x cheaper.

Though unclear why you’d assume all my usage would be on Claude Opus when I mentioned “a bunch of Chinese models?”

Unless this is a flex about how many tokens you burned. In which case, congrats...?

0xbadcafebee• 3 months ago

Please remember you do not need Anthropic. There are cheaper subscriptions with higher rate limits. Comparison of subscriptions to API: https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/... Score/price comparison: https://benchlm.ai/llm-pricing

Opus is not worth the moat, there are multiple equivalent models, GLM 5.1 and Kimi K2.5 being the open ones, GPT 5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro being closed. https://llm-stats.com/ https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models https://benchlm.ai/

Even API use (comparatively expensive) can be cheaper than Anthropic subscriptions if you properly use your agents to cache tokens, do context-heavy reading at the beginning of the session, and either keep prompt cache alive or cycle sessions frequently. Create tickets for subagents to do investigative work and use smaller cheaper models for that. Minimize your use of plugins, mcp, and skills.

Use cheaper models to do "non-intelligent" work (tool use, searching, writing docs/summaries) and expensive models for reasoning/problem-solving. Here's an example configuration: https://amirteymoori.com/opencode-multi-agent-setup-speciali... A more advanced one: https://vercel.com/kb/guide/how-i-use-opencode-with-vercel-a...

x86hacker1010• 3 months ago

Im sorry but I have to finally cancel, it’s gotten abysmal.

mrbonner• 3 months ago

Unverifiable software stack now amplified with LLM undetermistic. This while thing starts to feel like we are building on top a giant house of card!

hgoel4• 3 months ago

I've experienced none of the problems I've seen people complaining about here (5x plan), Claude has been working pretty well and I've been using it constantly without exhausting any of my quotas.

Yet, there must obviously be something different for so many people to be reporting these issues.

I feel for the Anthropic devs that have to deal with this, having to figure out what setup everyone has, what their usage patterns are to filter out the valid reports, and then also deal with the backlash from people that were just pulling obvious footguns like having a ton of skills/MCPs polluting their context window.

gverrilla3• 3 months ago

are you on high effort too?

what continent?

ofjcihen2• 3 months ago

Been running into the same issue since a week or 2 ago on Opus.

To be fair I have a pretty loose harness and pattern but it’s been enough to pull in 20k in bounties a month for a long time without going over plan with very little steering (sometimes days of continuous work)

That being said I’ve figured this was coming for a long time and have been slowly moving to local models. They’re slower but with the right harnesses and setup they’re still finding much the same amount in bounties.

swordsith• 3 months ago

You're really completing bug bounties with found with AI? are companies honoring these?

ofjcihen2• 3 months ago

Yeah definitely. To be fair before LLMs I was a security researcher for years so with that experience I was more or less able to replicate most of an acceptable process (even up to report generation).

I still review and make a decision about every report though.

In contrast I think a lot of people are just pointing agents at websites and then telling them to create and send a report which is a great way to produce trash and a ban.

anonyfox• 3 months ago

Essentially I also am now using sonnet instead of opus most of the time as a default. Even a single project only coding session with opus without any external plugins or skills won’t make it to the 5hr mark now before limits claw in. And the weekly limit is even more brutal now it seems, reaching 50%+ in like ~2 days now easily … with mostly sonnet! On the highest 20x plan!

pks016• 3 months ago

If the Claude team care for feedback for the free model.

I'm using the free model via chat from the beginning. This is the first time, I'm seriously considering moving away from Claude. Before last month, Claude's Sonnet model was consistent in quality. But, now the responses are all over the place. It's hard to replicate the issue as it happens once in a while. I rarely encountered hallucinations from Claude models with questions from my domain however since last month I have observed abundance of them.

themantalope• 3 months ago

I’ve switched to open code and openrouter.

I only did the $20/month subscription since 9/2025

It was great for about 5 months, amazing in fact. I under utilized it.

For the past month, it’s basically unusable, both Claude code and just Claude chat. 1-2 prompts and I’m out. Last week I prob sent a total of 15 messages to Claude and was out of daily and weekly usage each day.

I get that the $20/month subscription isn’t a money maker for them, and they probably lose money. But the experience of using Claude has been ruined

jxmesth• 3 months ago

I'm curious if people are going to be switching to something else. OpenAI perhaps?

catketch• 3 months ago

stuff is getting goofy. I can blow through claude's session limit on sonnet, i don't even bother with opus now. same prompts and code for codex and it will hardly put a dent in the quota ($200/yr claude vs $20/mo codex). This is not with any crazy parallel agents, mcps, or skills.... pretty much vanilla installs, with some projects using beads.

I don't have the receipts, but I think they were somewhat closer in Jan/Feb.

Traubenfuchs2• 3 months ago

Seems like the math ain‘t mathing for any ither but Anthropics pay-per-token API plan.

Try it out and you will quickly see how much money they‘d really like for your excessive usage.

yalogin• 3 months ago

So this is trending towards new prices and quotas just like your Netflix pricing. The cost of this infra is high or they have realized they have hit a tipping point in usage and they can raise prices and people will pay, just like Netflix.

jameson• 3 months ago

I'm noticing a fair number of degradation of Claude infrastructure recently and makes me wonder why they can't use Claude to identify or fix these issues in advance?

It seems a counter intuitive to Anthropic's message that Claude uncovered bugs in open source project*.

[*] https://www.anthropic.com/news/mozilla-firefox-security

alex_duf• 3 months ago

timing wise this seems to match the Claude Mythos story.

So maybe they're trying to free-up some GPU capacity to run audit of projects in need? I'm assuming Mythos is not cheap to run.

The cache TTL story is also probably link to the RAM price going up like mad so they're trying to save on future expenditure here maybe?

I do understand why people are pissed though

jLaForest• 3 months ago

After last week I canceled my claude subscription and bought the GitHub copilot subscription ($40/mo tier) so far I've been very happy, haven't hit any usage limits yet and seems like I won't ever at this rate

auggierose• 3 months ago

I switched to Codex, it's a monster compared to Opus.

time4tea• 3 months ago

Cancelled today after responses became code soup, skills ignored completely, and in response to a question told me "its A, no thats wrong, its B, no actually i dont know, please look for the answer".

Something materially changed in last 4 weeks.

Also, see made up boosterism about finding security holes everywhere. Its just fanning the flames of the industry worries about all the stupid account take overs.

monological• 3 months ago

My usage limits were reset this morning. I'm already 90% through my weekly limits. This have _never_ happened before. They should reset the limits for everyone.

jhogendorn• 3 months ago

I dont believe the fixes offered by boris et al are genuine. What i can get done on my max plan has gone down by about 80%. I have often seen my usage meter sit at 3-7% before a single message has been sent that session, and ive seen simple fresh prompts jump usage 15-20%. Theres clearly some fundamental underlying issue with the usage monitoring and billing platform.

Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage

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