Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

Right, but these companies are selling their products on the basis that you can offload a good amount of the thinking. And it seems a good deal of investment in AI is also based on this premise. I don't disagree with you, but it's sorta fucked that so much money has been pumped into this and that markets seem to still be okay with it all.

Who would have though including a hard depedency on third part service with unclear long term availability would be a problem!

Paid compilers and remotely acessible mainframes all over again - people apparently never learn.

More than some thinking. They’ll probably need to think hardest or even ultrathink to keep the project moving forward.

Hmmm, I am 99% sure the users are not vibe coders who can't code, those are on tools like lovable, not messing with terminal tools.

Came to comment on the same quote.

I'm surprised, but know I shouldn't be, that we're at this point already.

He did not pass the vibe check.

I honestly feel sorry for these vibe coders. I'm loving AI in a similar way that I loved google or IDE magic. This seems like a far worst version of those developers that tried to build an entire app with Eclipse or Visual Studio GUI drag and drop from the late 90s

Even if Moore's law was still in effect and the computer resources required stayed the same and compute stayed as efficient per watt (neither is true), it would just halve compute costs every 18 months. You're able to read about people hitting $4000 costs/month on the $200 plan upthread. That's 8 years until it's cost effective.

Are they really ready to burn money for 8 years?

The thing is, all the models are not that 'smart'. None of them is AGI.

Currently it's much more important to manage context, split tasks, retry when needed, not getting stuck in an infinite loop, expose the right tools (but not too many), ...

> They've just done the work to tailor it specifically for proper tool using during coding. Once other models catch up, they will not be able to be so stingy on limits.

I don't subscribe to the $100 a month plan, I am paying API usage pricing. Accordingly I have learned how to be much more careful with Claude Code than I think other users are. The first day I used it, Claude got stuck in a loop trying to fix a problem using the same 2 incorrect solutions again and again and burnt through $30 of API credits before I realized things were very wrong and I stopped it.

Ever since then I've been getting away with $3-$5 of usage per day, and accomplishing a lot.

Anthropic needs to find a way to incentivize developers to better use Claude Code, because when it goes off the rails, it really goes off the rails.

Claude is decent for sure, but if you are using these models for 'smarts', that is a whole separate problem. I also think honestly people are sleeping on Mistral's medium 3 and devstral medium. I know it isn't 'smart' either (none of them are), but for mundane tasks need valid code output, it is extremely good for the price.

The problem with models is that they create lots of junk content.

Industries can often get away with polluting when they're small, but once they reach planet scale salting the earth behind you is not as reliable of a tactic.

Will the other models really catch up, though? To me it seems like Anthropic's lead in programming has increased over the past year. Isn't it possible that over time, some models just become fundamentally better at some things than other models?

Prices for yesterday's frontier models will fall but there will always be the next big model. similar to how game graphics get ever better but ever more demanding at the bleeding edge.

The latest trend for the anti AI folks is just to deny it - to say that developers are imagining the benefits and then they demand hard numbers and data and when such hard numbers are not produced - they claim victory.

Worth noting that a lot of these limits are changing very rapidly (weekly if not daily) and also depend on time of day, location, account age, etc.

There's a lot you can do in terms of efficient token usage in the context of Claude Code, I wouldn't be surprised if they soon launch a Claude Code-specific model.

In my experiments, it would be enormously wasteful in token usage, doing things like re-reading all Python scripts in the current folder just to make sure all comments were up-to-date, or it re-read an R script to make sure all brackets were closed correctly. Surely that's where a good chunk of the waste comes from?

I hit the limits within an hour with just one request in CC. Not even using opus. It’ll chug away but eventually switch to the nearing limit message. It’s really quite ridiculous and not a good way to upsell to the higher plans without definitive usage numbers.

Thinking is extremely inefficient compared with the usual query in Chat.

If you think a lot, you can spend hundreds of dollars easily.

If you aren't hitting the limits you aren't writing great prompts. I can write a prompt and have it go off and work for about an hour and hit the limit. You can have it launch sub-agents, parallelize work and autonomously operate for long periods of time.

Think beyond just saying "do this one thing".

A coworker of mine claimed they've been burning $1k a week this month. Pretty wild it’s only costing the company $200 a month.

We just came out of closed alpha yesterday and have been trying to figure out how best to price, if you'd be willing to provide any feedback I'd certainly appreciate it: https://www.charlielabs.ai/pricing - Thank you!! :)

Can you clarify which tooling you are using? Is it cursor-stats?

> They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet

What do you mean? That’s totally a good reason to be pissed off at them. I’m so tired of products that launch before they have a clear path to profitability.

I can tell you how I hit it: Opus and long workflows.

I have two big workflows: plan and implement. Plan follows a detailed workflow to research an idea and produce a planning document for how to implement it. This routinely takes $10-30 in API credits to run in the background. I will then review this 200-600 line document and fix up any mistakes or remove unnecessary details.

Then implement is usually cheaper, and it will take that big planning document, make all the changes, and then make a PR in GitHub for me to review. This usually costs $5-15 in API credits.

All it takes is for me to do 3-4 of these in one 5-hour block and I will hit the rate-limit of the $100 Max plan. Setting this up made me realise just how much scaffolding you can give to Opus and it handles it like a champ. It is an unbelievably reliable model at following detailed instructions.

It is rare that I would hit the rate-limits if I am just using Claude Code interactively, unless I am using it constantly for hours at a time, which is rare. Seems like vibe coders are the main people who would hit them regularly.

> Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip?

This is my experience: at some point the AI isn't converging to a final solution and it's time to finish the rest by hand.

Are you using claude code for coding with sonnet? Just claude web use alone is indeed fairly relaxed i think.

I couldn’t even get it to do simple tasks for me this week on the max plan. It’s not just max users overloading it. It feels like they’re randomly rate limiting users.

One day my very first prompt in the morning was blocked. Super strange.

Faster overall, sure. But I am interrupt driven and typing the prompt alone is faster yet, so I do that and come back after a bit (bouncing between many open tasks), so the fact that the agent took 3x longer overall doesn’t matter, because it happens in the background. my time was just spent typing out the prompt, which was only seconds.

They have fixed capacity but want to provide a reasonable product for all. They've really struggled with defining and enforcing quotas. It seems they have issues predicting what their actual capacity is, how many users they want. Also, there is not much competition. The prices are not really anchored to anything. Hopefully it will improve.

This was with Opus? What sort of tasks were you doing? I found that very large files (2.5MB source file) can really eat up tokens. Other than that, I've never run out with my 100 EUR plan, exclusively using Opus.

Why wouldn't you assume that it implies the API rates are massively inflated? I don't do anything really but started playing around last week. I put $5 in tokens in to see how long it would last while I play around. It came out at 30min of compute or whatever dir 3hrs of playing around. So my dumb back of the envelope says $10/hr of compute means $90k per year. Sure GPUs are expensive but are they $90k year expensive? Dunno. It's not like the incremental cost of adding GPUs to the inference side are unmoored from hardware incremental costs.

A lot of people switched away from Cursor within the blink of an eye. Switching IDEs is a big deal for me - it takes a lot of effort, which is why I never switched to Cursor in the first place.

I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.

You are using the "auto-switch back to Sonnet" mode right? Try just selecting Opus without the auto-switch, probably you'll get more Opus and may not run out of it. Anthropic is just being careful because Opus eats compute and they don't want people getting disappointed. But for me it does not run out that quickly. Only when I asked it to work on a 50k+ source code file, which it had to ingest entirely in my case, is when I ran out.

Off hour usage seems to be different for sure.

Also there's likely only so much fixed compute available, and it might be getting re allcoated for other uses behind the scene from time to time as more compute arrives.

It was always gonna be the Uber approach. Cheap and great turns to expensive and mediocre when they have to turn the money spigot on.

It's definitely worth it if you're on the plans and don't hit the usage limits already. It's subjectively better based on my experience.

There was a batchmode pulled from the documentation after the first few days of the Claude Code release. Many of have been trying to be respectful with a stable 5 agent call but some people have pushed those limits much higher as it wasn’t being technically throttle until last week.

One with only manual interactions and regular context resets. I have a couple of commands I'll use regularly that have 200-500 words in them but it's almost exclusively me riding that console raw.

I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours, that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are about every four hours.

I'm not on the pro plan, but on $20/mo, I asked Claude some 20 questions on architecture yesterday and it hit my limit.

This is going to be happening with every AI service. They are all burning cash and need to dumb it down somehow. Whether that's running worse models or rate limiting.

I've seen prompts telling it to spawn an agent to review every change it makes... and they're not monitoring anything

Check out Llama 3.1 70B Instruct, which now runs on consumer hardware with 24GB VRAM using techniques like unsloth or llama.cpp's new Q4_K_M quantization - surprisingly competitive with Claude for many coding tasks.

I think model providers would love to run their models on a single GPU. The latency and throughput of GPU interconnects is orders of magnitudes worse than accessing VRAM. Cutting out the latency would make the models much more efficient to run, they wouldn't have to pay for such expensive networking. If they got to run it on consumer GPUs even better. Consumer GPUs probably cost something like 5-10x less with regards to raw compute than data center ones. New coding optimized models for single GPUs drop all the time. But it's just a really hard problem to make them good and when the large models are still in the barely good enough phase (I wasn't using agents much before Sonnet 4) it's just not realistic to get something useful locally.

We already have really strong models that run on a consumer GPU, and really strong frameworks and libraries to support them.

The issue is (1) the extra size supports extra knowledge/abilities for the model. (2) a lot of the open source models are trained in a way to not compete with the paid offerings, or lack the data set of useful models.

Specifically, it seems like the tool-use heavy “agentic” work is not being pushed to open models as aggressively as the big closed models. Presumably because that’s where the money is.

I do the same with two $200 MAX plans that I switch between when one hits the limit. I use opus exclusively though so I tend to hit the first account's limits at least once a day.

Honest question: what do you do with them? I would be so fascinated to see a video of this kind of workflow… I feel like I use LLMs as much as I can while still being productive (because the code they generate has a lot of slop) and still barely use the agentic CLIs, mostly just tab completion through windsurf, and Claude for specific questions by steering the context manually pasting the relevant stuff

lol thanks for ruining it for the rest of us. i am sure you created something groundbreaking with 4 instances of cc.

COGS == cost of goods sold?

For what it's worth, when Cursor downgraded their Claude limits in the middle of my annual subscription term, I emailed them to ask for a pro-rated refund, and it was granted. You may be able to do something similar with Claude Code.

Changing the terms of the deal midway through a subscription to make it much less valuable is a really shady business practice, and I'm not sure it's legal.

> my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines.

I dunno, from my company or boss's perspective, there are definitely days where I've seriously considered just disappearing, demanding a raise, or refusing to work after the 3rd meeting or 17th Jira ticket. And I've seen cow orkers and friends do all three of those over my career.

(Perhaps LLMs are closer to replacing human developers that anyone has realized yet?)

I guess the argument has time goes on AI will get cheaper and more efficient.

…but idk how true that, I think it’s pretty clear that these companies are using the Uber model to attract customers, and the fact that they’re already increasing prices or throttling is kind of insane.

Now say it about electricity from the wall. Just because you might not be able to use it next week doesn’t mean the productivity gains today aren’t real.

A subcontracted dev that can do that much is way more than $2k. I’ve had $800-on-AI months and it was a good deal.

Haven't you checked out Ollama, yet?

>Claude Code is not worth the time sink

there are like 15~ total pages of documentation.

There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route.

Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command.

The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too.

That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.

I've spent far too much of my life writing boilerplate and API integrations. Let Claude do it.

Comments like this remind me that there's a whole host of people out there who have _no idea_ what these tools are capable of doing to ones productivity or skill set in general.

> It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches.

Uh, no. To start - yea, boilerplate is easy. But like a sibling comment to this one said - it's also tedious and annoying, let the LLM do it. Beyond that, though, is that if you apply some curiosity and that "anyone that already knows what they are doing" level prior knowledge you can use these tools to _learn_ a great deal.

You might think your way of doing things is perfect, and the only way to do them - but I'm more of the mindset that there's a lot of ways to skins most of these cats. I'm always open to better ways to do things - patterns or approaches I know nothing about that might just be _perfect_ for what I'm trying to do. And given that I do, in general, know what I'm asking it to do, I'm able to judge whether it's approach is any good. Sometimes it's not, no big deal. Sometimes it opens my mind to something I wasn't aware of, or didn't understand or know would apply to the given scenario. Sometimes it leads me into rabbit holes of "omg, that means I could do this ... over there" and it turns into a whole ass refactor.

Claude code has broadened my capabilities, professionally, tremendously. The way it makes available "try it out and see how it works" in terms of trying multiple approaches/libraries/databases/patterns/languages and how those have many times led me to learning something new - honestly, priceless.

I can see how these tools would scare the 9-5 sit in the office and bang out boilerplate stuff, or to those who are building things that have never been done before (but even then, there's caveats, IMO, to how effective it would/could be in these cases)... but to people writing software or building things (software or otherwise) because they enjoy it or because they're financial or professional lives depend on what they're building - absolutely astonishing to me anyone who isn't embracing these tools with open arms.

With all that said. I keep the MCP servers limited to only if I need it in that session and generally if I'm needing an MCP server in an on-going basis I'm better off building a tool or custom documentation around that thing. And idk about all that agent stuff - I got lucky and held out for Claude Code, dabbled a bit with others and they're leagues behind. If I need an agent I'ma just tap on CC, for now.

Context and the ability to express what you want in a way that a human would understand is all you need. If you screw either of those up, you're gonna have a bad time.