[smcleod]

Considering all the problems they've been having with over-charging Claude Code users over the past few weeks it's the very least they could do. Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work, while Anthropic have no support or contact mechanism for users that they respond to.

[impulser_]

"Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work"

This has not been my experience at all. The only time I even got close to this is multiple long sessions that had multiple compacts.

The key is if you hit compact, start a new session.

[namelosw]

This hasn't been my experience either. I personally find the max plan is very generous for day-to-day usage. And I don't even use compact manually.

However, when I tried out the SuperPower skill and had multiple agents working on several projects at the same time, it did hit the 5-hour usage limit. But SuperPower hasn't been very useful for me and wastes a lot of tokens. When you want to trade longer running time for high token consumption, you only get a marginal increase in performance.

So people, if you are finding yourself using up tokens too quickly, you probably want to check your skills or MCPs etc.

[mcast]

It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two. Meanwhile, I've had ample usage testing out Codex on the basic $20 ChatGPT Plus plan without a problem.

As for Anthropic's $100 Max subscription, it's almost always better to start new sessions for tasks since a long conversation will burn your 5-hour usage limit with just a few prompts (assuming they read many files). It's also best to start planning first with Claude, providing line numbers and exact file paths prior, and drilling down the requirements before you start any implementation.

[daliusd]

I wonder what do you mean by "if you hit compact". Claude Code does not show used tokens.

[darqis]

It's my experience however.

[coffeefirst]

Wait, if it burns through a $200/mo allotment that fast, what are all these people who “barely wrote code anymore” doing?

[input_sh]

You hit a vague, never-quite-explained 5h window limit that has nothing to do with what you're doing, but with what every user is doing together. It's totally not downtime, you're just "using it too much" and they're telling you to fuck off until the overall usage slows down.

The order of priority is: everyone using the API (you don't want to calculate the price) → everyone on a $200/month plan → everyone on a $20/month plan → every free user.

[smcleod]

It hasn't always done this, it's a relatively recent problem in the last 1-4 weeks (roughly). (note: I'm on the $160AUD/mo plan, so I think that's $100USD).

[heavyset_go]

> what are all these people who “barely wrote code anymore” doing?

Writing self-serving LinkedIn productivity porn

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

“Light work” is a pretty bold statement my dude. I run max for 8+ hour coding sessions with 3-4 windows where I’m babysitting and watching the thing and I never even get session warnings. The only time I bump up against limits is on token hungry tasks like reverse engineering 3M+ LOC codebases or 5-6 agents generating unit tests in parallel. Something tells me that what you call “light work” is not remotely the same as what I consider “light work”

[mercutio2]

It hadn’t occurred to me this was a billing bug.

That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.

Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?

I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back

[smcleod]

Yeah I think it's either a billing bug, or some sort of inbuilt background sub-agent loop gone wild inside Claude Code, if you have a look at recent issues on the Github relating to 'limits', 'usage', 'tokens' you'll see a lot of discussion about it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=sort%3Aup...

[klipklop]

Yeah I can work for minutes in the $20 Claude plan but potentially hours with Codex. It’s just not worth bothering.

[cantalopes]

exactly my experience. i am on pro subscription and when coding with claude in console i can only do about 30 min of work before i have to wait for 4 hours. i actually code more by chatting with claude via poe.com than using the subscription that i have

[brulard]

pro is the $20, right? It runs out quickly, especially using opus. But what do you expect for that kind of money? For serious work at least Max $100 is needed.

[alpineman]

Wasn't customer service going to be one of the first things to be fully automated by AI? :D

[chaostheory]

Experienced this with the $20 sub, but not with Max (yet).

[subscribed]

Yeah, I find very capable but won't paying them exactly because they cheat /steal like this.