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Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

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Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#4
I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a toy side project.

I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I never did.

To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it every single day.

My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up because it’s starting to overwhelm their capacity.

I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#5
post #2

Id like to hear about the tools and use cases that lead people to hit these limits. How many sub-agents are they spawning? How are they monitoring them?

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.

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#6
post #2

Id like to hear about the tools and use cases that lead people to hit these limits. How many sub-agents are they spawning? How are they monitoring them?

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.

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#7
They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent.

I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing returned by the API doesn't make any sense.

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#8
Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. 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. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#9
I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet. But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in store.

I suspected that something like this might happen, where the demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning models because I find I get more work done and the quality is good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long. Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token reducing step (and maybe this already exists).

Re: Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

#10

Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. 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. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.

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