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Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

techcrunch.com

71–80 of 274 posts

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

#71

The funny thing is Claude 4.0 isn't even that 'smart' from a raw intelligence perspective compared to the other flagship models. 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. Google has the advantage here given they're running on their own silicon; can optimize for it; and have nearly unlimited cas…

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?

Uber operated at a loss for 9 years. They're now a profitable, market-winning business.

Amazon operated at a loss for 9 years, and barely turned a profit for over a decade longer than that. They're now one of the greatest businesses of all time.

Spotify operated at a loss for 17 years until becoming profitable. Tesla operated at a loss for 17 years before turning a profit. Palantir operated at a loss for 20 years before turning a profit.

And this was before the real age of Big Tech. Google has more cashflows they can burn than any of these companies ever raised, combined.

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

#72

The funny thing is Claude 4.0 isn't even that 'smart' from a raw intelligence perspective compared to the other flagship models. 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. Google has the advantage here given they're running on their own silicon; can optimize for it; and have nearly unlimited cas…

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?

I think people also expect models to be optimised over time. For example, the 5x drop in cost of o3 was probably due to some optimisation on OpenAI's end (although I'm sure they had business reasons for dropping the price as well).

Small models have also been improving steadily in ability, so it is feasible that a task that needs Claude Opus today could be done by Sonnet in a year's time. This trend of model "efficiency" will add on top of compute getting cheaper.

Although, that efficiency would probably be quickly eaten up by increased appetites for higher performance, bigger, models.

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

#73
post #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.

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!! :)

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

#74
“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.”

This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.

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

#75

“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.” This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.

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.

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

#77
post #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 incredib…

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".

How is that a great prompt having it run for an hour without your input? Sounds like it’s just generating wasteful output.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't there a stat somewhere that a good o3-pro deep research was ~$3500, per question?

I highly doubt that was ever the case in the UI version. You're probably thinking of when they benchmarked o3-high on ARC-AGI and it cost $3440 per question.

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

#79
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crikey. Now I get the business model: I hire someone for say £5K/mo. They then spend $200/mo or is it a $1000/wk on Claude or whatevs. Profit!

The model is "outspend others until they're bankrupt". Known as the Uber model or Amazon vs Diapers.com

> Amazon vs Diapers.com

To be fair that was a little different; Amazon wanted to buy the parent company of Diapers.com so sold at a loss to tank the value of the company so they could buy it cheap.

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

#80
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I focus more on reading code & prompting claude to write code for me at a high level. I also experiment a lot. I don't write code anymore by hand except in very rare cases. I ask claude for questions about the code to build understanding. I have it produce documentation, which is then consumed into other prompts. Often, claude code will need several minutes on a task so I start another task. My coding throughput on a…

Can you share some code? I work with a guy like this who claims this level of output but in reality he consumes massive amounts of other devs time in PR review.

Are you doing a lot of broad throwaway tasks? I’ve had similar feelings when writing custom code for my editor, one off scripts, etc but it’s nothing I would ever put my professional reputation behind.

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