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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

#101

Post by MystK »

dawnerd wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: 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…

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.

Use `npx ccusage` if you're interested in how much it would have costed if you paid by API usage.

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

#102

Post by sothatsit »

vineyardmike wrote: post #99
sothatsit wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This is very interesting as a workflow. How “big” are the asks you’re giving Claude? Can you give an example of the type of question you’d ask it to implement where it requires a discrete planning document that long? Whenever I use it, I typically do much smaller asks, eg “add a button here”, “make that button trigger a refresh with a filter of such state…”

The best results I get are for things like writing a new database migration and plumbing the data through to an API endpoint. That touches a lot of the codebase, but is not particularly complicated, so this process works quite well for that. Especially because it is easy for me to review.

I have also used this for creating new UI components or admin pages. One thing I have noticed is that the planning step is pretty good at searching through existing UI components to follow their patterns to maintain consistency. If I just asked Claude to make the change straight away, it often won't follow the patterns of our codebase.

But for UI components, adding new pages, or things like that, it is usually more useful just as a starting point and I will often need to go in and tweak things from there. But often it is a pretty good starting point. And if it's not, I can just discard the changes anyway.

I find this is not worth it for very small tasks though, like adding a simple button or making a small behaviour change to a UI component. It will usually overcomplicate these small tasks and add in big testing rigs or performance optimisations, or other irrelevant concerns. It is like it doesn't want to produce a very short plan. So, for things like this I will use Claude interactively, or just make the change manually. Honestly, even if it did do a good job at these small tasks, it would still seem like overkill.

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

#103

Post by hboon »

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. “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.”

PMF.

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

#104

Post by ChadMoran »

stogot wrote: post #77
ChadMoran wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who said it was writing code for an hour? Solving complex problems by problem solving, writing SQL, querying data, analyzing data. formulating plans.

What do you do for hours?

If all you're thinking about is code output, you're thinking too small.

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

#105

Post by ChadMoran »

ChadMoran wrote: post #104
stogot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who said it was writing code for an hour? Solving complex problems by problem solving, writing SQL, querying data, analyzing data. formulating plans. What do you do for hours? If all you're thinking about is code output, you're thinking too small.

You should really read this.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4

It was given a task and it solved a problem by operating for 7 hours straight.

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

#106

Post by deadbabe »

Does anyone not realize they are just using the typical drug dealer type business model? I used to do cocaine and it was a similar vibe.

They will turn you into an AI junkie who no longer has motivation to do anything difficult on your own (despite having the skills and knowing how), and then, they will dramatically cut your usage limit and say you’ll need to pay more to use their AI.

And you will gladly pay more, because hey you are getting paid a lot and it’s only a few hundred extra. And look at all the time you save!

Soon you’re paying $2k a month on AI.

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

#108

Post by r0fl »

neom wrote: post #73
buremba wrote: 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!! :)

You are charging $2500 a month!?

I’ll assuming this is real and not trolling. Who are the customers? What kind of people spend that much? I know people using $200-300 models but this is 10x that!

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

#109

Post by Syzygies »

sothatsit wrote: post #81
Ataraxic wrote: post #40

I need to see a video of what people are doing to hit the max limits regularly. I find sonnet really useful for coding but I never even hit basic limits. at $20/mo. Writing specs, coming up with documentation, doing wrote tasks for which many examples exist in the database. Iterate on particular services etc. Are these max users having it write the whole codebase w/ rewrites? Isn't it often just faster to fix small t…

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 i…

Yup. I'm on a side project trying to port the 1980's computer algebra system Macaulay I coauthored from 32-bit K&R C to 64-bit C23.

K&R C is underspecified. And anyone who whines about AI code quality? Hold my beer, look at our 1980's source.

I routinely have a task manager feed eight parallel Claude Code Opus 4 sessions their next source file to study for a specific purpose, to get through all 57 faster. That will hit my $200 Max limit, reliably.

Of course I should just wait a year, and AI will read the code base all at once. People _talk_ like it does now. It doesn't. Filtering information is THE critical issue for managing AI in 2025.

The most useful tool I've written to support this effort is a tmux interface, so AI and I can debug together two terminal sessions at once: The old 32-bit code running on a Linode instance, and the new 64-bit code running locally on macOS. I wasn't happy with how the tools for this worked, that I could find online. It blows my mind to watch Opus 4 debug.

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

#110

Post by willhslade »

pembrook wrote: post #87
klik99 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren’t good comparisons. Uber operated at a loss to destroy competition and raised prices after they did that. Amazon (the retailer) did the same and leveraged their position to enter new more lucrative markets. Dunno about Spotify, but Tesla and palantir both secured lucrative contracts and subsidies. Anthropic is against companies with deeper pockets and can’t spend to destroy competition, their current busin…

They are good comparisons. All startups go against incumbents/competitors with deeper pockets. Re: Anthropic specifically, I tend to agree, hence why I'm saying the deeper pockets (eg. Google, Amazon, etc) are perfectly positioned to win here. However, big companies have a way of consistently missing the future due to internal incentive issues. Google is deathly afraid of cannibalizing their existing businesses. Plus…

Haven't they already cannibalized search? It really sucks now.
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