Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

techcrunch.com

201–210 of 274 posts

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have changed hands through shitty drag-and-drop UIs, wordpress ecommerce plugins, and dreamweaver sites, lets not forget the code is there to serve a business purpose at the end of the day. Code quality is an implementation detail that may matter less over time as rewrites get easier. I love me some beatiful hand-written clean code, but clean code is not the true goal.

> clean code is not the true goal Its not, but it does matter. LLMs, being next word guessers, perform differently with different inputs. Its not hard to imagine a feedback loop of bad code generating worse code and good code generating more good code. My ability to get good responses from LLMs has been tied to me writing better code, docstrings, and using autoformatters.

I don't think that feedback loop is really a loop because code that doesn't actually do its job doesn't grow in popularity for long. We already have a great source of selection pressure to take care of shitty products that don't function: users and their $.

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

#203
post #103

> 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.

Product Market Fit? Yes, seems they have.

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

#204
post #82

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.

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.

You need to run the cost/benefit analysis here: if I had avoided Claude Code, all that would have happened is I would have written much less code.

What's the cost between never using Claude, and using it and getting these lower limits? In the end, I'm left with no Claude in both situations, which leaves me better off for having used it (I wrote more code when Claude worked).

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

#205
post #135
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long can AI be subsidized in the name of growth? They need to radically increase the price. If I replace a $150k yr employee should I pay $200 a month or $2,000 a month. $200 is too cheap.

> If I replace a $150k yr employee

Based on my experience with Claude Code (which is relatively good TBH), I'd say good luck with that.

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

#206
post #64

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect. Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.

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

I really don't like how religious the debate about AI has gotten here. "I feel sorry for these vibe coders" is something you tell yourself to feel superior to people who use AI.

Don't feel sorry for me, I've used vibe coding to create many things, and I still know how to program, so I'll live if it goes away.

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

#207
post #103

> 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.

Product Market Fit? Yes, seems they have.

Yes. That kind of reaction I quoted is telling.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most inference runs at 40%+ margin

Is this like saying a gym runs at 40%+ margin because 80% of users don't really use it heavily or forget they even had a subscription? Would be interested to see the breakdown of that number.

TL;DR: their subscriptions have an extra built-in margin closer to 70%, because the entry price, target audience and clever choice of rate limiting period, all keep utilization low.

----

In this case I'd imagine it's more of an assumption that almost all such subscriptions will have less than 33% utilization, and excepting few outliers, even the heaviest users won't exceed 60-70% utilization on average.

"33% or less" is, of course, people using a CC subscription only at work. Take an idealized case - using CC only during regular working hours, no overtime: then, even if you use it to the limit all the time, you only use it for 1⁄3 of the day (8h), and 5 days a week - the expected utilization in this scenario is 8/24 × 5/7 = 24%. So you're paying a $200 subscription, but actually getting at most $50 of usage out of it.

Now, throw in a rate limit that refreshes in periods of 5 hours - a value I believe was carefully chosen to achieve this very effect - and the maximum utilization possible (maxing out limit, waiting for refresh, and maxing out again, in under 8 hours wall-clock time), is still 10 hours equivalent, so 10/24 × 5/7 = 30%. If you just plan to use CC to the first limit and then take meetings for the rest of the day, your max utilization drops to 15%.

Of course people do overtime, use same subscription for personal stuff after work and on weekends, or just run a business, etc. -- but they also need to eat and sleep, so interactively, you'd still expect them to stay below 75% (83% if counting in 5-hour blocks) total utilization.

Sharing subscriptions doesn't affect these calculations much - two people maxing out a single subscription is, from the provider side, strictly not greater than two subscriptions with 50% utilization. The math will stop working once a significant fraction of users figure out non-interactive workflows, that run CC 24/7. We'll get there eventually, but we're not there yet. Until then, Anthropic is happy we're all paying $200/month but only getting $50 or less of service out of it.

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

#209
post #135
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long can AI be subsidized in the name of growth? They need to radically increase the price. If I replace a $150k yr employee should I pay $200 a month or $2,000 a month. $200 is too cheap.

$200 a month with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 won't let you replace a $12.5k / month employee - but it's cheap enough that everyone, including you and even your employees, will want to see how much utility they can squeeze out of it.

This is a price to get people hooked up, yes, but also to get them to explore all kinds of weird tricks and wacky workflows, especially ones that are prohibitively costly when billed per token. In some sense, this is crowdsourcing R&D - and then when Opus 7 or whatever comes along to take advantage of best practices people worked out, and that turns out to be good enough to replace your $150k/yr / $12.5k/mo employee - then they'll jack up prices to $10k/month or whatever.

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

#210
I think that Cursor is doing the same. A couple of weeks ago they removed the 500 prime model requests limit per month in the $20 plan, it seemed like this was going to be good for users, in fact it's worse, my impression is that now the limit is effectively much lower, and you can't check anymore in your account's dashboard how many of these requests you've made over the last month.
Post reply on HN