Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw

> People don't pay that much for occasional usage and many/most people will organise themselves to use all or most of their weekly allowance when the expense is in that ballpark.

I don't think that's accurate for professional users. Personal users, especially those for whom $200/m is a significant cost, will definitely try to get the most out of it.

I know several $200/m user (I'm on the $100 personally), and they've all had the same experience I had when first upgrading to the max package: initially you try to use it as much as you can and feel like you need to keep it busy. But that goes away after a few days and you use it when you have need. The primary point of the max tiers for my peers is to not hit limits during their work if they occasionally use it intensively because it's disrupting to have to wait for X hours to continue.

If you get a benefit from using it, and you bill at $200 an hour, and you work 160+ hours a month, the $200 monthly cost doesn't register as a significant cost and you won't make it determine your usage patterns. I'm sure that'd be different if VC money goes away and it turns out the true price would need to be closer to $5k, but at this point it's similar to your ISP for fiber costing $80 a month. You enjoy the speed for a few days, but then it becomes the new normal.

Have you tried switching to smaller models like GLM-4.5-air for Openclaw? I’m thinking you’d consume way less of the hourly quota. Often times, the smaller models are decent enough when the task is not complex.

My code base is two monorepos 10M+ lines. I have the same experience as you - run 3-6 agents with remote devcontainers and tmux and rarely break the 75% usage, never had the weekly limit stop me.

My observations are these things impact both quality and token consumption a lot.

  - Architecture matters really- how messy code is and how poorly things are organized makes a big difference
 
  - how context window is managed especially now with default 1M window.
   
  - How many MCP servers are used. MCP burn a lot, CLI tools are easy , quicker and good ones don't even need any additional harness like skills etc, just prompt to suggest using them.

  - Using the right tool matters a lot 

  - What can be done with traditional deterministic tools have to be done that way with agent controlling (or even building) the tool not doing the tool's work with tokens. 

  - for large refactors codemod tools AST parsers etc are better than having the agent parse and modify every module/file or inefficiently navigate the codebase with grep and sed. 
    

  - How much prep work/planning is put in before the agents starts writing code. Earlier corrections are cheaper than later after code is generated

Typically my starting prompts for the plan phase are 1-2 pages worth and take 30-60m to even put in the cli text box. With that, first I would generate detailed ADRs, documentation and breakdown issues in the ticketing system using the agent, review and correct the plan several times before attempting to have a single line written.

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It is no different as we would do with a human, typing the lines of code was always easy part once you know what you want exactly.

It feels faster to bypass the thinking phase and offload to agent entirely to either stumble around and getting low res feedback or worse just wing it, either way is just adding a lot of debt and things slow down quickly .

It seems unclear if this covers all Claude -p uses or just the ones they can identify as misuse/third party. Did they speak on this anywhere?

I use Claude -p for a lot if not most of my coding workflows

>>I take your point, the way I used “abuse” there probably carries more charge than I’d meant it to.

Fair enough.

>> But that’s not what the subscription product is for.

This was the point I was trying to make - I pay for XX tokens/usage. But somehow using them all is 'taking advantage' ?

BTW - I'm actually not complaining about the limits - I probably only use half my tokens on average week. I'm just annoyed at having to jump thru hoops if I want to try something 'API' oriented. For me, AI is still the new shiny - I try all different sorts of things learning/playing. There was an article posted today about writing agent harnesses. That could be interesting - maybe I want to try my hand at it. But then I've got to mess around/pay extra to _try_ something I that my subscription already easily covers.

[added:] >>to take on personal-scale projects, to allow them to learn without having to understand the tool’s economics upfront. To play without fear of expensive mistakes.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do - however, as soon as you want to try anything 'API' oriented, the 'fear of expensive mistakes' comes right back.