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What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

minimaxir.com

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Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#61

Post by InsideOutSanta »

margalabargala wrote: post #41
dlenski wrote: post #6

This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs. He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models. You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a ca…

> He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models. This one just makes sense though. If you have a body of work to do that you know will exceed your 5 hour limit, then sending a message 3 hours before you start so that the reset happens in the middle enables you to do a task in one sitting.

Yeah, I subjectively definitely feel like using LLMs has aspects of gambling. It's 100% a Skinner box where I push a button with a high chance of a substantial reward. It's fun and addictive.

But setting an automatic prompt in the morning so limits are more sensible during the day and allow continuous work is just common sense.

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#62

Post by rcxdude »

chaps wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said tricks improve the output in an objective measurable manner, not theoretical, vibes, or gambler's fallacy. (blog post forthcoming on that) I've been researching LLM prompt optimization for longer than ChatGPT has existed; I was successfully optimizing the output of GPT-2 back in 2019.

Respectfully, a lot of what you're saying in this thread sounds a lot like the lies that gamblers tell themselves. Saying this as someone with a strong tendency towards addictions. Some of these things are only possible to really see in hindsight. Yes, you've been working on these things for a while, but these systems are notably different in their capacity and strings they pull on us. Be well, please.

A lot of this really seems to be pattern matching on superficial similarities when the meat of the issue is probably the more important one. I think for LLM usage to be compared to gambling, it has to be a) universally negative-sum in the long run, and b) extremely addictive. a) seems very unlikely to be true, even if it is sometimes negative. b) seems to be the case for some subset of programmers, but again I would not assume this just because someone uses some statements that are sometimes uttered falsely by gamblers (the siren song of those statements being that if they were true, the gambling would be a good thing. That means the truth of those statements matters and should not be assumed to be false like they are more obviously so for gambling).

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#63

Post by epitrochoid413 »

minimaxir wrote: post #12
dlenski wrote: post #6

This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs. He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models. You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a ca…

Gambling addition implies dopamine hits from irregular and uncertain outcomes: as I note in the post, I don't get a dopamine hit from running agents. I know people say "LLMs are just gambling because they're next-token-maximizers that can't write real code" but with GPT 5.6 Sol (and a few new tricks I discovered) the outputs are much less irregular and uncertain. It's just typical engineering. "Not wanting to waste m…

Yes I agree with you here.

LLMs tend to be a bit random, but are still more consistent and predictable than slot-machines. Also, gambling tends to exert lower effort and higher dopamine hits than vibe-coding, making it way more addictive.

But LLMs are still addictive to some extent. Maybe its around the same level as other behavioral addictions like food, social media, or gaming addictions.

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#64

Post by wronex »

I can see three reasons:

1. They have left over capacity that will go unused otherwise. Most users have hit their limits before the end of the week. Might as well get some use out of the servers.

2. A backend change made migrating usage tracking hard, inaccurate, or impossible.

3. A usage tracking issue meant the usage wasn’t accurate anyway and they needed a reset to save face / avoid contract breach.

The addiction or marketing strategy seems too clever. Why explain something with cleverness that can be explained by laziness or stupidity.

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#65

Post by dathinab »

putting aside the possibility of very badly implemented token limiting doing requiring our accidentally just doing a reset for whatever reason

we (industry) have reached the point where questions about productivity gain, use-cost analysis and similar get asked increasingly more often

by resetting tokens they are silently decreasing the cost and increasing the use (hit limit ==usefulness stops until end of period) they are effectively fudging any "simple" internal company studies in their favor leading to a potentially pretty bad surprise if this isn't noticed by the assessing personal

An alternative is that they bought to many GPU resources in relationship to actual demand and they still need to show that they are "highly used".

Either its is appreciated for anyone benefiting from it but fishy as which company which doesn't do something fishy gives out rabbats to already paying users without turning it into a advertisement/PR benefit???

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#67

Post by somewhereoutth »

rcxdude wrote: post #62
chaps wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, a lot of what you're saying in this thread sounds a lot like the lies that gamblers tell themselves. Saying this as someone with a strong tendency towards addictions. Some of these things are only possible to really see in hindsight. Yes, you've been working on these things for a while, but these systems are notably different in their capacity and strings they pull on us. Be well, please.

A lot of this really seems to be pattern matching on superficial similarities when the meat of the issue is probably the more important one. I think for LLM usage to be compared to gambling, it has to be a) universally negative-sum in the long run, and b) extremely addictive. a) seems very unlikely to be true, even if it is sometimes negative. b) seems to be the case for some subset of programmers, but again I would…

the key comparison is variable reward.

That 'triggers a surge of dopamine and creates highly addictive habits' [thanks Gemini!]

LLM use for code generation does exactly that, sometimes it works amazingly, sometimes it fails inexplicably. Whether it is negative sum or not doesn't really matter. Indeed it may well prove to be negative sum, especially if we step back a bit and consider the business benefit of the code produced, not just lines of code or even features produced.

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#68

Post by SyneRyder »

sadfgknerknksdf wrote: post #56

It's a weird thing to optimize for. If you care about availability for work you can just pay more where it feels limitless and never look at the limits. I think a lot of people have a tendency to want to minmax as a "game". I also occasionally have the urge to do it but then realize it's a means to an end, not the end itself. I would feel good having maximised usage even if it wasn't productive usage which is irratio…

> If you care about availability for work you can just pay more where it feels limitless and never look at the limits...

Depending on your work, it doesn't feel limitless - I've just upgraded to a $200 plan and I'm starting to see where I will even hit the edges of that, especially once resets and special offers start tapering off. But with a single AI question often costing $75 in API costs, I'm not at a point where I can just switch to API and not care about cost at all.

That means I need to carefully time the work to make sure I'm squeezing what I can into the 5 hour windows. Feels a bit like the days of mainframes and time slicing, when you had to book an allotted time for your workload to run.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/AcademicComputing/text/earlyt...

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#69

Post by theplumber »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #60
adamsmark wrote: post #4

My guess is they are getting folks used to the idea of: 1. The end of unlimited token subsidization and a new status quo of metered usage limits. 2. Adding to the above, self-initiated usage limit resets give you some control and again help lessen the sting of the end of subsidization. Right now though, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are in open MAU war ahead of their respective IPOs and that might be a bigger factor.

My impression is that, particularly on Anthropic's side, their confusing approach to quota limits is an intentional attempt to make the actual limits or offerings more opaque. This will make it easier to limit quota without officially limiting quota, because the current real-world quota is a result of bonus offerings, limited-time access, and random resets. So it's not that "limits went down"; it's that "the bonus of…

In reality their approach creates only friction and frustration and forces users to other competing products(I.e Kimi K3). Once they stop subsidising the prices the users will go away to cheaper models. I could bet my own max plans.

Re: What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?

#70

Post by rcxdude »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #67
rcxdude wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this really seems to be pattern matching on superficial similarities when the meat of the issue is probably the more important one. I think for LLM usage to be compared to gambling, it has to be a) universally negative-sum in the long run, and b) extremely addictive. a) seems very unlikely to be true, even if it is sometimes negative. b) seems to be the case for some subset of programmers, but again I would…

the key comparison is variable reward . That 'triggers a surge of dopamine and creates highly addictive habits' [thanks Gemini!] LLM use for code generation does exactly that, sometimes it works amazingly, sometimes it fails inexplicably. Whether it is negative sum or not doesn't really matter. Indeed it may well prove to be negative sum, especially if we step back a bit and consider the business benefit of the code…

I think whether it's negative sum or not matters quite a lot, really. The variability of the outcome is a thing that might create some addictive components, but it matters a lot whether it's something with positive effects with some potential negative effects that may need to be managed, or whether it's the same as gambling, and I think it's extremely unlikely that it is the same as gambling.
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