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Excessive token usage in Claude Code

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Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#11

Post by behnamoh »

thurn wrote: post #9

There's a real hobbyist vs professional distinction with Claude Code. For professionals, including when I use it at work, we're generally super happy to have Claude spawn as many subagents as possible and burn more tokens to get a better result. Hobbyist users on a $20/month plan, though, generally want more conservative behavior. It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.

I don't think that's what this issue is talking about. I have the Max $200/mo plan and have noticed starting yesterday that my quota drains much much faster, to the point I'm about to use the $50 credit Anthropic gave away to everyone.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#12

Post by xwowsersx »

thurn wrote: post #9

There's a real hobbyist vs professional distinction with Claude Code. For professionals, including when I use it at work, we're generally super happy to have Claude spawn as many subagents as possible and burn more tokens to get a better result. Hobbyist users on a $20/month plan, though, generally want more conservative behavior. It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.

True enough. But to be clear, that's a separate issue from what users are reporting here.

Both hobbyists and professionals are understandably frustrated that tokens are being consumed quickly without justification, or at least in ways that seem entirely avoidable.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#14

Post by visarga »

sparin9 wrote: post #4

The recent VS Code extension update has noticeably degraded the experience. The agent now becomes unresponsive at times and needs a reload, which really breaks flow. More frustratingly, the context limit seems to fill up much faster on the same project that was working fine just days ago. Nothing major changed on my side, so this feels like a backend or token allocation shift.

That agent has a bug that quotes from open files all the time, consuming tokens.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#16

Post by nurettin »

pdntspa wrote: post #13

I have MAX and have been using Opus 4.6 heavily for my day job which is 100% agentic programming, and my usage numbers have not changed meaningfully since Opus 4.6 came out

Same here. Both $20 and $100 finished fast. Never hit a limit after dishing out the $200. Explore() sometimes prints 90k token usage which scares me, but so far it is consequence free.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#18

Post by bastard_op »

My quality of usage with Claude has degraded heavily since last week of December that I've stopped using Claude entirely now and mostly found a Codex suitable, and goes much further. I was maxing out usage on Claude Max 5x in absurd ways once I started using MCP features heavily, and even when not found myself constantly hitting limits through January.

The final nail was them offering a $50 credit toward overage use that within a half hour of enabling maxed out and began digging into. It's become almost predatory now, and I have no way to quantify the actual usage I'm getting from it other than it burns now at an alarming rate.

Since I've stopped using Claude, I ultimately landed on Codex where for my usage, where I'm easily getting 4x less quota usage from it than Claude for the same period of heavy use. I keep it as a backup now if Codex gets stuck on something, but I'm annoyed enough to stop paying all together.

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#19

Post by selridge »

behnamoh wrote: post #10
selridge wrote: post #2

This is just a github issue with a vague complaint.

what kind of evidence would you expect? it's not like everyone has a claude code monitor with detailed logs.

Why is it on hacker news?

That’s the implied question. It’s an issue on a piece of software. There’s more than 10,000 of them.

Why is it news?

Re: Excessive token usage in Claude Code

#20

Post by pdntspa »

nurettin wrote: post #16
pdntspa wrote: post #13

I have MAX and have been using Opus 4.6 heavily for my day job which is 100% agentic programming, and my usage numbers have not changed meaningfully since Opus 4.6 came out

Same here. Both $20 and $100 finished fast. Never hit a limit after dishing out the $200. Explore() sometimes prints 90k token usage which scares me, but so far it is consequence free.

At 8 hours a day 5 days a week I never hit the limit on my $100 MAX plan. People must be running crazy autonomous workflows or something because I'm nowhere near hitting my limit, ever
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