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Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

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Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#101

Post by ibejoeb »

dinakernel wrote: post #38

This turned out to be a bug. https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2038754906715066444?s=20 One reddit user reverse engineered the binary and found that it was a cache invalidation issue. They are doing some hidden string replacement if the claude code conversation talks about billing or tokens. Looks like that invalidates the cache at that point. If that string appears anywhere in the conversation history, I think the star…

> BUG 2: every time you use --resume, your entire conversation cache rebuilds from scratch. one resume on a large conversation costs $0.15 that should cost near zero.

I use it with an api key, so I can use /cost. When I did a resume, it showed the cost from what I thought was first go. I don't think it's clear what the difference is between api key and subscription, but am I believe that simply resuming cost me $5? The UI really make it look like that was the original $5.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#102

Post by DefineOutside »

ikidd wrote: post #85
xnx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on a single entity Contrary to the popular opinion here, there are other services beyond Claude Code. These usage limits might even prompt (har har) people to notice that Gemini is cheaper and often better.

Last time I used Gemini I watched it burn tokens at three times the rate of any other models arguing with itself and it rarely produced a result. This was around Christmas or shortly after. Has that BS stopped?

It's still not uncommon for it to escape it's thinking block accidentally and be unable to end it's response, or for it to call the same tool repeatedly. I've watched it burn 50 million tokens in a loop before killing the chat.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#103

Post by canada_dry »

I hit my limit on the project I've been working on (after I let "MAX" run out and moved to "PRO") after about only 2 hours!

TIP (YMMV): I've found that moving the current code base into a new 'project' after a dozen or so turns helps as I suspect the regurgitation of the old conversations chews up tokens.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#104

Post by vintagedave »

pxtail wrote: post #53

Recently after noticing how quickly limits are consumed and reading others complaints about same issue on reddit I was wondering how much about this is real error or bug hidden somewhere and how much it's about testing what threshold of constraining limits will be tolerated without cancelling accounts. Eventually, in case of "shit hits the fan" situation it can be always dismissed by waving hands and apologizing (or…

I've run into this, and I highly doubt I am one of the more extraordinary users. I have delays between working with it, don't have many running at once, am running on smaller codebases, etc. Yet just a few minutes ago I hit a quota. In the past I did far more work with it without running into the quota.

I emailed their support a few days ago with details, concerns, a link to the twitter thread from one of their employees, and a concrete support request, which had an AI agent ('Fin') tell me:

> While our Support team is unable to manually reset or work around usage limits, you can learn about best practices here. If you’ve hit a message limit, you’ll need to wait until the reset time, or you can consider purchasing an upgraded plan (if applicable).

I replied saying that was not an appropriate answer.

You're absolutely right re the lack of transparency and accountability. On one hand, Anthropic generates good will by appearing to have a more ethical stance then OpenAI, and a better product. On the other hand, they kill it fast through extremely poor treatment of their customers.

If they have a bug, they need to resolve it: and in the meantime refund quotas. 'Unable to' - that's shocking. This is simple and reasonable. It's basic customer service. I don't know if they realise the damage their attitude is doing.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#105

Post by thisisit »

pxtail wrote: post #53

Recently after noticing how quickly limits are consumed and reading others complaints about same issue on reddit I was wondering how much about this is real error or bug hidden somewhere and how much it's about testing what threshold of constraining limits will be tolerated without cancelling accounts. Eventually, in case of "shit hits the fan" situation it can be always dismissed by waving hands and apologizing (or…

They keep running experiments like free $50 in extra use credits or 2x usage outside certain windows where inference is very slow. You can’t help but think this is all a slowly boiling the frog experiment. Experimenting how much they can charge.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#106

Post by bigbinary »

horsawlarway wrote: post #74
bigbinary wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-premise LLMs are also getting better and likely won’t stop; as costs go up with the technical improvements, I would imagine cost saving methods to also improve

I still think it's basically unavoidable that most people who might pay for api access will end up on-prem. Fixed costs, exact model pinning, outage resistant, enshittification resistant, better security, better privacy, etc... There are just so many compelling reasons to be on-prem instead of dependent on a 3rd party hoovering up all your data and prompts and selling you overpriced tokens (which eventually they MUST…

These big players don’t have as big of a moat as they like to advertise, but as long as VC wants to subsidize my agents, I’ll keep paying for the $20 plan until they inevitably cut it off

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#107

Post by kaycey2022 »

ikidd wrote: post #85
xnx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on a single entity Contrary to the popular opinion here, there are other services beyond Claude Code. These usage limits might even prompt (har har) people to notice that Gemini is cheaper and often better.

Last time I used Gemini I watched it burn tokens at three times the rate of any other models arguing with itself and it rarely produced a result. This was around Christmas or shortly after. Has that BS stopped?

No. It's still shit. It can do some well contained tasks, but it is very less usable on production codebases than gpt or claude models. Mainly because of the usage limits and the lack of good environments for us to use it on. Anthropic gets away with this because claude code, as bad as it is, is still quite functional. Gemini cli and antigravity are utter trash in comparison.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#108

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

I've found a lot of people are almost belligerently pro-Claude. They refuse to consider other providers or agents, and won't consider using any model than the latest Opus. The most common reasons I hear are 1) they don't want to use anything other than the greatest model, afraid that anything else would waste their time, 2) they believe their experience is that it's far better than anything else.

Even if you show them benchmarks that show another model equally as good if not better, they refuse to use it. My suspicion is they've convinced themselves that Opus must be the best, because of reputation and price. They might've used a different model and didn't have a good experience, making them double down.

I hope a research institution will perform an experiment. My hypothesis is that if you swapped out a couple similar state-of-the-art models, even changing the "class" of model (Sonnet Opus, GPT 5.4 Sonnet), the user won't be able to tell which is which. This would show that the experience is subjective, and that bias is informing their decision, rather than rationality.

It's like wine tasting experiments. People rate a $100 bottle of wine higher than a $10 bottle. But if they actually taste the same, you should be buying the $10 bottle. But people don't, because they believe the $100 bottle is better. In the AI case, the problem is people won't stop buying the expensive bottle, because they've convinced themselves they must use the more expensive bottle.

Re: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

#110

Post by dmd »

bensyverson wrote: post #5
master_crab wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tool calls (particularly fetching for context) eats the context window heavily. I explicitly send MCP calls to sub agents because they are so “wordy”.

Everyone who has not hit this bug thinks it’s user error… It’s not. It happened to me a few days ago, and the speed at which I tore through my 5 hour usage cap was easily 10x faster than normal. Also: sub agents do not get you free usage. They just protect your main context window.

I'm on Max. This morning, just to test, before doing anything else whatsoever, I was at 0%, and I typed 'test one two three' into CC.

That put me at 12%.

I have no MCPs except the built in claude-in-chrome.

This is clearly a bug.

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