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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'

#171
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you get used to using claude as an abstraction layer you start getting pretty reckless with it. My organization has the concept of "premium models" where our limits reset every month. I hit my limit pretty quickly last month because I was burning tokens doing things that would have been a simple bash loop in the past - all because I was used to interfacing with Claude at the chat layer for all my automation need…

This is a real danger that I think a lot of people will run into as prices go up more and more in the future. Completely outside of the productivity debate, offloading cognitive tasks to LLMs leaves you less practiced in them and less ready to do them when the LLM isn't available. When you have to delegate only certain tasks to the LLM for financial reasons, you may find yourself very frustrated.

Seriously, who isnt planning a local first strategy?

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

#172

It seems like Anthropic is constantly changing the rules and pulling out rugs, and always entirely by surprise. I’m not sure if they’re incompetent or just careless, but I stopped paying them because of this a while ago, and my days are much more interesting and enjoyable using my own brain instead.

Theyrr a business abd tgeyre burning cash. Their goal is to find profit and that typical grades towards whales.

We have decades that say this. Few businesses survive by low margins on wide audiences.

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

#173

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.

Readimg through this thread, it seems likely is a KV cache "bug". Theyre likely doing too many evictions of the LLM cache so the context is being reloaded to often.

Its a "bug" because its probably an intended effect of capturing the costs of compute but surfacing a fact that they oversold compute to a situations where they cant keep the KV cache hot and now its thrashing.

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

#174

I'm guessing their newer models are taking way more compute than they can afford to give away. The biggest challenge of AI will eventually be, how to bring down how much compute a powerful model takes. I hope Claude puts more emphasis into making Haiku and Sonnet better, when I use them via JetBrains AI it feels like only Opus is good enough, for whatever odd reason.

I get the same. Work has shifted to being agentic first - and whenever I use anything other than Claude Opus it seems that the model easily gets lost spinning its wheels on even the simplest query - especially with some of our more complex codebases, whereas Opus manages to not only reason adequately about the codebase, but also can produce decent quality code/tests in fairly short order. Oddly though, when using at…

Agents dont solvd compute, they solve context pollutuon.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a horrid glimpse in the future. I hope we won't get there and we all collectively fight back with our wallets.

It's going to get much worse. We're soon going to have enough data and compute (and are losing enough online privacy) to allow every company to apply personalized pricing down to the individual. My local restaurant is going to know that I am willing to buy a burger for at most $4.57 and my neighbor is only willing to pay $2.91 for it, and they will have the ability to charge us individually. Every business is going t…

Then your neighbor can charge you up to $1.65 to buy a burger on your behalf and you still get it cheaper.

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

#176
The way Anthropic prices its services is honestly dubious at best. You have no way to know what the real limits are, nor to verify what was actually consumed. For most people it's ok because it's likely heavily subsidized, however this won't last forever...

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

#177
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…

It is also interesting to observe that your most valuable accounts in this kind of pricing model are the ones that are least used and therefore are not confronted by the limits. Heavy users canceling their accounts in frustration is a win for Anthropic not a punishment, at least a short term.

I suspect casual users are MUCH more likely to either cancel their account or switch providers on a whim.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a horrid glimpse in the future. I hope we won't get there and we all collectively fight back with our wallets.

It's going to get much worse. We're soon going to have enough data and compute (and are losing enough online privacy) to allow every company to apply personalized pricing down to the individual. My local restaurant is going to know that I am willing to buy a burger for at most $4.57 and my neighbor is only willing to pay $2.91 for it, and they will have the ability to charge us individually. Every business is going t…

I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made that this is discriminatory. Certainly it’s not something I would tolerate as a consumer. I suspect there will be heavy pressure to regulate this practice out of existence if it catches on.

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

#179
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't use local llms. it's mostly the closed source subscriptions that are not private, it really is a choice. there are many cloud providers of zero data retention llm APIs, and even cryptographic attestation. they are not throttled, you can get an agreed rate limit.

Would you mind naming some of your favorite providers?

API: fireworks

Fast: inception labs or cerebras

Confidential: tinfoil.sh, phala

TTS/STT: groq

Routers: vercel (or openrouter if they don't have the model).

Search: unsolved, just can't get zdr, local hosted.

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

#180

The only way AI will be profitable to companies like Anthropic or OpenAI is to make the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. Whether the company pays for it, or they pay for it themselves, it will need to be paid. There's no other way that these c…

> the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. I routinely match or beat Claude with regards to speed, I often race it to the solution because Claude just takes so long to produce a usable result. Staying competitive doesn't mean only paying an AI for…

You must not be using it right because where I work, a Big Tech company, it's been transformational. Things that would take me a day to code takes minutes. I can't coded since last year. I can see why software engineering as a career is a dead end job now, I spend most of my time testing and code reviewing instead of coding.
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