Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected' • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by leptons » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 12:16 AM UTC

reenorap wrote: post #216

leptons wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because I can match or beat Claude at the tasks I give it, you think I'm somehow using it wrong? Maybe you don't recognize someone with real skill and 30+ years of experience? I don't need Claude, but I'm using it. Sometimes it succeeds at simple tasks, but it's out of its depth for anything complex, and after enough iterations on one task, entropy takes hold. Maybe your coding career was a dead end job, but mine…

I also have 30+ years of experience. If you are "match or beat Claude at the tasks" you give it, you're using it wrong. You sound like some of my coworkers that are eschewing AI or are minimizing it. The ones such as yourself who find AI annoying or not useful are the ones who are going to go extinct during the next few years. The new era of programmers aren't going to be the most "skilled" ones but the most mentally…

>If you are "match or beat Claude at the tasks" you give it, you're using it wrong.

Are you purposely mischaracterizing what I said to perpetuate a pointless internet argument? Because it should sounds like that.

I don't sit there all day racing Claude. I do it sometimes just because I'm tired waiting for Claude to do simple shit. It's a benchmark, not a workflow.

>You sound like some of my coworkers that are eschewing AI or are minimizing it. The ones such as yourself who find AI annoying or not useful are the ones who are going to go extinct during the next few years.

You think you know me, but you don't. You're making wild assumptions about me to try to attack me.

This pointless internet interaction is over.

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

#232

Post by devmor » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

3abiton wrote: post #196

devmor wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local models just don't seem that useful for me for these particular tasks yet - the most recent versions of Codex and Claude Opus are the first time I've found them to be particularly useful in a "real engineering" context that isn't just vibe coding. Google's TurboQuant might help address this, but it also might just widen the gap even further. I am far on the skeptic edge when it comes to the generative AI side of…

Turboquant is totally irrelevant compared to current quantization methods. It has been thoroughly test by people who build inferencing engines for local models. It's all talk no actual meat to it.

Do you have any reading on this? I find it hard to believe something announced a week ago has been “thoroughly tested”.

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

#233

Post by ikidd » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:12 AM UTC

kaycey2022 wrote: post #107

ikidd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly my experience. I remember thinking to myself that if this is what people get exposed to when they try to use a coding agent, no wonder there's so much bad-mouthing going on about LLMs. You use CC and you get usable output without much hassle, and in the end it costs way less because you aren't fighting with a substandard model.

Frankly, Gemini seems like Codex was two years ago. Lots of back and forth and nothing of value in the end.

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

#234

Post by reenorap » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 4:12 AM UTC

leptons wrote: post #231

reenorap wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have 30+ years of experience. If you are "match or beat Claude at the tasks" you give it, you're using it wrong. You sound like some of my coworkers that are eschewing AI or are minimizing it. The ones such as yourself who find AI annoying or not useful are the ones who are going to go extinct during the next few years. The new era of programmers aren't going to be the most "skilled" ones but the most mentally…

>If you are "match or beat Claude at the tasks" you give it, you're using it wrong. Are you purposely mischaracterizing what I said to perpetuate a pointless internet argument? Because it should sounds like that. I don't sit there all day racing Claude. I do it sometimes just because I'm tired waiting for Claude to do simple shit. It's a benchmark, not a workflow. >You sound like some of my coworkers that are eschewi…

If your prompt to Claude isn't "This program doesn't seem to work properly. The log files indicate that writing to the database keeps occurring over and over again. What is the cause?" and if it doesn't actual fix the problem without anything more than the above prompt, then you're not using it properly.

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

#235

Post by leptons » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

reenorap wrote: post #234

leptons wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are "match or beat Claude at the tasks" you give it, you're using it wrong. Are you purposely mischaracterizing what I said to perpetuate a pointless internet argument? Because it should sounds like that. I don't sit there all day racing Claude. I do it sometimes just because I'm tired waiting for Claude to do simple shit. It's a benchmark, not a workflow. >You sound like some of my coworkers that are eschewi…

If your prompt to Claude isn't "This program doesn't seem to work properly. The log files indicate that writing to the database keeps occurring over and over again. What is the cause?" and if it doesn't actual fix the problem without anything more than the above prompt, then you're not using it properly.

This pointless internet interaction is over.

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

#236

Post by 3abiton » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

devmor wrote: post #232

3abiton wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turboquant is totally irrelevant compared to current quantization methods. It has been thoroughly test by people who build inferencing engines for local models. It's all talk no actual meat to it.

Do you have any reading on this? I find it hard to believe something announced a week ago has been “thoroughly tested”.

Their paper TurboQuant (TQ) is not new per say. It's released last year, and heavily rehash of old ideas that were released a year prior (RabitQ). There is also [a bit of drama](https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3ASKZlok) there that boils down to what it seems a bit of malpractice for google's researchers. TQ does few things: it claims better compression quality and speed, and better KV cache handling. Currently KV cache takes a load of resources beside that of the model itself. Many people applied different quantization strategy for it, but the quality degradation is a too apparent. Enter Attention Rotation. This seems to have genuinely helped KV cache compression as per [llama.cpp latest tests](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/21038). On the other hand, [ik_llama.cpp](https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s7nq6b/technic...) did tests on the quality of turboquant-3 compared to IQ4 quantized models, and yhe quality degradation is much worse. So it's 2 things: KV compression -> good. Turboquant quantazation -> not good.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

muskstinks wrote: post #88

lukewarm707 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think that privacy is good for wellbeing. it may be this is a dying point of view.

It is for sure but running your own email is so time intense that i gave that up 10 years ago. i then decided to trust one company with most stuff. Also as I said, I would use something different for my personal stuff. But i'm waiting for the right hardware etc.

[deleted]

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

#238

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #54

susupro1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not crazy, you are just waking up from the SaaS delusion. We somehow allowed the industry to convince us that paying $20/month to rent volatile compute, have our proprietary workflows surveilled, and get throttled mid-thought is an 'upgrade'. The pendulum is swinging violently back to local-native tools. Deterministic, privately owned, unmetered—buying your execution layer instead of renting it is the only wa…

If I could buy this to run it locally, what's that hardware even look like? What model would I even run on the hardware? What framework would I need to have it do the things Claude Code can do?

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by lukewarm707 » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 10:33 AM UTC

johntash wrote: post #167

lukewarm707 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't use local models, i just use the APIs of cloud providers (eg fireworks, together, friendli, novita, even cerebras or groq). you can get subscriptions to use the APIs, from synthetic, or ollama, fireworks.

I might be missing it, but does fireworks actually have a subscription? All I saw was serverless (per token) and gpu $/hr. And since I saw a few other comments talking about these, do you have any preference on different cloud providers with ZDR? I look every once in a while and want to switch to completely open models and/or at least ZDR so I can start doing things like summarizing e-mail. I'm thinking I can probabl…

on fireworks, log in and go to the dashboard, then the subscription is available under "fire pass" (above the model library). the underlying compute is fireworks and is ZDR.

other cloud providers, kind of depends on the use case. fireworks. inception labs is frontier for the use case. otherwise a lot of the time I use TEE. tinfoil is very good, easy to integrate using their cli proxy, fairly expensive. phala is less expensive but slow, more work to integrate.

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

#240

Post by Kim_Bruning » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

Ok, I have part of the answer at least.

Claude recently improved Opus 4.6 to have a 1Mtoken context. Cache normally invalidates after 5 minutes.

If you come back or --continue after a break (or 5 minutes), that's a MASSIVE hit to your session limit. 250000 tokens at Max x5 will ding you 10% of your session for "Hi, I'm back".

So say you don't typically do /compact very often. And say you're not very chatty and "do the right thing" by only asking a question once in a while? You'll burn through context like crazy.

Meanwhile if you have ADHD and anthropomorphize the bleep out of your claude and chat with them all day long? Hardly a dent!

This trick seems to work for now (ymmv)

Tell your system to

   CronCreate
      cron: "*/4 * * * *"
      prompt: "heartbeat — no action needed"

And turn it back off at end of day.

I'm sure anthropic will be thrilled by this, but I don't have a better solve at this time yet.

Context management is a thing. Unfortunately you're not allowed to use any tool other than claude code with the Anthropic Subscription, so I guess this is the solve they asked for. Allowing people to write their own tools with superior context management would seem to be a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?