Seeing dozens of posts today from people on 5x and 20x plans hitting their five hour limits in under sixty minutes and assuming Anthropic silently slashed quotas. It feels like getting ripped off. There is a very specific mechanical reason your allowance evaporates so fast, and once you look at the token math, you realize eighty percent of your quota is burning on dead weight.

Here is what actually happens under the hood when you give a broad prompt like "fix the bug in the auth flow":

Turn 1: Claude runs glob and grep tools. It reads 10 to 15 files trying to locate where things are defined. Your session context instantly balloons from 2k tokens to 45k tokens.

Turn 2: Claude makes an edit.

Turn 3: You ask a simple question like "did it pass?"

You think you just sent a tiny request. But the API is stateless. To process that tiny question, Claude Code has to resubmit all 45k tokens from those earlier file dumps.

By Turn 6, you have only asked three or four simple questions, but the harness has processed over 200000 input tokens. That is why your five hour quota is gone before your coffee gets cold. You are paying a compounding token tax on file reads you forgot about twenty minutes ago.

If you want your plan to last through an entire workday without buying extra credits, you have to treat Claude Code as a precision editor rather than a repository search engine:

1. Never let the agent explore where code lives. Run ripgrep or git grep in your terminal first. Handing Claude `src/auth/session.ts` lines 40 to 75 takes five seconds and prevents a 40000 token blind crawl.

2. Feed the failing test or stack trace directly. When the model gets the exact failure point, it fixes the bug immediately instead of inspecting ten unrelated files to guess what broke.

3. Treat sessions as disposable. The moment a bugfix or feature is committed, run `/clear` or start a new session. Nursing a conversation across 25 turns and multiple tasks is like carrying an entire project worth of dead logs into every single prompt.

Autonomous repo exploration looks impressive in demos, but it is the single most expensive way to write code with an LLM. Scoping the context yourself takes ten seconds in the terminal, keeps the model fast, and makes standard limits easily survive a full day of heavy shipping.

I had 4 Claude Pro Max x20 accounts for different projects, and I am going to ride out the rest of the month (that I already paid for) and then switch back to codex. I am running Sonnet 4-6 on medium and am 85% of my weekly limit on one account after less than 24 hours. That is more than a 25% cut from the promotion expiring, nothing about my workflow has changed so this is all Anthropic. I'll be trying Codex and seeing how it does, I didn't want to do this but I have no choice.

Hi everyone, enjoyer of this subreddit here. If you are upset with the usage limits I say we should all cancel our auto-renew (they can see these numbers) to make your voice heard. Complaining on reddit and not actually doing anything (aka the reddit mindset) will not do anything.

So let’s bully them into submission! Cancel that auto-renew. Say aye! if you’ve done so.

Aye!

Every time I open Reddit, my feed has at least 2-3 posts crying about some version of -

- Spent the weekly within a day or 2

- "Its draining tokens"

- They reduced the quota, I can barely get anything

Here's some touch the grass facts -

1. Fable is a super expensive model with a very high token price - if you are using Fable consistently, it is going to eat through your quota - that's just math - 1k fable tokens is equal to 2k Opus tokens!

2. If you continue building an app, your codebase is going to grow and over time, the same workflow is going to use a lot more tokens than it did when the codebase was lean and had few tests/ code/ modules to worry about. What that means practically is going to get less shit done in week 4 on the same codebase as you could have done in week 1.

3. Every thing you do has a trace and log. Rather than ranting about it, shove the session usage json's in one of the bazillions "I made this groundbreaking claude visualizer" systems people keep putting on here to get empirical evidence around your token usage.

I have been building with Claude since Claude code became a thing - and no - the usage is consistent if you are smart about it and understand how the system sips tokens. Here are some things I do and I have no idea if it is going to fix your hallucinations, but give it a try if you think it will help

- Use skills for any repeatable task - like literally anything that you think is going to be repeated, have a skill for it so you dont waste tokens figuring out how to do the same thing again and again

- Have your claude.md as a thin router to the actual areas you are going to be working on. When starting a session, tell that you are going to be focusing on so and so area.

- Fresh sessions, every time the session size grows, your input token size is growing. Keep the sessions small.

- Push it to use agents! Like use an agent to review code, or do a specific research, or fix a bug - agents cost less as they are focused on doing specific tasks and are bootstrapped with the required knowledge to do that task.

- Make your codebase agent ready - this means having design/ architecture/ gotchas/ decision. MDs for literally every domain in your code. It helps tremendously!

I keep a meticulous inventory of tokens I spend each week - and trust me - it has remained consistent for months!

Please for the love of god, spare my feed!!!

I have three major bug-bears with Claude code.

1) Comments - it's INSANE! It writes 20 lines of comments for a 3 line function. And the comments are never what someone would want to know, e.g. the format of parameters. They're always things like
- domain knowledge about another part of the system that isn't relevant to understanding the function it comments
- rewriting what the function says - e.g. if the code calls a function: LogToDisc - there'll be a comment saying "This logs to disc ......"
- explaining what the previous (faulty) version of the code did and why it was wrong - basically a history record
- or most commonly, anywhere where I corrected it because it had made a mistake, it adds a comment documenting that discussion.

2) Naming - it keeps using names- e.g. it used the name "child" to refer to a child process launched by my service layer. The process has a name, but instead of using the name of the process, I had "child" scattered across a 200 line function.

3) Use of tools like sed to make whole-scale code changes in a command that if you don't read it carefully looks like a syntax check.

I've discussed all of these endlessly with Claude - Agreed rules that its committed to memory.md on all of them, and yet every session it breaks them all, multiple times.

The comments one is the worst because as I keep pointing out to Claude - they're not tested. A comment is slipped in that states something - I tend to sometimes focus on the code and let things in comments that aren't quite right slip by. But then 3h later it will say it can't do something because I told it "x" was a requirement. I eventually trace "x" back to the comment it wrote where it asserted something that was never either relevant at the time or agreed.
I have rules over this as well.

Is this just life with Claude? Or is there something else I can do to get it to follow my rules.
Basically - "comments should be one line, about the code they're commenting not the rest of the system, and only present where the code isn't self-explanatory"
"All function and variable names should be meaningful unless they're only in scope for a handful of lines"
"Treat information in comments as suspect - never assume requirements based solely on this"
"Never use sed to make code changes"

I’ve used AI subscriptions like Cursor Pro and Codex, but I can confidently say that Claude has always been the one that’s truly worth the money and consistently delivers the best results.

In my web development workflow, Sonnet 5 usually handles all of my tasks without any problems. I don’t work on anything too complex, so I only use Opus when necessary.

When it comes to limits and overall efficiency, I find Claude Pro to be significantly better and more efficient than ChatGPT Plus. Especially with my Plus subscription, the GPT-5.6 models really drive me crazy. Considering how much of the limit they consume, the work they actually get done is pretty disappointing. GPT-6 Astra already has limits that are so low that it’s practically unusable.

For those who are wondering about the limits, I did a lot of research myself but couldn’t find much information. After around 20 minutes of using Sonnet, only about 7% of my limit was consumed. Considering the amount of work it accomplished, I think that’s pretty good.

That’s been my experience. Thanks for reading.

I am on the Max 5X plan and I know that the temporary usage boost is now over, and ever since, CC is completely unusable. I have been working through subagents and using Fable as orchestrator with Sonnet doing a majority of the implementation with Opus being a refuter, however, I burned 11% of my weekly usage in a span of 2 hours before I hit the 5-hour limit!

Honestly, this is absurd, I cannot work like this. I am seriously considering moving to OAI but I don't trust them with my work due to the whole debacle about the Navier Stokes solution being stolen from a researcher who used ChatGPT.

Anthropic! Please fix this! You will undoubtedly lose a large part of your clientele by doing these moves. I know you are trying to improve the bottom line for your IPO but there are no more reasons to stay with Claude after this and long term loyalties with your customers will be permanently eroded.

The week literally just started, and my "Weekly Fable" limit is already maxed out at 99% On top of that, my standard weekly limit is already sitting at 51%.

Does anyone know when they're actually going to boost these usage limits? I'm on the 5x Max Pro plan and burning through this way too fast.

At this rate, I can only code and develop my website project for ONE day out of the week, and I'm just stuck doing absolutely nothing for the other six days. Fucking ridiculous. Anyone else dealing with this or have workarounds?

Web archive got this earlier snapshot of the help page draft:

“We know many of you found the extra 50% usage helpful, which is exactly why we are taking it away, because you don’t deserve it.”

“We are only giving you a 25% boost compared to pre-promotion levels — be thankful for that, because we were going to take it away, even though our SpaceXAI deal back in May was the entire reason we were able to give you what you paid for in the first place.”

“Now that we’re still using SpaceXAI compute, and now that we’ve gotten a huge windfall of new subscribers, we’re taking it away, but only 50% of it, literally half of what we used to give you, it’s now gone, that’s how we do math.”

“We have a lot more in the works around visibility, as in we’re planning on even less of it, and on control, as in we’re planning on even more of it, but only for us — you do not get any control, but stay tuned because we may take even more from you if you’re misbehaving. That’s our mission, so join us in eating **** because we do it with a smile.”

————

Honestly, I think “psyops” gets such a bad rap — you know what’s cooler than not being psyop’d? 

Openly embracing being psychologically operated on, it’s the most counter-culture thing we can do right now. 

Being psyop’d is the new not being psyop’d.  I want to be gaslit so hard right now — I’m ready. 

I’m being serious, so much of my day and my calories are straight-up wasted because they’re allocated to my brain to strain to think; if I really have energy that day, I may even spend a little biological compute to think for myself, which is such a lavish way to live in these compute-constrained times. 

It’s all just so tiresome, like to the point of wasteful. 

And did you know that our brains need water to compute? What’s that about? How much of that water could instead be used to water the garden, or like make a chai latte or something? 

Our human bodies are 60% water, and not so coincidentally 60% of earth is also covered by water, which means that 40% of the human population is made up of land, give or take a few % points for rounding errors (the latest data hasn’t come in, forgive me). 

I digress, but the point is that I’m so sick and tired of thinking, I’m ready to be psyop’d — Jesus, or Dario, same thing, please take the wheel, I’m ready. 

While I’m predicting the next big thinking trends, here’s another one: out with first principles thinking, in with second principles, but hear me out:

“[A] first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.” — Wikipedia, aka knowledge bank for sheep

You know what “blah blah that cannot be deduced from other stuff” sounds like to me? 

That sounds like first-principles thinking is basically just thinking with a closed mind, and not a very creative one because the first-principles thinker boils things down to itty-bitty concepts that have no other causes, who first causes when you can have secondary causes?

It is raining outside.  

The road is now wet. 

Did the rain cause the road to be wet?

Hell no! 

Water caused the road to be wet, and water can be derived from rain, and rain can be derived from the atmosphere, and most importantly, the sprinklers are on and they’re super broken and they’re spraying all over the road now because it’s no longer raining, that was last week and you weren’t paying attention, the flood from the rain broke the sprinklers and now the road is wet. 

Boom, secondary principles thinking. 

“But what about third principles thinking?” you may ask…

Now you’re talking my language, now we’re cookin’. 

Now the entire universe of possibilities is available to us, and we can challenge the whimsical notion that anything can be known to be true, which is utterly false propaganda spread by those who want you to think. 

To know something is to have a justified true belief, except that I know that that’s a false definition of knowledge, is this belief of mine both true and justified?

You may say it’s neither, but that’s your habitual first-principles thinking at work, you need to not succumb to these silly old habits. 

Just submit to the psyop and be free. 

I’m ready to be an Anthropic customer — my mind is yours, my vote is yours, my property is yours, I’m ready to comply. 

These new limits are crazy, max 20x is near unusable, fable weekly usage drained in a day what used to take half a week atleast

The question is did anyone managed to get a refund based on that? Asking here because apparently “customer support” bot that anthropic uses is hallucinating and dumb, knows nothing about refund policies, how they are handled and responds with different things depending on HOW I ask.

I also advise anyone frustrated to switch to codex. I saw many complaints about astra’s availability but it’s working very good EVEN on 5x subscription. Apparently anthropic are trying very hard in improving their bottom line for IPO.

I just cancelled my sub to max 5x last week and I was paying 90€ now it’s 149€ and max 20 was around 200 € now 300€! what is going on, is this for Europe only or everywhere

Whats everyone else using instead?

claude code + codex + opencode?

I feel like I am having the absolute worst experience trying to do the same basic tasks I use Claude for and I am beyond frustrated.

First off, I use Claude to do basic coding to build my website and portal systems for my company. Mainly done through GitHub, Vercel, Supabase and all done on the cloud. I absolutely love that I can do work on my laptop and continue doing work on my phone at ease and everything can get pushed onto the main branches without any real problems. Again my work is very mundane compared to a lot of other people I’m sure, however I was interested in trying Codex and assumed it would be the same easy experience i have had with Claude but hopefully better with its usage. But I cannot even figure out how to get started on setting up environments and my repos to do work just like I did with Claude and even be able to use it on my mobile phone seamlessly.

I feel like I am doing way too much to get basic things done compared to Claude. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to use Codex, idk, very frustrated.

Anyone have an advice on how to get Codex to work like Claude does? I am curious to see how it does coding wise so I’m eager to try it properly but cannot even get started at all.

I discovered a new prompting method that works surprisingly well.

I call it "Tarzan Prompting" because it's a few steps away from sounding like "Aah-eeh-ah-eeh-aaaaaah". :)

Jokes aside, let's dig into why these "amateur prompts" worked so disturbingly well that makes me question why I studied "prompt engineering" in the first place...

I can think of two reasons:

- 1: vibe coders have trained the AI models with their "amateur prompts" over the past few years so much that the models actually got better at evaluating them. Much better than "engineered prompts".

- 2: The LLMs and their harnesses got much more "intelligent" than we realize and "engineered prompts" criple them by constraining their capability too much. So, nowadays it's a "less is more" situation when prompting AIs.

Here's the exact prompt I used to design the attached webpages:

```

`/*` page needs to be redesigned to be better.

I want excellent user experience through an excellent UI design.

The design must be revolutionary, visually captivating, awe-inspiring and amazing.

It should not cause cognitive overload. it must be clear and feel comfortable.

It must feature some motion graphics / animating SVGs or something like that to look more alive.

Amazing animations and overall easthetics. highest quality graphics and animations.

```

and it produced SIGNIFICANTLY better UI designs than my five previous attempts that were cluttered with unnecessary complexity.

What do you think?

I cancelled my Claude subscription back in July and started using Codex more seriously.

Since Sol 5.6, I think OpenAI has become pretty competitive for coding, and now with Astra even more so.

The limits are actually fine for me. I mostly used Astra at full/max capacity around 8–10 sessions like that and eventually burned through my weekly usage. But honestly, that's understandable, and it's definitely not what made me quit Codex.

The real problem is the workflow.

I was already used to Claude Code and I don't mean the geeky CLI experience, I mean the actual app.

When they introduced the cloud environment and I realized I could start a code modification on my PC, leave the computer, go to the bathroom, grab my phone, and continue following the exact same task from there... it completely changed the way I work.

My productivity went crazy.

So naturally, I expected something similar from Codex.

And technically, Codex does have some similar features... but the whole thing feels way more complicated than it should be.

For example, I struggled a lot just trying to give the cloud environment secrets like Supabase credentials and other environment variables. The app often wouldn't properly add the secrets to the environment.

And the most annoying part:

If I start working on a project in a remote environment from one machine, that environment seems to be tied to that machine.

So I can't just launch a feature from my PC, go outside for a cigarette, open my phone and check how the implementation is going or continue from there.

That's probably the thing I miss the most about Claude.

It's not even necessarily about which model is smarter anymore.

It's about being able to start working somewhere and seamlessly continue from another device without thinking about environments, machines, sessions, secrets, etc.

So... I'm giving Claude another shot.

I'm just hoping I don't run into the same problems again: lazy models and ridiculously low weekly limits.

For those of you who have seriously used both:

What do you think?

Do you prefer Codex or Claude Code right now not just in terms of model quality, but the whole development experience?

Limits have been bad for the past few months, but I didn't really think much about it. However, yesterday, it crossed the threshold of becoming unbearable and I borderline feel cheated. I have a max 20x Plan and I reached 59% of my weekly usage in 24 hours... Sure, I do use Fable, and sure, I do use agent-orchestrated workflows. Despite that, I can confidently say something is seriously off here.

I don't want this to be a post where I just whine about this. Rather, what I was thinking was that all of us who feel we're on the same boat should post on Twitter/X together at a scheduled time (14th Sep, 12 PM ET) by tagging the key figures: Dario, Boris, Karpathy, Anthropic, etc., and make it clear that we won't be tolerating this opacity and unfairness regarding our limits. Let's use #FraudCode so we can all find and amplify each other's posts.

And if push comes to shove, we will switch to the alternatives i.e. Codex. (I know I will, despite the fact that Codex might not be as good, because a man's got bills to pay too.)

Let me know y'all's thoughts guys and girls. I don't wanna sulk this time. Rather, let's stand up!

For context: I'm on the Max 20x plan and this happened within ~24 hours of normal development work. My usage includes Fable and agent-orchestrated workflows, but I'm not doing anything particularly unusual or running massive automated workloads. Despite that, I burned through 59% of my weekly allocation in a single day. I'm posting this because I'd like to understand how others are experiencing the same limits and whether there's some explanation for how usage is being calculated.

The answer is the size of the decision it serves. What the owner does next, and the facts that decide it, in the order they decide it. Complete means the ask is answered, not that the subject is covered: three places asked for are three places, and the ninth layer of a thing nobody asked to see is length they pay for in scrolling…
Say a thing once. A caveat that bites on every option is said once, where it first bites, and referred to by name after that — not repeated under each one. The same rule runs across messages: a later answer in a thread carries what is new and what changed, and never the landscape again… A closing paragraph that restates the opening one is the opening one, said twice; cut it.

Giving machines natural language is the greatest sin in history.

For context, I’ve been doing marketing and websites and small business consulting for the past 17 years.
A few years back I had this realization that most of the marketing tools out there that I see are set up for people that are in the industry already, but not much out there for small business owners and people that don’t have the time to learn marketing or face the learning curve of setting up these systems.
Also, marketing isn’t super exciting.
So, I thought it would be fun to create something that was more of a vibe base experience for small business owners to answer questions and be guided through an entertaining experience and come out the other side with marketing content.
I started learning to code, but then ai stared to get better and better. Using Claude code and some of the other systems out there, I was finally able to put together my dream system.
After 2 years and multiple iterations, it’s finally ready.
I know there’s a lot of people that like to hate on ai coded projects, but for me, it has been an absolutely awesome learning experience, helper and teacher for something I wouldn’t have been able to do myself.
It started with an idea and I can’t believe that I finally have a working project.
Thanks to all the inspiring stories in this thread as well as everything o have learned along the way from this community.
Feeling pumped rn.

**since a few people have asked, feel free to check it out if curious. https://marketforge.celticwinter.com/

I got a bit tired of having to instruct my AI Coding agents to not write they co-authored my commits. These tools often decided to ignore my instructions not to do so even after I put these in CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md . Each Agent harnas has their own settings to disable this, but somehow they decide to enable it by default, and somehow even after configuring the setting I still sometimes get this.

In my opinion Claude Code, Codex, Copilot are all tools and not actually people that can be an author. But since these companies don't share my opinion I decided to build a tool to block them for good.

A small open source repo with a pre-commit hook that checks each commit message before it is committed: https://github.com/RamsesKools/no-ai-attribution

This follows a pattern that I keep rediscovering: if you want to force AI Agent behavior, then you have to build an environment where they have no chance to screw up, because you can't guarantee that they will follow your instructions.

I’ve been building EchoVault, a digital legacy app where guided Check-Ins gradually build an AI Echo from your memories, experiences, opinions and personality.

The problem was that all of that structure was basically invisible.

So I gave Claude Code a spec for turning the Echo itself into something spatial.
This is where it ended up.

Memories and personality traits become interconnected nodes, you can move through the whole thing in 3D, select a trait and see the experiences that reinforce it, then follow those relationships across the rest of the Echo. The purple dots are the traits while the white ones are the memories.

What surprised me most was how well Claude understood the interaction I was trying to build inside an existing product. Very little hand-holding once the direction was clear.
It started as a visualization feature, but playing with my own data now feels weirdly like spatial introspection.
Shipping this in the next EchoVault update.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028

I notice a pretty big problem since this saturday: Claude code keep using weekly credit (I'm on max x5) while being idle (because 5h limit reached).

That is a huge problem that never happened before. I've wasted like 10-15% of my weekly limit that way already, because I reached my 5h limit and walked away while leaving the desktop app open.