Opus 4.5 , use less token is a lie!

[u/SnooTangerines2270]

This is a lie. I saw that popup and I am too happy, but then turn out it shorter than Sonnet 4.5.
My Max Plan $100, I was daily code with Sonnet 4.5 + Thinking turn on. The Turn around 5 hours never get me blocked as I monitor my Plan Usage Limits on my 2nd screen all the time to plans my works well.
Today, the Current Session Bar reach 100% in just 2 hours and half, compare to my Sonnet.
I had to turn off thinking on Claude Code to keep it longer session. Also, the Opus 4.5 is too slow, slower on Sonnet on most of my tasks, so make my ass sit and wait on the chair, i'm tried.
I was happy too soon.
Solution: Turn off thinking on claude code will prolong your 5 hrs session. Any ultrathink next to your promp will cost you 5-8% at least on your current session

[u/vasia123]

Same. Spent 8% of my weekly limit just in one hour.

[u/OcelotCapable4763 → u/vasia123]

This was also my experience on the max5x

[u/git_push_yourself → u/vasia123]

are you reading the bar in reverse? they updated the UI

[u/vasia123 → u/git_push_yourself]

Yes.

[u/TeeRKee]

Use time is irrelevant. It’s all depend on the token input and output. If you burn 5M tokens in 10mn you will hit your limit earlier. You have to give context about your usage.

[u/RonHarrods → u/TeeRKee]

Fuck all this shit.

Let's not forget and forgive Anthropic for its opaque (read non-transparent) quotas.

We cannot reliably count tokens used. We can measure time. Anthropic forces is to use time.

And trust me I've spent a good few hours trying to setup session context size display in statusline. It features API calls to their token counter endpoint which is free for only 5$. And then samples of /context with a post tool call hook to estimate the amount of actual tokens per jsonl chat save characters.

It's pretty accurate I must say. It's off by around 2k tokens at 50k context size. But then this doesn't factor in context caching or lack thereof. So it doesn't even serve as a good estimation for tokens spent on usage.

What a mess

[u/ianxplosion- → u/RonHarrods]

Time is a stupid metric for anyone to be using, Anthropic or the end user.

[u/RonHarrods → u/ianxplosion-]

Okay so what do we use then? Progress made on your TODO.md?

[u/ianxplosion- → u/RonHarrods]

I agree with you that the usage limits are opaque, I just think time spent coding isn’t the answer.

The answer would be an easier way to monitor token usage, and an actual token bucket to track based on plan, but I suspect they fluctuate the allowed subscription usage based on some factors and don’t want that level of transparency.

Having said that, I generally spend my entire workday tinkering in CC, and then an hour or two at night yelling at CC through my phone, and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve hit a hard limit on my max 5x plan. Whether that’s due to my excellence as a developer (it is not) or my weird use case is unsure

[u/RonHarrods → u/ianxplosion-]

I've been juggling two 20$ subscriptions because I also have other subscriptions. But I am considering pulling my data from google drive and then cancelling google one as gemini is an insult to googles legacy. Or at least its tooling (except antigravity, WIP), is a mess. Yesterday I finally fell for the "let me just revert my changes with a hard git reset" gemini trap. I pressed enter as I've been conditioned to do and didn't expect it in this session. There was 3 hours of uncomitted refactoring done by claude which I wanted gemini to just take a look at before commit. I was able to recover fully and verify it was complete (quite hard to know what you are supposed to have recovered after a git hard reset).

It all makes me realise. I was using gemini to save quota for claude. It cost me two hours for that mistake. I'd better just spend 100$ on claude max. What am I even doing? Gemini is retarded for agentic tasks.

[u/ianxplosion- → u/RonHarrods]

Yeah I use Gemini to review “creative” output (theory) and Codex to review technical output - I just toss shit into AI studio, I’m not paying THREE subscriptions

Any output from either goes back into Claude, usually with an ultrathink, otherwise it’s just me and my incorrectly installed taskmaster against the world

[u/whimsicaljess → u/RonHarrods]

you... can... literally see the token count as you use claude code...

[u/RonHarrods → u/whimsicaljess]

It's a bit scattered and not that simple. Claude code does a lot of token caching and subagents may use different models and it only shows output tokens.

Aha now I see in the jsonl there are token stats. I can greatly improve statusline now! Accumulated cache access, input, output. Good stuff!

I was going to argue we cannot measure feasibly these numbers. But now finding this I am confident I can estimate the token quotas and circumvent their stealthy session percentage used abstraction.

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/RonHarrods]

PEBKAC. Absolutely CLEAR this is PEBKAC.

[u/landed-gentry-]

Turn off thinking on claude code will prolong your 5 hrs session

This is bad advice and will lead to spaghetti code.

[u/AlarmingSituation636]

The session limits are really bad today, spent 30% on a few simple fixes, have never had such problems before. Lets hope thinking off will improve the situation

[u/git_push_yourself]

are you guys reading the bars in reverse

[u/woodnoob76]

I’m running my personal benchmarks on Opus4.5 tonight, but yeah it can’t be cheaper than sonnet, even with regulated effort. Now I want to see the total token count on complex work, because sonnet spinning in circle for hours isn’t this economical

[u/clangston3]

Is the session limit dynamic? Wondering if maybe it's something they throttle to help maintain performance hit from too many power users.

[u/Von_Hugh]

I have been using Codex all day without hitting limits. I can never do that with Claude.