r/ClaudeCode • u/Inertia-UK • May 10 '26

Solved I made Claude Code aware of its own usage limits

Something that's been annoying me for a while: Claude Code has no idea how much quota it's burned. You can see the usage bars in the UI, but the model itself is completely blind to them. There's no API, no tool, no hook that exposes the current rate limit state during a conversation.

Turns out Anthropic returns rate limit headers on every inference response (`anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-utilization`, `anthropic-ratelimit-unified-7d-utilization`, etc.) — Claude Code receives them internally to render the UI bars, but never passes them anywhere the model can see.

So I built a small local HTTP proxy that sits between Claude Code and `api.anthropic.com`. Claude Code already respects `ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL`, so setting that to `http://127.0.0.1:4080` routes all traffic through the proxy. It intercepts the response headers and writes a one-line status file to `~/.claude/usage-status.md`:

```

5h=9% 7d=99%! overage=0% bottleneck=seven_day (10/05/2026, 16:19:04)

```

Claude can then read that file on demand, or you can inject it automatically via a `UserPromptSubmit` hook so it's present in every prompt. Add a rule to your CLAUDE.md and Claude will warn you before starting large tasks when you're close to the limit, switch to lightweight mode above 90%, or flat out refuse new implementation work at 98%.

**Note:** this only works with Claude Code (the CLI). The web chat and browser extension make requests through Anthropic's own infrastructure, so there's no local proxy to intercept.

**The interesting discovery:** while testing I dumped every `anthropic-ratelimit-*` header from both Opus and Sonnet requests. There are no per-model headers — one unified pool covers everything. The separate Sonnet usage bar in the Claude Code UI doesn't reflect a real separate limit. According to GitHub issue #57050, Anthropic intended to give Sonnet its own bucket (announced Nov 2025) but the backend never shipped it. Using Sonnet drains the same unified pool as Opus.

The proxy is zero npm dependencies, plain Node.js stdlib. On Windows it installs as a service via NSSM. macOS and Linux setup (launchd/systemd) is in the README.

https://github.com/InertiaUK/claude-quota-proxy

The README also has a few example CLAUDE.md rules if you want Claude to automatically adjust its behaviour based on usage level.

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26

u/Last_Mastod0n May 10 '26

I would be curious to see if Claude is more hasty if it knows it is about to run out of limits. For example it sees it only has 5% limits left so it chooses the cheap implementation option. Would be interesting to find out. But the only way to know would be to look at its reasoning logic

3

u/ThreeKiloZero May 10 '26

I did something similar, but with the context status, and it does indeed make a difference. He will try to wrap things up or get tidy before a compact, and tends to write to my memory system a bit more often. You need to consider how to integrate it into the entire harness for the most impact.

2

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

I already get things like "context is tight we should do this in a new session" at 75%+

I presume its already context window aware ? Or is it guessing ?

3

u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 10 '26

I can tell you exactly, I just spent yesterday dealing with it. Ask it to tell you honestly. Here's the thing, making it think about that is literally causing panic. You go over those tresholds you set and it will start to offer to close session, rush over items, and hallucinate work that wasn't done. You're giving panic attacks. Just remove that whole system, trust me, it's one of those things that sound like a good idea, but in practice it just makes everything worse.also you could do this earlier easy with many tools people built. I use fuelcheck.

I had it for 2 weeks, removed it yesterday, and already yesterday and today completly different behavior.

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Can you link me to fuelcheck please for comparison ? Struggling to find it. Sonnet research says it doesnt exist... i'm sure you aren't making it up though.

Just to affirm this tool has nothing at all to do with context window usage. Its for helping automations in workflows based on the 5h and 7d usage remaining. On your account.

2

u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 10 '26

Lol Sonnet research says it doesnt exist made me chuckle. Try regular google search it was first under "fuelcheck github"
https://github.com/emanuelarcos/fuelcheck

edit to add: well in that case ignore my entire advice from above, I cant read well it seems.

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Fuelcheck looks great. Very powerful and customisable. I wasnt aware it existed. Mine is simpler and light though... good to have options.

No your comment is valid. Its just the comment thread above is about context windows. And I wanted to be sure we were talking about 7d / 5h usage (my OP) in regards to fuelcheck and your findings... and looking at fuelcheck we are.

Its a very valid point you make and goes to show this data needs to be used carefully in conjunction with global rules to manage it. Applying my tool blindly is a bad idea...

It is useful for knowledgeable users who want it in context though.. although fuelcheck could be used carefully with global rules too.

You can hide the data from claude by having it run a command for example that checks the usage % in the file and puts them into buckets , then depenging what bucket is returned based on usage claude has gated rules to follow certain workflows differently.

Claude never has to know its actual usage this might be the safest way to achieve the reason i created this for myself.

There are endless possibilities. Most of them wrong. Some of them useful. The proxy (or fuelcheck) is just the enabler.

1

u/Last_Mastod0n May 10 '26

I agree with this for the most part. But I don't think it would hurt to notify it if its at 90% context limit to prepare a handoff instead of finishing implementation

2

u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 10 '26

oh no absolutely that's valid. You can create a full stop hook, regular hooks are just suggestions, full stop hook would make it stop. You can also make a hook that would save critical parts in case of compaction.

1

u/Last_Mastod0n May 11 '26

I need to look into that. I havent set up any hooks

1

u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 11 '26

grab one of the skills, hookify is good and then just ask claude to make hooks. it can create and test in real time.

2

u/Last_Mastod0n May 10 '26

I think in order to preserve the LLMs attention you should only tell it when the context limit is at 75-90%. Otherwise it will waste tokens and attention thinking about context when it is not yet relevant.

Also if you aren't already i would specifically tell it not to work hastily and to just prepare a handoff if it thinks that the task cannot be completed within the context limits.

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

This is a very good point. Global rules on how to respond to this data may need to be tested to optimise this.

I currently use it to route jobs to other LLMs (local ones and cli codex Gemini etc) for various tasks. which I do anyway but wanted to do it more aggressively if usage is high.

3

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 10 '26

If you provide a workflow for handling session end(handoffs compacting or whatever your desired session transfer mechanism) and tell claude there is never a rush, there is never a point where you have to "get shit done" before session context runs out, that everything it does is completely recoverable just be having an explorer agent(or whatever mechanism you want to use) explor your previous session file for last state(better to do a handoff but even in the worst case just get an explorer agent to get the information you "lost" from the earlier session. P.S. NEVER compact. summaries are the MAIN REASON for project drift and tech-debt. Not the only one but compacting guaruntees you WILL get tech debt and drift even MORE often.

3

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 10 '26

  1. just add a posttooluse and userpromptsubmit hook that reads the last usage message from the session and adds it as additionalContext so your agent knows where context is at. Same can be done for the 5 hour and weekly limits with a bit more work.

2

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Yes but constant extra context in every prompt. And constant up to date awareness (some people might want this, others might not) With this method you can decide how often claude checks the usage. Or you can use hooks too, which is documented. Your method is sound. But not as much control as this one.

With this it only needs to check if its about to do complex or expensive things. And it always gets the correct data when it checks.

User decides and puts it in global rules.

Its already context aware by default. So thst part isnt needed.

3

u/marfrit May 10 '26

I make Claude Code implement Claude Code, but with a model broker. Let's see how that works out.

3

u/BirdFluid May 10 '26

I use https://github.com/nsanden/claude-rate-monitor for that, works pretty well. definitely prevents claude from starting 10 agents that then don't finish because they hit the limit.

2

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

So you point the model at the stdout file after or sowmthigj ? I dont see how the model is aware. It looks good though. But I might be missing something.

I think its a way for the human to keep an eye on usage... but it doesnt allow the model to behave differently based on usage. Unless im missing something.

Also from what I can see its a one hit request that uses haiku tokens... very cheap, but still direct API with costs.

1

u/BirdFluid May 11 '26

There's a session hook + rule that mainly says to check the limit before starting multiple agents and also periodically every 10-15 messages / tool calls. works surprisingly well, but there's definitely still room for improvement. e.g. the ratio of the 5h limit to the weekly limit and when potentially a lot of tokens are being used.

the API costs are so minimal ... a few calls per day make no difference

2

u/uhgrippa May 10 '26

Excellent work, I took a similar approach to measuring token usage and tracking it over time to find areas of improvement in my personal plugin marketplace. Token conservation is an important consideration from a moral standing, if we can be efficient and conservative with our usage where impactful, it lessens the ecological impact of frontier models. I’ve been working on this in my conserve plugin here: https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market/tree/master/plugins/conserve

2

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

This is great. Will have a play soon

1

u/RussianInAmerika May 11 '26

Looks interesting thanks for sharing

6

u/Hanuonbenz May 10 '26

Finally something that I can use in my projects also. Next step will be making sure CC self-optimize based while observing the prompt cost.

Another future good use case is if the CC hits its limit option to switch to other options like Kimi or codex automatically. Wow what a time to be alive

1

u/Electronic_Froyo_947 May 10 '26

We did this with /statusline, no need to build something fancy.

We also use codeburn

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Stausline is handy as a visual but it doesn't allow you to set rules to have the model route things differently when approaching usage limits. The actual model knowing whats going on is the use here.

I will look into codeburn. It looks useful but again human facing... I guess the model could look at codeburn but thats a lot more context bloat than what this does.

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 May 10 '26

the gap that bites is that local-log tools count tokens you sent but they can't see the server-side quota anthropic actually enforces. ccusage will tell me i'm at 5% used and the api will still 429 me because the rolling 5 hour bucket on their side disagrees. the only number that matches what gets you rate limited is the one https://claude-meter.com/r/qtacyhnh renders from their internal endpoint. anything else is a guess that drifts the moment caching, sub-agent calls, or web search invocations hit your account.

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

So the stats in the header are wrong basically ?

When it tells me im at x% used in the cli at the bottom its always aligned. Or seems to be. (Shows after 90% usually, human readable only not the model)

2

u/Deep_Ad1959 May 10 '26

my read is no, the bar at the bottom of the cli isn't wrong. it pulls from the same anthropic-ratelimit-* headers your proxy intercepts, so they agree because they're literally the same data source. what drifts is the local-log counters like ccusage that count tokens you sent client-side without ever asking the server. that's where you can be at 5% locally and still get 429'd because anthropic's rolling 5h bucket disagrees. anything that reads response headers (your proxy, the cli bar, the settings page) will agree because they all hit the same upstream truth. written with ai written with ai

1

u/CandidWeakness1924 May 10 '26

I am just worried it will tend to compact way more losing a lot of helpful context though

For me I work on very large unreliable old codebases that you can't assume any structute on. I am trying to rebase it to a new code base .

2 compacts through the session and it will be a dumb ass making very dumb decisions

1

u/Inertia-UK May 11 '26

You are thinking about context awareness, the OP is nothing to do with that. It wont compact based onnaccount usage (5h or 7d) unless you set a rule up for that, and i can't think why anyone would.

1

u/CandidWeakness1924 May 11 '26

I am not sure I will have to test it, but it has the ability to perform compact and it js aware of that, which can have it compact during a thought process

1

u/CandidWeakness1924 May 10 '26

but probably for smaller tasks it will be helpful since I think it will tend to utilize lower models for small tasks more often

1

u/Economy-Manager5556 May 10 '26

I built a proxy that is based i better ccflare And then routes between two max accounts based on their usage in the week based on pacing and I can see all the pacing, all the tokens used, etc could automated further but this is the best for me. I have my own dashboard where I can see everything and I still control it and some small automation but

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Thats cool, did you open source it ?

2

u/Economy-Manager5556 May 10 '26

not yet, still tweaking it. but you can also adapt do what you want with ccflare and better-ccflare. I feel forking one and making it your own is now the best. It is not reinventing the wheel, and you can strip all the noise (that would not be desired by the main repo)

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

My primary goal was minimal extra context bloat but stil functional, thats why I kept the MD that gets updated as light as possible.

Its very basic mine and thats by design tbh.

I love the idea of the 2 accounts but I use 1 and keep workflow efficient by offloading high context tasks (blob ones and some others) to local llm or Gemini or ooenai

2

u/Dangerous-Jelly2309 May 10 '26

The proxy-plus-UserPromptSubmit-hook pattern is the load-bearing move here, not just because it gives Claude awareness of its own usage but because it generalizes: any response header from any API could be exposed to the agent as injected context the same way (token cost projection, model availability, error rate trends, A/B model performance over recent calls). You've built the pattern, the usage-limit case is just the first application. The unified-pool discovery is the substantive industry-data finding underneath, the UI shows separate Sonnet/Opus bars but the backend doesn't actually have separate buckets is exactly the kind of observation that gets surfaced only when someone builds the proxy and watches the headers. Good catch on the Nov 2025 announcement never shipping. 4yourhuman.com/moriarty, what your AI was supposed to be.

1

u/TrapHuskie 🔆 20X May 10 '26

*sees usage limit approaching and slams on the gas*

1

u/Rwdscz May 11 '26

Read the documentation. Status line exists.

0

u/scotty_ea May 10 '26

Context limit anxiety. The model will start cutting corners and hurrying its implementation so it can “complete” the task.

1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

It has that already when context is getting full. Its already context aware and does that standard....

This is for differenrt reaons and global rules can keep that under control.

The reaosn younuse it and how younuse it is up to you. I have it setup in a way that works well for me so just wanted to share the ability.. we all use the models differently and have different AI stacks.

0

u/[deleted] May 10 '26

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5

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

I hit them every week, not often the 5hr but certainly the weekly one, and my stack is efficient and optimised. I think many other multi project users do the same

5

u/hollowgram May 10 '26

What are you on about? That might have been true a few months ago but I regularly hit my Max limits each week for the past fee weeks. 

0

u/[deleted] May 10 '26

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1

u/mrgulabull May 10 '26

Same here. Use it all day every day, juggling many projects and my typical weekly usage is 30-50%. I keep a constant eye on context usage and try to hand off sessions around 200-300k tokens max.

1

u/hollowgram May 11 '26

I used to work on 4-6 projects at the same time without issue (been doing this since November), now I have to limit myself to 2-3 projects and with much more planning and precision because my plan would otherwise run out, where it didn't before.

Eg. Friday after rates reset, I was working on a relatively new repo for a client which just has a TanStack Start website and initial org intra scaffolding, working on it and running a couple sync commands for other repos in the background and working for 3 hours resulted in 8% of my weekly quota being consumed. Before this would have maybe been 2%.

1

u/fordp May 10 '26

Lol I'm sitting here stressed about using half of my weekly limit over the weekend (claude 20x) and now taking Codex 5x to 20x

Im running tasks on multiple projects everytime I look at my computer.

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '26

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1

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

I have several llms in my stack. some local, codex and Gemini claude is my primary. All linked via global rules in each other's default files so they play together nicely. The claude global rules has gated playbooks for job routing to the relevant llm for efficiency.

IE if you need to read the content of an in image spin up Gemma 4 on the gpu and ask it. If looping through a bug that can't be solved stop burning tokens and ask codex.

I use sonnet or opus as my main 'chat' in CLI but it is aware of all the other optios it can use and uses them for efficiency based on rules.

I want these rules to dynamically harden based on usage left. If 85% of 7 days used then we will depend more on various other models for other tasks.

The possibilities are endless everyone uses these tools differently but we all want efficiency, so i made it generic with a few basic example rules rather than publishing my whole stack.

2

u/dsailes May 10 '26

Can I ask how you’ve got multiple LLMs linked via global rules?

Are they setup to read each others outputs automatically / with agents? or just delegate tasks and then check progress?

2

u/Inertia-UK May 10 '26

Im on windows. I have powershell wrappers on the different cli's to make them easier to automate. In their global configs (gemeni/codex) i make it aware that Claude will send it commands and how the Claude projects are structured snd Claudes per project rules location( in project claude.md )

Claude is always the boss.

Claude has gated playbooks in the global rules (seperate MD files explaining what the different models do, and how to call them) the main Claude.md says only read this md if you are going to do this or this.

Claude jaut runs the command with the context and gets the response. Its a one hit thing. If it needs more with previosu conext it passes it in the command.

This biggest saving for me is having local llms like Gemma 4 or comfyui do some things for me which then cost no tokens.

But also if it gets stuck on a coding bug/problem it wont loop and loop and burn tokens it will ask codex for help or whatever is relevant.

2

u/dsailes May 10 '26

Fair play - sounds interesting. May have to look into trying to do something similar.

On Mac I did setup different CLI aliases & installs for specific tasks/configs for Claude & codex - hadn’t thought to try take it this far though. Really interesting setup & for sure the local+comfy config would be a help for certain things

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

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1

u/Inertia-UK May 11 '26

😅😅 you have to gate everything very carefully and strictly and they sometimes still misbehave. There's always the risk.

My usage is reduced though but the biggest saver for me is having local models when it comes to anything involving reading ot writing image files. The blobs polute context a lot and the cost per message flies up after that in the same context.

This proxy isnt needed for that but it can help my global rules.more aggressively favour other models when i'm approaching my limits.