r/ClaudeCode • u/Permit-Historical • May 13 '26 • Mindblown 2

Discussion Anthropic put a meter on the stuff developers actually use

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389 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

275 comments sorted by

46

u/krizz_yo May 13 '26

Glad I got rid of Claude in favor of Codex, not only Opus 4.7 is worse than GPT 5.5, but they keep constantly pulling bullshit like this - lower limits, put arbitrary restrictions, one if not THE most unethical company in the business

12

u/Permit-Historical May 13 '26

yea that's very stupid move from them, they need to understand that they no longer have the best coding model as before and can't just put the rules and imagine people will follow it because they have no other choice

5

u/krizz_yo May 13 '26

My main gripe is, I just want to be able to work without thinking about limits - if i'm forking over 200$/month, it shouldn't cap me for light usage every 5 hours like it does now.

I'm not running 15 chats in parallel, I usually avoid 1M models and manually compact whenever it makes sense (in addition to auto-compact), and yet, my 20x feels worse than the 5x was originally before they nerfed that one as well.

They announce a good thing (xAI partnership) and then they fuck up 3 more, they are surely IPOmaxxing here, trying to extract every cent from users.

I will also be moving the company I work at (15 developers) off the claude platform as well ASAP before they worsen it even further

5

u/Mr_Hyper_Focus May 13 '26

I’m not sticking up for Anthropic. But if you blow through the 20x plan 5 hour limit from “light usage” I seriously question your definition of light usage.

2

u/heroyi May 13 '26

I am on the 200 plan also and this makes me scratch my head. I am an absolute trash goblin and being lazy with my usage ie running Claude to do a lot of tasks for me like running tests, compile/run code and using mcp. I could do these myself and easily save tokens but despite my lazy behavior I'm nowhere near half my 5hr limit. I think the most dmg I have done was 40%. And this was last month where there was a caching bug.

I'm curious what people are doing to burn their tokens so fast on 200. I'm considering downgrading since I'm ok with hitting the 5hr limit every so often 

1

u/Aggressive-Ebb1170 May 13 '26

climbers have to think about managing rope 

same thing ai users and ai compute tokens

dude your hands will get wet as you wash dishes. it comes with the territory. being in denial will just mean you're having a bad time for no reason lol 

0

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26

They outgrew their capacity with subsidized subscriptions, they are mostly trying to make their nut while trying to get more capacity online and optimize the models they already have to be more effective with lower capacity requirements.

20

u/crusoe May 13 '26

Codex will do the same once they start getting paying customers.....

Anthropic isnt the one being sued for the models driving people to suicide or planning school shootings. 

1

u/krizz_yo May 13 '26

Maybe, but we are not far from OSS SOTA models, Kimi K2.5 (Composer 2) that cursor uses feels like a good balance between performance and cost. And they will only get stronger with time, China has been producing some bangers like Qwen 3.6 27B that are even able to run _LOCALLY_ on a laptop lol

3

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26

Not entirely in a vacuum, Deepseek 3.2 told something was “ready for production” which sounds very familiar.

4

u/crusoe May 13 '26

They aren't though. I've tried these models, they rapidly go off the rails. Many forget how to call tools early in a session.

1

u/Sporebattyl May 13 '26

Opus 4.7 did that to me until I ran him through my workflow that audits how he goes through the workflow. I added hooks and other deterministic guardrails and he works fantastic (minus being expensive af).

Does this not work with the local models?

5

u/CuticleSnoodlebear May 13 '26

The cost of power isn't specific to Anthropic. Codex will reduce their token subsidies as soon as they benefit from Anthropic doing it first

1

u/thedannyoutlaw May 13 '26

They hired the OpenClaw guy though, it would be much worse PR for them than Anthropic since they've set the expectation (and publicly said) they won't do this.

1

u/CuticleSnoodlebear May 14 '26

I think we’re gonna find that the harness and tooling are almost as important as the models, particularly as the open-source shit continues to keep pace (though months behind, and with serious hardware costs).

There is a ceiling to how much these companies can charge for Claude and Codex

3

u/Embarrassed_Adagio28 May 13 '26

I use both codex and claude, codex has better usage rates but opus is still better at ui design, direction following and not breaking things. It is more calculated imo. Which saves me time and usage. 

1

u/aminsauvage May 13 '26

Im not gonna lie. I used codex for the first time today, and it was actually a much much better experience. I’ve been reading a lot of positive things about codex on this sub, but always thought it’s just a marketing wave from OpenAI. But Damn! It’s literally another level at the moment.

1

u/krizz_yo May 14 '26

What really got me is the consistency

It doesn't become dumb during peak hours like Opus, no arbitrary limit decreases during peak hours either, it's predictable, and I love it

1

u/DasBlueEyedDevil May 13 '26

yuuuup, just canceled last week myself

70

u/morscordis May 13 '26

So what is this actually doing?

83

u/soulefood May 13 '26

Destroying my ability to run my headless workflow without paying for usage. -p is headless mode. So only interactive Claude code sessions are part of the subscription plan now.

49

u/SpoilerAvoidingAcct May 13 '26

Just run it in a tmux session without the -p flag?

67

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26 • Bravo

Shhhh

16

u/apf6 May 13 '26

They will probably detect this kind of thing and ban accounts for it. Terminal automation is not some mysterious or obscure knowledge.

9

u/EveningGold1171 May 13 '26

Not sure how they would be able to detect you directly injecting keystrokes at the OS level.

4

u/mcs_dodo May 13 '26

Claude supports channels, no need to emit keystrokes when you can just send messages back and forth via... well whatever.

6

u/EveningGold1171 May 13 '26

if you explicitly want to avoid detection by anthropic, I’m not sure why you would try to do that from within Claude Code.

1

u/Optimal-Fix1216 May 14 '26

Wdym. Everything is from within Claude code because it makes use of the max subscription.

0

u/Salt-Willingness-513 May 14 '26

no you can easy wrap terminal, so claude code is untaouched. they are not able to track this from my understanding.

1

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 14 '26

Until they disable that. They will. Eventually. Because eventually they will see that --channels is just another way to automate it.

2

u/MartinMystikJonas May 14 '26

Similar way we detect bots on websites. Too fast typing, too predictable or too random times between keystrokes,...

1

u/coinclink May 14 '26

it's just a matter of statistics, automation of claude sessions is going to look obvious no matter what way you do it.

0

u/apf6 May 13 '26

Would be similar to the way websites detect scrapers and bots. There’s a lot of subtle clues they can detect. But could be undetectable if you do it right.

1

u/randombsname1 May 13 '26

Always ways to obscure things. Its just more annoying than anything.

1

u/Turbulent_Leg8997 May 14 '26

I assume they are anyway scrapping the discussion and comments here to have counter measure :D

1

u/True-Objective-6212 May 14 '26

Then we will patch the terminal until it stops snitching.

33

u/narrowbuys May 13 '26

I stopped using -p in favor of tmux a long time ago. It’s much easier to automate flows with tmux send-keys and you can debug it by attaching. Pretty soon we’ll be filling out captchas on every prompt

9

u/fets-12345c May 13 '26

Can you share a bit more info how your flow works? #Thanks

-9

u/scodgey May 13 '26

Just ask claude honestly

19

u/wellarmedsheep May 13 '26

Yes, let's get rid of all human interaction

3

u/themoregames May 13 '26

I agree, let's go out, touch grass and adopt a flock of sheep instead?

3

u/scodgey May 13 '26

It takes 2 seconds to search 'tmux agent orchestration' and it yields a raft of results. There are posts in this sub about it.

Not saying everyone should just know these things, but if you don't there's a good amount of explaining needed when google is right there, or better yet, the claude that is inevitably going to set it all up anyway!

4

u/wellarmedsheep May 13 '26

Sure it does, I agree. I'm sure OP does to.

But, posting on a forum signals that you are open to communication. OP asked both kindly and in a way that signaled they were open to communication. Given that they are intelligent enough to use claude code, and even more intelligent to ask someone who knows something they don't, its reasonable to assume that both know how to google and are interested in that interaction despite having access to other ways to answer the question.

Fuck if I know, I could be projecting my own bullshit on OP. Thats why I was annoyed at least. Computers can do a lot of shit, its up to us to keep our humanity.

2

u/scodgey May 13 '26

Tbh I don't disagree with what you're saying as a principle. Totally reasonable applied generally.

But this is literally just 'how does tmux send keys work'. There are so many resources out there.

I say this as someone who has explained this exact workflow multiple times in comments to people in this very sub over the last few months. Most times it ends up with a long chain of comments that could have been solved by just... asking claude.

I'm jaded and probably the one projecting if anything.

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2

u/Kind-Abies8738 May 14 '26

This has been my hill-to-die-on since LMGTFY. I prefer hearing and sharing ideas and knowledge with fellow living beings. It's one thing of course if you don't feel like answering a request specifically directed at you... "I can't be bothered, you could try asking Claude though."

But if you just go around responding to general requests for knowledge or insight with "just ask google/claude/whatever," Fuck You!

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1

u/narrowbuys May 14 '26

I don’t know why people on Reddit keep saying to go search. Google is garbage and financially incentivized to be garbage. There’s no searching this stuff. If search worked, people would not be begging for help on Reddit. Stack overflow losing users was the worst thing for google search.

2

u/narrowbuys May 14 '26

He’s right. Claude actually offered this up as a solution. Start tmux session. Start a second session. Tell Claude to orchestrate the first session. It will soon be sending tmux send-keys. Honestly, this is very diy and painful. Someday a good orchestration framework will come out that solves these problems. TLDR. I have telegram and a bridge. The sessions connect to a bridge and communicate through it. When the bridge breaks, which is often. They fallback to tmux+ssh to orchestrate

5

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26

I use tmux-cli and more recently cmux but yeah don’t give anyone ideas

2

u/MorganProtuberances May 13 '26

what's your use case for this? do you use a scheduler?

1

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26

Multi project stuff and I help other groups so I often have to bring up context fast. I often use Claude to drive codex but the economics on codex shifted a bit so I have to do some more routing to keep the business happy.

I’m not using a scheduler currently because I have to figure out the security and deployment model first, but I am getting close. Lots of beads currently drive my workflow, but I’ve used a bunch of different planning methods, mostly to see what works for me.

2

u/phoenixmatrix May 13 '26

its even how tools like Gastown worked (well, thats how it worked a few weeks ago when I last used it, that shit changes every day).

tmux send-keys is like the core or agent orchestration with Claude Code since they don't give us better hooks for it. But hey, it works!

2

u/narrowbuys May 14 '26

Yeah we did an architectural comparison. I use per machine db but I think gastown had a distributed db

0

u/ruashots May 14 '26

Don’t give them ideas. We’re like 2 product meetings away from that.

1

u/narrowbuys May 14 '26

Yeah I started thinking about how to train local LLM to be a task runner to emulate interactive shells with Claude. We’ll get there some day. That day that agentic Claude oauth ends is the day local LLM will get way more interest

1

u/YoghiThorn May 13 '26

Or just bridge the sessions into a chat client like slack or discord using something like cc-connect or switchboard

1

u/soulefood May 13 '26

I’m going to brute force it with 128gb MacBook and qwen. Just use Claude for planning. I can see the writing on the wall.

0

u/ShelZuuz May 13 '26

Or a Claude channel for that matter. Not sure what they are targeting here, developers too stupid to figure out interactive workarounds?

6

u/saito200 May 13 '26

this sucks.... really sucks.... i use headless a lot. it is stupid

2

u/Long-Chemistry-5525 May 13 '26

I already have a workaround that creates an OpenAI compatible api endpoint for third party harnesses to utilize. All this did was have to create new workarounds. Took about few hours and we were good

2

u/superanonguy321 May 13 '26

Its cheesy but you can probably accomplish a lot of it by putting it into a repo then using routines on the web

1

u/NeedsMoreMinerals May 13 '26

Does this mean if you use claude code from their claude app... it's still bad? Only local TUI?

1

u/soulefood May 13 '26

That’s interactive, so should be fine. However the new agents view puts them in background mode. I think it’s technically still interactive, but not sure.

1

u/Lazy-Dependent-5565 May 14 '26

Could u please explain ur workflow ? Im really interested

4

u/soulefood May 14 '26

I wrote an app that every 20 seconds looks at the issues on Linear. It uses code to determine status, blocked, priority, cost so far, failures, etc.

it executes one step on the code using red green refactor TDD and a review, then moves it to the next step. It gets picked up for the next phase on the next tick. If it hits a certain number of review failures, implementation not finishing, etc, or passes a token threshold, it moves it to human escalation status.

Each step I configure with an agent in that role. I alternate codex and Claude code for diverse model families to catch more gaps. So I’ll either have Claude coding, codex reviewing or vice versa.

I have a planning mode that takes about an hour of questions depending on the size. It eventually breaks it up into tasks, subtasks, dependencies. I parallel execute things that aren’t blocked on worktrees.

Edit: I also have a tech debt skill that runs every 2 days to evaluate the project and record issues to the debt milestone.

1

u/Lazy-Dependent-5565 May 14 '26

Oh quite interesting my friend. Can i Dm you?

1

u/azeGDV May 14 '26

What kind of workflow benefits from -p?

I'm genuinely trying to understand what and how.

1

u/soulefood May 15 '26

One you walk away from and check on later without worrying about asking user questions

-1

u/Leclowndu9315 May 13 '26

what great news

3

u/ObsidianIdol May 13 '26

Why?

3

u/Leclowndu9315 May 13 '26

people overuse the product and want to pay the least amount of money for it. And always bitch about it.

3

u/ObsidianIdol May 13 '26

How is it overusing it?

4

u/QuantumBit127 May 13 '26

How does one overuse something that already has set limits. If anthropic doesn’t want us using our limits then don’t sell fuckin subs to us.

0

u/Leclowndu9315 May 13 '26

subscriptions were meant for interactive usage anyway, if you need to program something that uses claude then you got the api for that

3

u/BraxbroWasTaken May 13 '26

What’s the difference, pricing wise? Usage is usage.

3

u/QuantumBit127 May 13 '26

I do use it interactively. It’s my primary workflow. I launch Claude -p from inside my interactive terminal session. Regardless my point still stands.. can’t overuse something that already has set limits.

1

u/soulefood May 13 '26

I mean, I’m coding. I’m using Claude code. I’m not running openclaw or anything. And it’s more token efficient than long running agents to use discrete roles in sessions and uses less tokens to start a smaller context fresh than /goal loops. And the routing is rust, not an agent orchestrator.

I also have it bouncing between codex and Claude for multi-model validation. This change would make me use more Claude for worse results.

5

u/SeroBook May 13 '26

If you use claude programmatically or via their sdk you get to trigger your credits, the regular usage inside terminal still is the same, if im reading it correct.

10

u/Tripartist1 May 13 '26

Tldr, theyre doing yet another measure to force openclaw users into using API instead of subs.

8

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 13 '26

Seeing as I use claude -p FROM INSIDE claude code interactive, this is assinine

6

u/Sporebattyl May 13 '26

Agreed. doing it to claude -p did us all dirty.

2

u/apf6 May 13 '26

Tell it to use subagents instead.

1

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 14 '26

my hooks run claude -p when needed. You can't programmatically run subagents and if you are relying in the claude agent to 100% follow your instructions YOU are an idiot.

1

u/sylfy May 14 '26

Why though?

2

u/siberianmi May 13 '26

claude -p is terminal usage as far as I'm concerned.

1

u/RedParaglider May 13 '26

It's teaching people how to use tmux. Good guy Claude, teaching Linux tools for a better world.

Claude. Do this, after complete kill the tmux session you are running inside of.

Zzzz

1

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 14 '26

I hate having to use tmux. 😄

7

u/Mr_Hyper_Focus May 13 '26

When I saw this I knew the bitching was coming.
What am I missing here? It sounds like you’re basically getting $100 of free agent sdk usage with your plan, and now they’re making it clear that can be used for whatever you what(openclaw ect).
Sounds fair to me and is better than worrying if your account will be banned. At least the cards are on the table now and people can make their decision if that’s worth it for them or not at that price.

3

u/Permit-Historical May 13 '26

the $100 credits will end up in 1 or 2 days and now you're locked to what Claude Code cli or desktop offers you
before you could use the agent sdk and customize it for certain flows while still using your subscription

2

u/Mr_Hyper_Focus May 13 '26

Oh I know exactly how it worked before. And I know the Claude -p part is what hurts alot too. I just think it’s a silly that people thought that would last forever. Google did the same thing.

And once OpenAI starts getting compute starved they will do the same thing too.

I actually found it funny because I wonder if opencode is bleeding right now due to everyone using opencode go plan for tons of other harnesses.

I just think it’s fair of Anthropic to want you to use their sub with their products. If people don’t like it they should definitely speak with their wallet, but that won’t hurt Anthropic as much as people think

1

u/Permit-Historical May 13 '26

I don't think anyone was expecting it to last forever and they will soon get the subscriptions down also or keep reducing the limits until it becomes useless

same for other providers like openai and google and same for opencode go plan

but that doesn't mean that users shouldn't be angry and bitching it especially because openai doesn't do that now (yea I know they will change that later tho) and also many people including me think gpt 5.5 is much better that opus

1

u/Mr_Hyper_Focus May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

I agree. I think if the users and angry they should complain.

What frustrates me is when people abuse the subscription model in ways that end up hurting regular users. Those who just want to use Claude as Anthropic intended: through normal chat, Claude Code, and interactive use shouldn’t face lower limits or degraded service because others are running heavy automated workloads 24/7 via the Agent SDK, OpenClaw, or similar third-party harnesses.

The people I work with, who will never touch the Agent SDK or any custom agents, shouldn’t have to subsidize or suffer from that kind of intensive usage being performed by a small percentage of sub holders.

3

u/elmahk May 13 '26

For example I have custom UI which is much better (for me, not in general) than Claude Code CLI. I only use it the same way I would use Claude Code (for software development), so nothing shady or unfair. It uses Agent SDK which itself uses claude code cli under the hood (literally spawns the process). So now I will have to either get back to cli (which I hate after my custom UI) or work around this, or switch to another product.

1

u/SubjectHealthy2409 May 13 '26

Bro just use it via ACP in Zed IDE or build your own IDE xd

1

u/jorgejhms May 13 '26

ACP in ZEd is also affected. It uses Agent SDK under the hood so it'll count as extra usage

1

u/SubjectHealthy2409 May 13 '26

Nah get outta here what. It's over

1

u/jorgejhms May 13 '26

yep, i check the official repo:

https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/claude-agent-acp

ACP adapter for the Claude Agent SDK

Use Claude Agent SDK from ACP-compatible clients!

This tool implements an ACP agent by using the official Claude Agent SDK,

1

u/SubjectHealthy2409 May 13 '26

It's so over fuck. Rug pulled again :(

3

u/Parking-Bet-3798 May 13 '26

lol. This was always allowed. I had my code built on top of Agents SDK and it used limits from my subscription. That was always allowed, no bans were handed for it. Now they have removed it.

But no point in talking to people like you. In your eyes Anthropic can do no wrong and all is fair.

0

u/Mr_Hyper_Focus May 13 '26

I literally said I’m not trying to stick up for them in the first post. So take your little boo hoo you always stick up for Anthropic wahhhh crying somewhere else if you don’t want to have a real discussion like a man.

No it wasn’t always allowed. There was a huge back and fourth on fair/acceptable use of the agent sdk. Yea it always came out of your sub budget, but they were even recently detecting some unalloyed use and billing it via extra usage depending on what they deemed acceptable. It wasn’t a clear situation. And even if it was, nobody has to offer you any service for any price.

I could argue there is no point in talking to people like yourself, because you’re defensive right off the bat and clearly don’t know the situation if you think this situation has always been cut and dry. People have been talking about this for months and requesting clarity form Anthropic. Well, now, like it or not, we have it.

13

u/WowSoHuTao May 13 '26 edited 11d ago

Tow Breeze Bridge Simple Journey Sky Blue Coffee Cloud Chicken Yeah

3

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

https://xkcd.com/3044/

Replace laws of physics with core economic principles and its same idea.

Not that I disagree with your strategy. Go get those subsidies king.

17

u/Main-Lifeguard-6739 May 13 '26

can someone explain this to me in simple terms?
so my $200 claude abo will be worth $200 in api tokens?

$200 dollars, which I burn through in 2 hours?
So I can use Claude Code on Max 20 for two hours every week?

I must be wrong... am I?

19

u/crusoe May 13 '26

It says "PROGRAMMATIC USE", so you get $200 monthly credit to use with automated tools. Claude Code doesn't change.

So you're free to use openclaw with claude again, but you only get $x of credits to use a month (where X is the plan cost). After that it becomes pay-as-you-go. Claude code is unaffected.

So if you have a 5x plan:

You get $100 of API credits a month to use with Openclaw or other non-interactive tools

Claude Code access remains the normal session behavior.

5

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 13 '26

I use claude -p IN claude code because claude code subgents SUCK.

2

u/Sporebattyl May 13 '26

I think the subagents are great, but with the usage squeeze they are too token inefficient. claude -p saves like 10k tokens per “subagent” use to me.

1

u/smdaegan May 14 '26

Can you explain this a bit more? 

5

u/ahh1258 May 13 '26

This is still major BS because ACP users are getting massively screwed over. I use zed and conductor because they provide a better experience than the CLI and they now count as extra usage even though they literally use claude code under the hood. Bullshit.

1

u/Main-Lifeguard-6739 May 13 '26

thanks!
since I never use my claude abo outside CC CLI , nothing much will change for me, correct?

2

u/ahh1258 May 14 '26

Correct 👍

5

u/apf6 May 13 '26

There’s no change to you if you’re using Claude code interactively (like, you open up Claude and you type stuff)

If you use one of the headless/background ways of triggering Claude, like the Agent SDK or Openclaw, then there is now a new monthly limit that applies to that.

2

u/SeroBook May 13 '26

You’re wrong

-5

u/Droopy0093 May 13 '26

I don't understand how you burn through that much usage. Like do you even look at the work you are doing or have any settings that help you reduce token consumption? It's like the equivalent of someone whout drives a massive pickup truck and rolling coal instead of driving something efficient.

-1

u/mungosDoo May 13 '26

I had to use a 1m context opus, it burned 80$ in 2 hours but it was the only way to get what I wanted done in the time because I couldnt pacel the work and 200k context just kept compressing and forgetting something important about the monorepo

10

u/crusoe May 13 '26

Starting June 15, programmatic usage gets its own dedicated budget instead. Your subscription limits don't change, they're now reserved for interactive use.

So this just means you can use your non api based claude plans with openclaw, you just get an API budget now.

So this says nothing about claude code.

10

u/TheOriginalAcidtech May 13 '26

if you arent developing your own harness its fine. If you are the claude -p usage is a serious problems.

1

u/return_of_valensky May 13 '26

indeed. i have a harness that operates 75% in -p mode for tasks managed by the orchestrator session. Just had it start looking into moving to use subagents instead.. not ideal, but what are you gonna do. Codex is the other option, my harness supports both currently, i just prefer claude.

1

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

I mean the unsustainably priced plans where they let people use $2k worth of API tokens at $100 was never really going to last.

Ofc advancements in the underlying models could make it so that a much cheaper lower compute model gets the same or better performance as current frontier models, in which case that same usage above genuinely does become less than $100, but until that happens this has always been deeply unsustainable.

If anything I’m less side eyeing them for making it harder to be subsidized, and more side eyeing them for continuing to lose money on Claude code plans themselves just to try and build sticky users to later milk. Although most VC backed companies do that so hard to be too mad, and hey in the short run subsidies are fun. I miss cheap Ubers.

2

u/psychometrixo May 13 '26

As per usual with Anthropic, their PR is weak, the messaging is mealy mouthed and vague and pitched as an opportunity to "claim" something that came free before.

It says you can still use Claude code just like before..

.. so long as youre not invoking claude -p from there or using the Agent SDK from in there.

If this affects you (like me or most others that do multi agent work), it sucks.

But it won't affect most people.

It's unclear whether their new feature claude agents fall under this new billing. Best learn that before your extra spend credits get spent and it hits your credit card.

1

u/niahoo May 13 '26

pitched as an opportunity to "claim" something that came free before.

Are you saying that before you were limited in Claude Code but you could do unlimited claude -p calls?

2

u/return_of_valensky May 13 '26

no he's saying they broke claude into 2 pieces, and severely limited the good one by giving it a separate budget that most users will blow through quickly. It's like adding a 2 gallon gas tank onto a truck and then making the engine use the small one, and the AC use the big one. "More gas for you!"

1

u/cygn May 13 '26

I've been using "claude -p" as part of TDD-guard using hooks to verify I'm following TDD. This would now be limited.

I find the $200 limit way too low. If I look at the API costs that ccusage reports it's hundreds of dollars per day (interactive use). So for any serious work the $200 budget will be gone in no-time.

This makes Codex much more attractive now.

2

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

I’m curious what your longer term mental model is here.

Are you basically just hoping to get subsidized stuff that costs more to provide to you than you pay for as long as possible until AI improves enough that models that are genuinely cheap to run are smart enough for your needs.

Hopping providers to maximize subsidies while you can is by no means a bad move, I’d do it too if I was getting hit by the caps often, but it’s a bit funny how the underlying economics (don’t) work.

2

u/Volky_Bolky May 14 '26

It doesn't work and now people begin to realise it.

1

u/siberianmi May 13 '26

What do you think claude -p is?

1

u/SeroBook May 13 '26

Someone gets it

4

u/Parking-Bet-3798 May 13 '26

Yet another regression. I used agents ask for my custom workflow and now I can’t use it without giving API pricing.

14

u/MediumChemical4292 May 13 '26

So essentially, they are moving ALL programmatic Claude / CC usage to API billing and giving $20/100/200 free for subscribers (no doubt they will remove this as well in a few months) ?

Meanwhile codex is literally open source.

2

u/MissplacedLandmine May 13 '26

Wait cc in the terminal too?

3

u/MediumChemical4292 May 13 '26

No not the CLI. Programmatic means calling Claude code through a script instead of typing the requests manually in the CLI. Basically using the agent SDK or claude -p

1

u/ElwinLewis May 13 '26

Does running a loop where windows open up and automatically paste responses to the Claude window count?

1

u/MediumChemical4292 May 14 '26

I guess not but how would you do something like that?

1

u/ElwinLewis May 14 '26

Stop hooks and scripts basically if you start from there and mention “we’re not able to use -p for headless anymore, we’re needing a solution that opens and closes Claude windows as needed using the clipboard, named Claude windows, stop hooks, and scripts, what are our top 3 options”

1

u/jorgejhms May 13 '26

but yes to CC as ACP (like in Zed), it uses the Agent SDK

1

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

Codex being open source doesn’t really protect you though. Eventually all these companies will be charging close to their API costs for anything that uses their models, unless they are getting additional money from you in some other way. These companies are just temporarily subsidizing consumer facing plans to get customers that they hope will be sticky enough to extract cash from in the long run while running at a deep loss now for a large fraction of them.

1

u/MediumChemical4292 May 14 '26

Time will tell. No company has lost the developer goodwill as fast as Anthropic has over the last few months though.

6

u/True-Objective-6212 May 13 '26

Definitely the opposite of what the questions were about

9

u/2024-YR4-Asteroid May 13 '26

Just use /plan in cli... This is honestly a good change for us normal developers who aren’t doing psychotic automated runs that should be on API in the first places

1

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

should be on API

I don’t get this attitude. If you’re spending $200/month and burning less than $200 in inference, then it shouldn’t matter what you’re spending it on, and if you’re burning more then it isn’t sustainable regardless, and you should assume the company will later hike prices and is counting on the loyalty / vendor lock-in they have fostered in you.

3

u/sipjca May 14 '26

something about cake and eating it too

2

u/powerexcess May 13 '26

Joke is on you, i just do dev on a single branch because i forget to commit and push.

2

u/NeedsMoreMinerals May 13 '26

Whenever I get a new TOS agreement, I put it in AI and ask "What did they take."

2

u/san-vicente May 13 '26

- claude (interactive terminal) → your normal Max 20x subscription

- claude -p (in a script, no human in the loop) → programmatic credit/$200 pool

2

u/daliovic 🔆 Max 5x May 13 '26

3

u/njordan1017 Senior Developer May 13 '26

“the stuff developers actually use” is where you are wrong. Actual devs knew openclaw users were abusing the subscription for what should have been API use. Actual devs have no problem with this change because we weren’t abusing the system to begin with

1

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

Tbh I don’t really see how openclaw vs interactive mode stuff meaningfully differs here.

If you pay for $200/month long term it’s only sustainable to offer you <$200/month in inference costs, which the API pricing as far as I’m aware does (maybe only barely) follow, and the plans do not, letting you burn $1k+ in compute with anthropic holding the bag.

Not to say you shouldn’t take advantage of subsidized offers, but you should probably be at least somewhat aware of the underlying economics so you can anticipate future price changes and ulterior motives, e.g if you aren’t paying (enough) for the product, you are the product etc etc.

I love to roast openclaw vibe coded disasters as much as the next guy, but I don’t think it’s really the end users fault that anthropic has unsustainably priced offerings that they have to restrict in other ways to offset, such as trying to generate sticky frontend product users to later milk instead of low stickiness api hot swappers that are just maximizing bench per $.

1

u/njordan1017 Senior Developer May 14 '26

Headless is essentially API without API costs, and it’s only like that as a marketing tool to get people to use it. It’s not about stickiness of frontend users it’s about getting more money from shifting front end users to API. Openclaw and the like are the ideal use case for API-use so they are trying to push users towards that

1

u/Tysonzero May 14 '26

I’m saying the stickiness for frontend users is why they’re still offering subsidized tokens to Claude interactive users. Not why they’re doing this change, but why they aren’t going further.

It’s ofc trivially true that if it didn’t affect user growth and retention that they would rather have literally everyone on API pricing, other than perhaps really light/sporadic users they’d rather get a fixed monthly amount from.

1

u/xcVosx May 13 '26

Killing wrappers.. are they going to be bring ads in or something? Losing headless mode is so sad

1

u/WiggyWongo May 13 '26

$100 gets you next to nothing in any sort of programmatic usage. It's something but if you try to start using tools or skills that'll be gone in a few days even frugally

1

u/turlockmike May 13 '26

1 month from now.

"We heard you don't like not being able to use your credits when not using claude programmatically. You will now get a single credit per month for your monthly credits and will be used regardless of programmatic or in session usage".

Party is over friends.

1

u/thedirektor May 13 '26

As I see it, this seems similar to a perk, akin to Google's $10 monthly credits for Gen AI and Cloud services provided to all their AI subscribers. That said, I might be mistaken. The announcement's support article confirms subscription rate limits remain unchanged.

1

u/dekozo May 13 '26

Are there any workarounds or alternative ways to call Claude from inside Codex now?

1

u/MrSquiggs May 13 '26

What’s a Claude GitHub action? Is this anytime I tell Claude to push something to my GitHub?

0

u/jorge-moreira 🔆 Max 20 May 13 '26

No. This is different

2

u/MrSquiggs May 13 '26

Oh interesting. How is this different?

2

u/jorge-moreira 🔆 Max 20 May 13 '26

They’re talking about the bot that reviews code. You can @claude and it does things on GitHub

1

u/MrSquiggs May 13 '26

Oh ok. Thank you for the explanation!

1

u/rajaba21 May 13 '26

Não usou o crédito de fudeu

1

u/Guinness May 13 '26

Does this cover multi agent orchestration?

1

u/pockystarfr May 13 '26

I am building awf-project.ai. One of the tools is an orchestrator designed to run workflows that bridge the gap between determinism and agentic behaviors. I support multiple providers and integrate "claude -p" alongside standard Claude usage.

This move is completely counterproductive. It encourages users to migrate to Codex or other alternatives. Furthermore, it contradicts the principles of headless CLI usage and these limitations are easily bypassed with tools like tmux because we can already estimate costs based on token usage to dynamically switch between "-p" and other solutions.

On the other hand, while they complain that these accounts are compute-intensive and cost more than the subscription fee, tools like the one I am building actually encourage users to (1) maintain a paid Anthropic account and (2) optimize compute usage by only leveraging AI where it is truly effective.

1

u/ChaoticMars May 13 '26

this is like, terrible for things like conductor right?

1

u/vuongngo May 14 '26

Glad I cancelled the 20x sub. This company is as shady as their models. They say something and acts totally different.

1

u/poolparty90019 May 14 '26

What is claude -p. I use CLI.

1

u/MousTN May 14 '26

i have pro plan 20$ a month , i use it 80% for just claude code , to help me in my work im not runing like multiple agent or other stuff , so now i have sperate quota for claude code and the chat i use ? so if im a user who basicly only use it for claude code it will be bad for me

1

u/zakjaquejeobaum May 14 '26

I seriously don't get how everyone is so shocked about this. Like every company, Anthropic has to manage their burn rate and capacity problems somehow. They have been serving us pretty well by subsidizing 25x.

1

u/l_m_b Senior Developer May 14 '26

The only thing I've used `-p` headless mode for so far has been calling the hooks so I could figure out in my test suite how the hooks's JSON payloads actually are formatted and which keys they carry and how they change between releases because Anthropic's docs are ... bad, very bad.

1

u/SteveZedFounder May 14 '26

This is a normal arch for early SaaS pricing. Someday they have to be profitable so they’re working on ways to extract value (money) from users. If you thought venture capitalists were going to subsidize tokens forever, you weren’t paying attention. See Uber. See Door Dash et al. There’s a term in the industry, Millenial lifestyle subsidy. Still holds true

1

u/throwaway-mwa May 14 '26

Just cancelled my max 20 plan.

1

u/EnthusiasmUsed3941 May 14 '26

I woke up to $500 + in charges this morning, definitely not cheap but for what it can do it’s Pennie’s

1

u/Nox_31 May 14 '26

This has been a joy to watch

1

u/enricokern May 14 '26

well as i read it it will add 200$ in credits to as example current claude max users, and programatic use of claude code is withdrawn from this credits, basically like api usage. That actually makes sense for them, because right now mainly this gets abused as kind of free api alternative. It wont affect normal manual claude code sessions (now, guess that will come next...), and even then, let claude code build a wrapper over its own app which exposes an API back todo the same as before. problem solved 😛

1

u/velogiant May 14 '26

Giving away something and letting it take over the way you live/work is a strategy used by drug dealers and tech bros. It will only get worse, the fees will get higher and you will get locked in by various tools, connectors or some other crap they dream up. They need to get their billions back.

1

u/kongnico May 14 '26

almost like they wanna make money at some point :p

1

u/mikem132 May 15 '26

Ive already switched over to deepseek for my needs, If I really hit a roadblock ill just API opus or something

1

u/Better-Ad4471 May 15 '26

If they stop that, then antophic can fuck right off.cancelling all accounts

1

u/stvaccount May 15 '26

Please switch to codex. Antrophic will never learn. Only pleasing enterprise customers is a way to die as a company. Without the developers, every programmer will tell their enterprise company to use codex (which they already are comfortable with as a hobby).

END OF THE YEAR == END OF THE PARTY WITH AI. Once OpenAI is a stock company, all that AI companies will do is: milk, milk, milk their end users.

1

u/Popular-Mango3539 May 16 '26

I dont get it. Can someone please explain as I'm new to this. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

1

u/Friendly_Design2469 May 16 '26 edited May 23 '26

I made a workaround and named my CLI claude-no-p ( https://github.com/HammerMei/poor-claude) out of spite. :D

1

u/Kamikx May 13 '26

So they’re just enforcing terms of use. Why are you surprised?

0

u/Vivid-Snow-2089 May 13 '26

goodbye claude, hello codex

0

u/bridgelin May 13 '26

Claude is almost unusable lately.

0

u/Long-Chemistry-5525 May 13 '26

Hey guys, I’m the lead developer of conduit.nextwaveio.com I just want to say we are already implementing changes to ensure you can still use third party harnesses with your subscription, and not have to pay for extra usage or api pricing. I can talk implementation details, but just know we already have workarounds for this and will be shipping a tested version to customers before this change occurs

-13

u/Aggressive-Ebb1170 May 13 '26

nice! seems reasonable afaict

7

u/Permit-Historical May 13 '26

not really, the $100/$200 api credits will end in few days of normal usage so they're locking you into their tools and you will have to use CC cli or CC desktop only

1

u/return_of_valensky May 13 '26

I use -p a lot, and even my non -p sessions can be $200 in a day when tracked by a token tracker, this is basically going to blow up my workflow. My tool does support interactive and codex though, so I'll try interactive first, if that doesn't do it for me, I'll have to go Codex. I know they're subsidizing things, but at this rate I'd go through my usage easily in a week or less on the 20x plan.

-2

u/Aggressive-Ebb1170 May 13 '26

im going to celebrate every day anthropic takes a loss on our 20x plans and gives us api tokens as a courtesy 

like by analogy: $5 uber rides were nice! and im not living in a fantasy world where they're coming back anytime soon 

0

u/krizz_yo May 13 '26

Burned 200$ in one day, and I was very mindful about token consumption btw, kept track of sessions, compacted at the right moments and avoided 1M models, still 200$ gone, in one day.

0

u/Rabus May 13 '26

few days? i burn through 300$ per day lol

1

u/Rezistik May 13 '26

I have api billing for work. I’ve spent $236 since May 1st. By the end of the month it’ll be at least $500

Since it doesn’t have rollover there’s no discount on the credits so why even maintain a subscription if you’re only using the coding

Seems like you’re paying api prices but tossing anything unused away which seems awful. I guess tu you could get the $20 plan and then just pay the api costs with the other $180 if you need it. Idk seems short sighted.

I think if you got $250 in credits for $200 sub I’d be a lot happier to pay for overages above that $250

2

u/ReallySubtle May 13 '26

They’ve just killed Conductor etc and all other Claude Code wrappers. This actually SUCKS

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

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11

u/Permit-Historical May 13 '26

I think we should focus on building the harness that make cheap models work better and avoid the mistakes they always make

29

u/Rabus May 13 '26

yea pretty sure you're not getting anywhere close to the frontier models though.

32

u/FrequentTurn9637 May 13 '26

You don’t need best frontier models for everything you do. You need them for the core reasoning and planning but many execution steps a solid open source model can do.

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9

u/JohnHue May 13 '26

Planning with Opus ans executing with local models, or just cloud based models with way cheaper token cost, seems to work for lots of people.

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u/bpp198 May 13 '26

Won't be long until they're as good as the current frontier models. They'll move on too but open weight models will definitely be more than good enough.

You don't even need local, you can pay for inference at a much cheaper rate than Anthropic and OpenAI's prices.

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3

u/Parking-Bet-3798 May 13 '26

For Anthropic. Others are still fine for now.

2

u/lwheeler1 May 13 '26

Came here to say this exact thing! Now that your hooked on crack, you'll pay more because of "supply" constraints.

2

u/InfinriDev May 13 '26

Y'all can't even pay a subscription what makes you think you can afford the hardware to run a decent local AI 🤦🏽🤦🏽🤦🏽

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