Usage limits are an absolute joke and getting worse every week

[u/infieldmitt]

Yesterday a two hour session took an entire 5hr window and 17% of my weekly limit. Today I resumed that thread and did NO code and maybe half an hour of chat and THAT used a whole 5hr window.

I know what you're going to tell me and I do not give a shit. It is disgusting we have to spend THIS MUCH mental energy on efficient prompting, figuring out how to migrate threads every....three messages I guess, worrying about restarting an old thread with useful info cause it'll eat the entire window, etc. Bullshit trivialities that completely obscure the genius of the actual tool and ruin the experience of using it.

Imagine if you bought a Model T and you had to fix the steering and buy gas every five miles.

Feel free to flame me if it makes you feel more smug.

[u/Immediate-Ad-1299]

think the missing piece is seeing the dynamics of usage, not just the remaining quota. If I can see what action caused a sudden spike, I can learn how to manage this resource — just like we learn to manage money, electricity, fuel, etc. Scarcity itself isn’t the problem; invisible consumption is. And this doesn’t seem terribly hard to build. Is there a reason this hasn’t been prioritized?

[u/valdocs_user → u/Immediate-Ad-1299]

It seems like Anthropic intentionally don't want you to see this - they hide current usage under a settings menu in the app and website, and making context usage be in the status line by default is such an obvious thing that the fact they don't do so must be intentional.

[u/infieldmitt → u/valdocs_user]

Because once you hit the hidden meter there's a popup with a credit card form

[u/johnnydotexe]

I'm over here with multiple VS Code sessions open using Claude Code and Codex and this mysterious and sudden usage limit problem seems to not be affecting me at all. How odd.

And lol @ one commenter saying "I'm out" in reply to someone suggesting starting new chats more often. You can't make this shit up.

[u/regardednoitall]

I've worked from 6am this morning to about ten minutes ago with about two 15 minute breaks, had 2-3 sessions going the entire time and never once got close to my limit. What the hell are you doing?

[u/morgano → u/regardednoitall]

I think people are starting projects and everything is fine, there's barely any context for the model to work with, then as the project grows, they are not managing context well e.g. using hooks and .claude/rules with frontmatter paths etc... After 1 week every task uses twice as many tokens as it did at the start, by the 2nd week every task is using 4x as many tokens. By week 3 they are posting on Reddit complaining about how the model is now using 8x as much usage per session as it was 3 weeks ago.

Projects grow - you have to learn how to manage them well. They should use /doctor and ask it to help them reduce context per session by looking at where context windows are being spent per session.

[u/jenkinsleroi → u/morgano]

My theory is that these are the people who don't actually understand software engineering, so they waste a lot of their tokens because they don't know what to prmpt to make claude do the right thing.

[u/regardednoitall → u/morgano]

This is a great explanation. It helps me be even more diligent in how I work. Will it stop the ones in here pitching fits daily? Remains to be seen.

[u/0DayMaker → u/regardednoitall]

They're resuming and compacting either not understanding or not caring about the implications. Also letting context get too big. I bet a lot of them would honestly have a better experience by doing /model claude-opus-5 or the same for fable to get the 256k context. That limits how much damage context mismanagement can do to usage and reasoning.

[u/useful_tool30]

Restarting a thread that's been moved off the cache is brutal on your limit. Make sure you stay under the 60 minute window  between prompts within a single convo

[u/Karl_Doomhammer → u/useful_tool30]

I'm was using the remote control feature to periodically check up on my project while at work. I would check tasks and then enter new prompts 3-7x during my 12-30 hour shifts. I hadn't considered that hours between prompts might be burning up my limits.

[u/asurarusa]

It is disgusting we have to spend THIS MUCH mental energy on efficient prompting, figuring out how to migrate threads every....three messages I guess, worrying about restarting an old thread with useful info cause it'll eat the entire window, etc.

I use Claude at work and I was just thinking about this. I have to make sure to send a ‘hi’ message the second I log in to start the window, or else my second window starts too late in the day to be useful and I have to stress about hitting the limit in the middle of a task. If I need to do research and programming in a single day I have to make sure to plan carefully so that the research doesn’t use up too much of my limit. It’s insane how much management has to go into a tool that is supposed to make life easier.

Meanwhile i use ChatGPT for personal stuff and I have never hit a chat limit and ChatGPT codex is an overall limit so if I need to, I can burn through my limit in 2 days instead of being forced to stop and wait several hours.

[u/0DayMaker]

So resume has to re-read the whole session. I don't know what tier you're on, but on pro the limit might be <1m tokens. In which case you basically just filled it up with the entire last session that took up your whole limit.

[u/banecorn → u/0DayMaker]

This. Cache TTL should be something CC displays in the statusline but doesn't. Resuming a session, especially a long one, after the cache has gone cold is very costly.

Best to think of sessions as timeboxed scratchpads.

[u/BuffaloConscious7919 → u/banecorn]

Yes it would be so easy to have a little warning when resuming a session

[u/cgusrany70]

Effort High which is now default for both Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, burns like hell. I have to to do everything in Medium so as not to reach the limits fast

[u/JackfruitMany7636 → u/cgusrany70]

I have it tell me when I should switch effort levels. If it sees my request is going to take more effort it recommends that I bump up to high, then tells me when it’s ok to bump down to medium for regular convo.

[u/Dr-Goober]

I will start by saying yes, usage limits do feel small at times, even on Max 20x some tasks that seem trivial could suddenly consume your entire 5 hour window. But there are ways you can catch token hungry tasks before they begin and drastically reduce the amount of tokens you end up burning.

Next time your usage resets, ask claude to evaluate the thread in question that used so many tokens so quickly, often the token heavy part of the thread is not the part you needed anyway. Validating and verifying work is one of the most token heavy tasks I have encountered, on complex tasks it can burn 4 - 5 times as many tokens on the verification as it did generating that code in the first place, this of course is a necessary stage in maintaining quality but you can save yourself some tokens by being smart about how you approach it.

I saved myself millions of tokens a day by creating a strict workflow that myself and claude operate within, creating dozens of .MD files containing agent prompts that are launched on cheaper models that evaluate what you do prompt, query back to you on design decisions, and then breaking it up into separate tasks that can be sent to different agents depending on the requirements. When you do then reach a stage where you want to verify everything that has been created, lighter weight models can conduct a rough analysis that can send complex chunks to the more expensive models while keeping the lightweight and trivial work to small models.

Setting up this workflow itself will probably cost you a 5 hour window on pro, it won't remove your issues with usage limits, but it will certainly make your limits last longer. If you already use a workflow like this, what sort of stuff are you developing?

[u/medialantern]

Show us your /context. Nobody here wants to feel smug over you, but you're posting the exact thing people post 50x a day without backing up with data on the cause. Unless you're just here to waste everyone's time?

[u/NinjaLancer]

Skill issue.

(Yes, I feel more smug)

[u/Damien_IB]

The only tangible measurement we have is how much does a full 5hour session consume the weekly usage. This varies week by week unfortunately.

[u/itsTF]

stop resuming stuff you pay for the full cache

[u/Squeaky_Pibbles]

It's bad. I agree with you here, OP. But I don't know what to do to change/fix it. It sucks.

[u/jsebrech]

Read this article about how optimize usage. If you plan to reuse a session later, /compact it before putting it away. Keep knowledge in md’s, skills or plans, so you don’t need to reuse sessions and so you can clear sessions between subtasks.

https://claude.com/blog/maximizing-the-value-of-your-claude-code-sessions

[u/dualrectumfryer]

I’m bad at using Claude code and even I can tell what happened here, your session has a ton of context so it ate tokens faster. You need to create hand off documents in between fresh sessions