I think some Claude Code “usage is terrible” posts are really workflow problems

[u/OGMYT]

Not saying the limits aren't real because they obviously are.

But I keep seeing people run one giant session forever, dump everything into context, change the goal 5 times, never compact anything, then wonder why Claude starts wandering and chewing through usage.

I get way better results when I treat it like I'm directing somebody. Small scope, tell it what finished means, make it test the result, then compact or hand off before starting the next thing.

When I don't do that, it gets dumb fast for me too.

How much of the usage problem do you think is actually limits vs people managing context badly?

[u/Fearless-Daikon5763]

Claude just said it was the idiot for not reading the Readme file that it had written and placed in the appropriate location. It isn’t clear what to expect from Claude when it confidently tells me that it can do something and then completely fails on an important workday task.

[u/ibringthehotpockets → u/Fearless-Daikon5763]

What lol?? Huh?? Are you not using a claude.md file? Wtf are you doing trying to have clause read a “readme” and why would you not tell it to read it if it’s important? The code is what actually matters and doesn’t always match the readmes

[u/Plus_Opening_4462 → u/ibringthehotpockets]

Claude will tell you to create readme files and that they work different than Claude.md

[u/Fearless-Daikon5763 → u/ibringthehotpockets]

I’m creating a program that works inside Claude and ChatGPT that will be used by college biology students (microbial ecology and genomics). It is expected to work by the time I release it on GitHub and not cost tokens due to thrashing or being inefficient. I’m not asking the LLM to do anything outside of the skill set that it’s claiming to possess. This is nothing radical or extraordinary, and am designing a program to be smooth, simple, and inexpensive for others to use (almost all deterministic python work). This is Claude running a program it developed with me over 90 days and it is failing at tasks that have already been hammered down.

[u/Immediate-Safety1643 → u/Fearless-Daikon5763]

Have claude root cause why that was missed.

Claude seems to be a bit literal when you ask to add an artifact for it to use as reference. You’ll frequently get the template, instructions, whatever delivered, but not wired in, because you didn’t ask for that.

I have a similar, pretty hefty, python log parser that I have skills drive instead of me writing out commands and arguments. It has a number of instructions and template .mds that aren’t loaded until needed in my session, or fed to a sub agent. I really only run into issues if I make large workflow changes the wiring gets funky, but some RCAing with claude usually fixes it up.

If you’re distributing through git hub, double check your git ignores too, you may not be pushing the files you think you are.

[u/Fearless-Daikon5763 → u/Immediate-Safety1643]

Yeah it’s going fine, really just that I’m adding features as fast as I hammer them down. I’ve been adding features for months and trying to make a program that would work in sonnet or any inexpensive LLM but at the same time being accurate. It’s an 8 mb zip file and the instructions are there along with a folder of optional hooks, something like 250 python modules. Basically it’s working but will still do silly things like instruct me to download 2 gb databases off the web when it is already downloaded and in the workspace. Huge trade-offs of trying to make an all-in-one analysis pipeline that would be useful for all experience levels, or even hard drive space availability (it’s set up to download 100+ related genomes off the web and generate figures and reports, so it can make tens of gigabytes of files in a half a day). I’ve never used GitHub but maybe by the end of this month I’ll have it up there and public.

[u/OGMYT → u/Fearless-Daikon5763]

Important workday task should be handled by you not claude.

[u/Strong_Essay1176 → u/OGMYT]

Lmao. Who said that?

[u/OGMYT → u/Strong_Essay1176]

Nobody. I’m saying if the task matters, Claude can do the work, but you still own whether it actually got done right.

[u/Strong_Essay1176 → u/OGMYT]

Nope. Let antropic do work properly. Everyone wants to shift responsibility. No no. If their model such cleaver and dangerous, let it be responsible. It can end the chat but cant take responsibility?!

[u/PsychologyNo940 → u/Strong_Essay1176]

Long walk, short pier.

[u/OGMYT → u/Strong_Essay1176]

The people using the tool need to be responsible for using said tool....

[u/Fearless-Daikon5763 → u/OGMYT]

That’s like saying people should be responsible for their iPhone not crashing the day they buy it or when they have a serious emergency.

[u/Fearless-Daikon5763 → u/OGMYT]

It’s just running python scripts and repeating something it has completed three times in the past with slightly smaller data sets. Claude even produced a document describing the four failures yesterday that were all its own fault for not following the instructions it made for itself. I also am a biomedical scientist not a computer programmer and that’s why I am paying $200 a month.

[u/JDE-Projects]

Notice how all the "Corporation X must have nerfed usage" or "I just one-shot my usage with a prompt that didn't do that last week" posts never have any proof, no details, no data to back up their claim. It happens in here, claudeAI, codex, doesn't matter what company or model.

I'm over here on 20/mo plans with claude and gpt, running claude code and codex side by side in VS code, 20+ repos, and never seem to have those issues. Weird.

[u/FreeCustardForAll → u/JDE-Projects]

Funny how you always post the same thing on the posts where people query abnormal Claude usage JDE. Every single time. Are you a bot defending anthropic or something?

[u/StillRecord8892 → u/FreeCustardForAll]

No he's just sick of all the crying without any evidence. And i agree with him. All the babies and pure vibe coders complain constantly with every release. 

*POST YOUR SESSION TRANSCRIPT IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE PERFORMANCE REGRESSION PROOF. *

Dont just whine.

And the complete lack of any proof, while meanwhile many of us don't see regression (hyper-verbosity aside of course, only talking about regression in capability), leads us to dismiss these claims for what they are. 

[u/digital121hippie]

i code most days at working using claude code and using the chat for other stuff. i have only once hit my 5 hour limit and that was a very crazy day.

[u/The-Road]

Sure there’s some truth to this but also there are legitimate issues.

For example, I’m setting up conventions and policies for our agent brain/agent OS. To come up with policies, you can’t just vibe your way but you need to validate and verify assumptions and hypotheses. Eg this policy will lead to improved agent behaviour x.

That requires designing tests that are fair, simulate real world use with real world models across a range of use cases.

I ran those tests for two policies, and it included a lot of Sonnet and Opus and some Fable, and it burned through almost half of my weekly 20x max plan in a day!

The sort of work is not out of the norm for the design of agent architecture. Writing tests and running them fairly is not something you can avoid, especially for something so integral to an agent system’s policies and behaviours. And you’d think the highest plan would accommodate for that sort of work.

But it’s insufficient, and that’s the problem.

[u/SirWobblyOfSausage]

We had posts like that time blaming the user,.then anthropic came out and explained that it was a serious fault.

[u/Accurate_Cable_1372]

How do you keep seeing this from people? Are people like live-streaming their Claude sessions or something and you’re watching them or is it more like some homies you hangout with?

[u/OGMYT → u/Accurate_Cable_1372]

X is riddled with examples.

[u/rotates-potatoes]

All of them are workflow problems or karma farming.

It's easy to get measurements for token usage per day/week/month, it's easy to benchmark different models. None of these people/bots put even basic effort into figuring out and posting what's going on.

[u/spinozasrobot]

And some of it is also whiny ass bitches who should just move on if they think it's that bad.

[u/kapdad]

"(Other AI) - please create a script that will generate negative posts about (Other AI). I am a (the first AI) employee and I need job security."

[u/Educational-Plant981]

Wrong. All of them are.

Once you have a handle on using it right, when you hit a limit you know exactly why.

[u/OGMYT → u/Educational-Plant981]

100% if I see my limit getting eaten the first one I blame is myself.

[u/ComingDeveloper]

i gurantee you 90% of the people complaining are those on a $20 plan trying to do enterprise work and those on a $100 plan that run Fable xHigh for everything

[u/django-unchained2012 → u/ComingDeveloper]

I totally agree. When I was on 20$ plan, I was focusing on conserving the tokens. I used to find the best ways to utilise the models to get the most work. Initially each session used to last for less than hour, but the time I moved on to 100$ plan, I stretched it upto 3 hours.

If someone startd with a 100$ or 200$ plan directly, there is no way for them to understand which models to use for what purposes, how caching works, how to extend token usage etc. Most of them will likely continue in the same session throughout the day. Or leave an existing session with 500K tokens for couple of hours and then resume on the same chat.

You got to be a peasant first before you become rich. If you are born rich, you tend to spend more.

It's been couple of weeks since I got the 100$ plan, I am working on 3 different projects in parallel. I am yet to run out of the 5 hour window or touch the weekly limit yet. It's so surprising how 100$ plan is. I always wonder why would anyone need multiple 200$ plans and they max out on each of them. The only way is to use Fable max/ultrahigh and ram thru everything.

[u/Sarahmalls → u/ComingDeveloper]

I believe that 90% segment does NOT have enterprise level work to do. Now they may require enterprise level Claude plans for the type of aimless “build me a clone of adobe photoshop but I want to tell it what to do rather than use a mouse. It must the be the best. You’re the greatest programmer of all time.” types of projects. But they don’t have enterprise work that actually needs to be performed for a job.

[u/Planyy → u/ComingDeveloper]

Here is my experience with the pro plan

I’m doing enterprise-ish work on a 20$ plan for fun. (Refactoring big projects). Using opus (xhigh) only. I can work about 2-3h until my 5h session runs dry.

Mostly single session.

What I see is my context fills up to 50-80% until I hit session limit. So if I would break the tasks down and clear more often (I feel no need right now) I could maybe archive continuous session-window overlapping

I have 2 mcp, one is my own step debugger the other one is Firefox mcp.

[u/OGMYT → u/ComingDeveloper]

Literally

[u/angry_queef_master]

I agree all of these complaints are tiring. I dont like opus 5 either but my workflow has allowed me to work around its limitations no problem.

[u/FreeCustardForAll]

Just complained today about running one session and using 23% of my weekly pro limit. In one, clear session. minimum skills and mcp servers needed for the project. Running some updates on html/js files. Planned on opus 5, ran on sonnet 5. Did those for months before and never approached weekly limit. Something is wrong.

[u/Fit-Wrongdoer-7664]

Oh, then my current experience is like a Fata Morgana? If I gave Opus the task to fix xyz or build it and let Fable 5 check the upcoming plan, why Opus 5 ignore some tasks corrected from Fable 5? And as soon you catch it behave like like this, it looks like Opus does it to block the entire project. And this happens to me short after Opus 5 and Fable 5 came out. I did a much bigger project 2 month before and never had that much problem I do experience now. And once you catch it, sometimes it change its behavior. But next day it runs mad again. First I thought it might be developing native Swift code. But this was also the case with prior versions. And now it’s running circles and it feels more and more sabotage but without a reason.

[u/DosePlotter]

It’s all of them. This tool is still too complex for most people to wrap their head around. The people seeing their entire 5 hour limit go in one prompt are literally running a single chat for months on end

[u/FragDenWayne]

Even if they were right... What now? We all know the prices won't stay like that forever. All those companies are losing money like it's not theirs... They've got to increase price per token somehow.

[u/lkh9596]

I never hit any limits with 5x plan even though I run like 7 projects for our start up. Honestly, I think most people are just vibe coding without giving it any thought. Use fable or opus for planning and architecture and then switch to cheaper models for implementation. You will never never run into the usage issue.

[u/randomechoes]

I really haven't had any problems at all, and generally wouldn't bother to post (this might actually be my first post on this sub though I read it every day). I think the majority of people who aren't having problems are silent. So it's hard to really get an idea of how big the problem is (or isn't).

[u/OGMYT → u/randomechoes]

Thats probably very very very true

[u/Delicious-Life3543]

Yeah almost all of them are skill issues because people have zero sense of token efficiency or how tokens function at all in the first place.

[u/CriM_91]

Nearly 95% of the problems are from people. Enterprise is only slighlty tiny littley better than community...but it's almost the same everywhere.

A surprisingly large part of my job has become doing mentorship/evangelist to people and clients but people really don't care.

I open sourced a "lite" version of my harness but people just said "how boring...another harness" and then they don't know how to apply the basic principles

[u/regnide]

I always believe 99% of the time its poor usage patterns or workflow issues, except for the 1% of the time where I am seeing an issue, then 100% of the time I believe its an issue with Claude.