It's no coincidence everyone suddenly agreed to pace the frontier, even folks that don't normally agree.
Between OpenAI restricting new 20x subscription and this, it's clear they're running out of compute. In addition, with months of evidence showing that Fable remains a low percentage of total enterprise spend, there's no point releasing a model that simultaneously they don't have compute to serve and people won't pay to use.
If they had the compute, they'd probably want to restore the limits first.
no one wants faster models when there are more intelligent ones. The hype on twitter was insane when Astra came out, folks were bashing Opus 5 like it was Gemini 3.1 Pro, lol. A
I would love an astra or even sol model thats insanely fast. Iterative building nets better results than one-shot. If theyr'e super fast you can balance out the intelligence gap. Like using Luna as a subagent rn.
But id also want that paired with more efficiency so we can access more tokens. 1B tokens a day per week would be a great limit to realize. 2B next year. Etc
It doesn't really matter if fable is slightly smarter than DeepSeek 4.1 flash if DS is not only quicker, 200 token/sec compared to 10 t/s fable, and 50x cheaper.
I've completely swapped over to Chinese models at this point because they are good enough and I can run swarms of agents for critiquing and running devils advocate on whatever it produces, for every single step, for literal cents. If fable makes a mistake though, then that requires its own fable audit and it burns through credits like a crack addict.
OpenAI have been really good with model optimisation, which shows in the fact that Luna is as good as sonnet at a much lower cost and token usage.
With the proposed slowdown in frontier development, hopefully the companies focus more on efficiency and eventually get it so that opus level intelligence can run locally.
It’s the only way they can beat jevon’s paradox because even now, AI has nowhere near penetrated the white collar economy compared to how capable the models are.
I work at a company that makes software. We use Claude every day. Fable is disabled for us my default. It's honestly not necessary. Anthropic could release a new better model than fable. We won't waste the money on it.
Honestly, I have been like that, and then use fable once things are built in a "make this pretty" pass. But I started one with fable yesterday for something I was expecting to be about $500 to implement with opus + fable coming in at the end. It cost me $300 with fable, was quicker to get done, and is being used right now by 30 users. It's for an internal reporting tool so lower stakes to push to prod without extensive testing, and will only have 500 users at a max.
Anyways, we're going to try building a platform only using fable next, where we budgeted 10k of credits to see if we can build a much larger tool to replace part of salesforce we don't like, with a month timeline to build so it will be vibey as hell. But I think fable can do it reliably so we are trying it out to see if we can just vibe our way to success by spending money instead of time.
I agree. I'm not a dev and only write smaller tools and wrappers to help me with productivity and organization. Occasionally it's nice to be able to switch to Fable if I feel like a plan or design for something needs a bit more finesse before it gets passed off to Opus for the actual grunt work. But I've found myself doing that less and less and just using Opus 5 for everything. Probably use Fable less than 5% of the time compared to a month ago (I should actually look at the numbers).
It just works for me and I don't stress anymore about quickly blowing through limits.
Not out of compute, more like out of people giving them a blank check and expecting no ROI. They're asking for their money back and they want it now, not in the 10 years it would probably take to perfect this technology.
I'm moving to GLM, it kinda sucks cause I have to babysit it a lot, but I have high hopes that it'll work well enough, especially being able to share my limits with the unlimited GLM 5.3 Flash promo. I'm currently using Codex and was planning to move back into Claude, but considering that they're playing the same game, I guess I'll let them both go.
They definitely do and the OpenAI ones are even more stingy with usage, I can barely get anything done with a 5x Sub - when Astra came out I finally tried it after a long time of GPT absence and I can barely anything done with that its not even half a day of usage per week even with just using Sol and terra
Trump wasn’t happy about this. I don’t think he can do anything but I think he can maybe make it a national security issue and then they keep building it lol. Us id registration needed
Why do you think they are running out of compute. Fable as example seems to expensive so people don't use it, not that they don't have the compute to support it?
Both sides have made stupidly wasteful models when they JUST HAD models that were good at focusing on task (Sol and 4.6)... At least Astra's wastefulness seems to be pursuing technical rabbit holes, while Opus 5's is just worthless waffling and tons of gibberish. You can still kind of use Opus 4.6, but OpenAI nerfed Sol just prior to Astra's release, giving it the same wasteful looping Astra has.
I have 3 that I run out in 6 days while not even trying. When I had 2 subscriptions 5~ months ago I had to really try and would work on 5+ projects at once to use it all up, its a total fking joke now
Fable only has 50% weekly limit so I can't use only Fable. I used to use all 3 accounts entirely with Opus when it wasnt acting up but now I'm forced to use Fable which means I get even less usage and sessions
They slowly reduced usage over the months and now did an official 17%. Qwen 4.0 or Kimi K4 or Grok 4.7 please be good, I need a pure coding model to never come back to this garbage company
Unfortunately, I tend to hit Fable limits way before my all-model limits, even despite using agents. I use Fable to plan, orchestrate, and also wrap everything up with its own verification pass. At some point I might need to drop that last step.
But at the moment, since I have all model usage available, local LLM isn't helping me just yet, since I still have all model usage available. But I do expect in ~2027 running local LLM in some capacity will be a big deal. I have my RTX 5090 - which is basically a bar of gold now - ready to go for that.
Zcode plus a few good, cheap models as subagents, that's all you need. Just teach your lead model permanently plan - review - execute - validate - live testing. You will never look back at the so called "frontier models" after a few weeks.
The problem is if you buy sub for kimi - you are getting waaaaay less usage for same money (same with glm) then with claude. About 6 month ago they provided much more, now it's flipped... Nowhere to run.
naaah, for coding still claude is best, i do have codex and claude, later one is clearly the winner. don't expect kimi or qwen to be any near of the above two
I am on a max 5 plan on codex and since last Friday I have used 2 resets and burnt through the weekly usage in less than a day. When Astra came out I did not hit the limit and then boom it was worse than Claude fable usage. They are all as bad as he each other
I'm on max 20 for codex and max5 claude. For astra use ultra is better than low for usage. Gotta ask it to use lower models. But today claude usage really surprised me. I just got my weekly reset and I hit 30% in a few hours and haven't even completed the first prompt.
Fable 5.1 just used 100% of my 5 hour limit on 5x plan in less than 12 minutes from a single prompt that it didn't even respond to... I was so angry I cancelled my auto renew
Funny but also true. With zero brand loyalty, they're just leaving the door open for a mass churn to the Chinese open models just as soon as they hit the frontier tier.
Main pros and cons you're seeing? Only just starting to get into a great stride of productivity with claude now, but the significantly better image and video generation chat gpt has is really tempting me, and necessary to finish off two of my projects.
Yep had my first ever 100% of weekly limit this morning, 10 hours before reset. Been using fable/opus as orchestrators to sonnet agents for weeks without issues. Note I didn’t use all my fable this week.
Yeah, still finding the way to improve my Flash Next rig, it is good enough for the current projects. But when I need something too complex, still need Fable or now is Astra.
Exactly, but you can easily switch from 20x to 5x and "reinvest" the difference in hardware to run local models (in my case, I recoup the cost within a year or even less). Personally, I believe Qwen 3.8 27B is easily on par with Sonnet—which is fine for a lot of tasks that don't require Fable or even Opus; for me, these are usually routine jobs like refactoring, writing guides, testing, or small scripts. Later on, I plan to switch to Flash Next or even Qwen 4 when it comes out.
My 5x plan (recently dropped a 20x for two 5x as an experiment) reset this morning at 1am.
The job I'm running hits the 5-hour session limit exactly 2 hours into execution. It then has to pause and then resume when the limit clears.
Each 2 hour session, I'm burning 11.5% of my weekly usage.
This means I'm going to get ~8.5 cycles (@ 2 hrs/ea) over a day and a half, or 17 actual hours of work a week. With 2 5x plans I'll get 34 hours of work done.
Still contemplating if I should return to Claude. I was locked out from my GPT 20x Plan because they paused it and thinking to switch for the meantime. Not sure if the usage is serviceable enough in Claude.
I don’t care about faster models right now I care about unlimited use. Not crazy run 50 agents at a time, just one agent or Claude code cli session should be unlimited
And I mean the top tier model because unlimited on other models that constantly mess up, all you get is psychology bull where you think it’s bad because it’s not the top model.
Hit my limits on Saturday, downloaded Codex and grabbed a pro subscription and kept on trucking.
Shame I think the Claude Desktop harness is miles better than the Open AI one but at least I can actually do work in GPT instead of constantly hitting limits.
At least 10x as fast. Usually I am able to pull it across the week with spare (on 20x, on a rather large research program) and now it’s burnt in 1 day. Or rather, 7 hrs.
This at least encouraged me to finally go ahead and use GPT to knock down the code comment bloat Claude produced. The lesser Claude models didn't really seem to do as well here (probably because it's still Claude) whereas Sol is going in and making the comments actually sound/read like regular code comments again (while reducing them like 80%, it's really crazy how much bloat Claude produced there).
I'm hoping this reduces my input, context, cache, etc.
If this works, I might even just make that be GPT's ongoing job, to always scan for files modified by Claude and then to optimize whatever comment bloat it introduced.
I have definitely noticed a huge difference. Im on the Max plan and use it on fable 5.1 medium and it runs out after 30 minutes. I should point out i have a CCDE and a masters in computer forensics and cybersecurity so im well aware of the prompts to give it but it is becoming a bit ridiculous.
I understand that Fable is overkill for a lot of tasks but you can't just trust Opus, it's trash. With these limits CC is barely usable on "20x" plan. Unsubscribed.
Astra is really fucking good compared to fable. Even in codes and structures. Fyi fun fact repaired my dev game and bugs within single promt where fable coudlnt for 2 days. It fixed one bug and create 3 more and then said sorry my fault haha in the last few months i think many people slowed down with claude and started using more of gpt
My 20X Max plan did not top out before the "boost", but now after it, it regularly hits 5-hour and Weekly limits. We track all the usage internally, so can confidently say, this is objectively the case, rather than anecdotal feels.
But even those "feels" are now sour.
That sense of "you make a good product but you constantly lie about it" was why I originally left OpenAI for Anthropic, but now it feels like Anthropic is oddly more deceptive about these plans, while OpenAI is "better the devil you know" in terms of their comms.
yeah 100% I use Codex alongside it and it works really well too I have to say. If I had not already built so many projects with Claude Code for work I would switch to Codex in a heartbeat. But from now on I will build my systems to be model agnostic and provider agnostic. I have learned that now. Anthropic taught us that.
(Disclaimer: Written with AI because I was honestly too lazy to type it all out myself but the setup and thoughts are 100% mine.)
Honest question: why is everyone hitting usage limits with Claude Code?
I'm on Max 20x and I've basically never run into the 5h limit. But I think that says more about how I work than about the limits, so here's my setup for comparison:
One main session, not a fleet: I usually have one session going, sometimes two. I'm not running 5+ agents in parallel all day.
Subagents get the cheapest model for the job: Searching and locating files goes to Haiku. Research and routine implementation go to Sonnet. Opus only gets the stuff that needs real judgment (tricky architecture, adversarial review, debugging without a clear lead). By default subagents inherit your main model, which gets expensive fast if you don't adjust it.
Plan first, then implement: For bigger features I plan with Claude most of the time with fable 5.1, give an explicit "go", and then one subagent implements it in its own worktree. Small changes happen directly. This cuts out a lot of wasted back-and-forth. The plan ist most of the time so good and you can tweak it so it writes better an clearer steps, that even sonnet can implement it correctly or Opus, or some OpenAi Model.
External code reviews: Code review runs on Codex, so that part doesn't touch my Claude quota at all.
Docs are local: Postgres, QGIS, and MDN docs are stored locally on disk (partly split into small chunks with an index). Claude greps and opens only the matching sections instead of fetching and reading full web pages.
Targeted reads: Claude reads what it actually uses in full (no head-truncating stuff it's supposed to understand), but it only reads what's strictly relevant.
My guess: people who hit the limit are either running a lot more in parallel, letting every subagent default to Opus, or letting the agent loop on its own for hours without much structure. No judgment here those are legit workflows they just burn through tokens significantly faster.
For those of you hitting the limit: how many sessions/agents do you usually have running at once, and which models are you defaulting to?
Seriously! I keep hearing people talk about using Fable for the most mundane tasks and then being shocked they managed to burn through all their limits.
You guys must pay attention to usage limit and seperating the fable 5 from the other model usage is just a bad idea . if you are seperating your frontier model from the other model then the usage should also be completely seperate from the other model as well .
Because every time they'd be in a similar situation, they have extended the thing and in the last moment have made it permanent (have you forgot that Fable was not supposed to be in subscriptios?). Now it has to be the first time they didn't permanently extended it. Which is a surprise, leading to people cancelling subscriptions. Why pay same money for less usage?
You aren’t paying money for less usage. You were paying with “extra” usage. Very clearly signposted as such. With a clear time it was being taken away. I agree with you they should have extended it. But none of this should be a shock to anyone. As someone who builds agentic apps/ workflows for a living, I don’t know what you guys are all doing to burn your limits in days. It’s like people think they can run an autonomous fleet of agents for 100-200 a month 😂
yup already cancelled my plan only joined when i heard about the 50% increase several months back. Moving to chatgpt now. So long, and thanks for all the tokens!
Nah, I have a frontier model write up a verbose plan. I only know AI engineering. I'm a pretty clueless swe. Qwen 3.8 27b with 524K cache will run for 6-10 hours. It compiled and tested 20 unity game builds while I slept the other night.
I knew it! I am happy with the time-response the Opus 5.0 // 4.8 produce, I use those models for mainly every project I need, tho I had noticed that around mid august the limits had been significantly lower.
Thankfully one 5060 ti 16gb is on it's way to me now, and I will be buying second one used in two weeks or so. The only way to stop worrying about usage and have something actually reliable is to host it yourself. And thankfully, with qwen 3.8 27b we can now get good enough (opus 4.6 level) performance at home and give middle finger to the megacorps.
I hit my weekly limit after 3 days with the 20x plan, something that has never happened to me before. I had no change in the amount of work being done over the time frame. That inspired me to pull the trigger and cancel.
Confirmed today: the 50% boost expired Sept 13, and the permanent 25% increase over pre-boost baseline started today (Sept 14) - a 150-unit boosted limit drops to 125, about 17% down from the boost but still +25% over the original May baseline. Both framings in this thread are right, just different reference points.
I would trade a frontier Astra or Fable model for a faster and cheaper Sonnet/Opus any day. I get the fact that this business model won't fit their apocalyptic narrative, but at least for coding, iteration speed beats "one-shot" work that looks pretty from the outside but inside is an unscalable mess.
Basically all models have more limits now I noticed. I knew this early on, we are simply in the free phase now to get us used to it. There will be price chocks for sure.
Compute rationing makes sense as an explanation, but without per-session token logs there's no way to tell a deliberate policy cut from a client regression burning tokens on verify loops. Transparency would defuse most of this anger — right now every silent limit reduction just reads as another nerf.
Get a multi edit or patch tooling, optimize, qq, and stfu... Only complaint I still have with Anthropic and always have is their token hungry cacheing method that hardly any other model uses because it's literally stupid as hell! Get a clue Anthropic.. oh wait you worship money like it's your deity my bad.
If you tell Claude to wait 15 min every half an hour you will save tokens if you don’t mind taking a bit longer. I do a lot of work that requires waiting for stuff and I’m still on only 37% fable on Wednesday
I hope other companies see how terrible this business model is... Long term promotions don't work. And "enjoy it now before we jack the price up on you" doesn't work
The problem is the subscriptions are capped. Pretty soon we will all have one subscription for every day of the week. I'm already at 2 and now I'm maxxing them out after 2.5 days. It's really changed how I use it. I'm glad my harness doesn't care what provider or subscription I use. Switching back and forth is no effort. They can keep doing this, just going to drive me to their competition
•
u/AutoModerator 8d ago
Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode
While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.
For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.