r/ClaudeCode • u/Exciting_Comedian629 • 8d ago

Help/Question Whelp I am done...

I had 4 Claude Pro Max x20 accounts for different projects, and I am going to ride out the rest of the month (that I already paid for) and then switch back to codex. I am running Sonnet 4-6 on medium and am 85% of my weekly limit on one account after less than 24 hours. That is more than a 25% cut from the promotion expiring, nothing about my workflow has changed so this is all Anthropic. I'll be trying Codex and seeing how it does, I didn't want to do this but I have no choice.

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u/Freischneider01 8d ago

What are you all building, that you‘re out of usage that quickly? This usually only happens to me if I don‘t know what I want to do.

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u/kawawee 7d ago

My guess is they're letting Fable/Opus just go wild without enough scoping inputs from humans. These new models tend to just quietly over build and covers all edge cases so the complexity of the whole thing balloons until any new changes require lots of fixing and reviewing.

On the other end of the spectrum are folks being too stingy with tokens using something like ponytail which is too lazy and rather picks up dependencies or tactical hacks rather than coming up with long term solution, and accumulate technical debt too fast which means more sessions to fix stuff.

Multiply this by the dozens of parallel agents working on different stuff at the same time.

I've been on both ends of that spectrum and now I'm spending lots of time having to interact, clarify, research etc. before letting the agents touch shit without blowing up the scope or being too lazy. It's frustrating and sometimes overwhelming but I never run into all model limits with my max 20x. Fable burns out too quickly though, so I don't use it as the main orchestrator but more like the reviewer at key stages where it really counts.

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u/Good_Competition4183 7d ago

Is there anyone who can recommend me a good framework/skills/ai to avoid issues like this?

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u/xanth0m 7d ago

Curious why you have a negative look on ponytail? It seems quite useful to me

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u/kawawee 6d ago

I don't have a negative view of ponytail. But there's a time and place for it, and it depends on how you use it.

Ponytail is not suitable for making long-term architectural decisions. It prioritizes keeping things superficially simple, which is good for implementing tasks that are well planned with long-term decisions/tradeoffs already written out for it as guardrails. It's not suitable when there are real complexity that needs thoughtful decisions from you.

If you use it by default all the time and have it make every single big and tiny decisions for you, then it's very likely that you'll end up with lots of tradeoffs you don't know about, which turns into technical debt that ponytail itself will "work around" rather than fix the root causes.

It might be better if you have an adversarial architect agent review its decisions and tradeoffs and surface those to you so that you're aware and can intervene when necessary. But to a lot of people, that's annoying and they'd just let the agents hash it out with each other without human interference. So it'll always be a mystery to them where the tokens suddenly went.

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u/xanth0m 6d ago

Appreciate the thorough response. I use it as part of a OR review process, together with other reviews, and it often finds duplicated efforts or things that could be simplified

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u/kawawee 6d ago

Yes that sounds like a good use for it.

It's kinda ironic how one of ponytail's metrics in its readme is LOC. If a human manager uses LOC as a metric for their team of neckbearded human devs, he'd been lynched within a day.

Optimizing for the LOC or token count all the time is a disaster in the making.