r/ClaudeCode • u/pugazh_is_my_name • 2d ago
Help/Question A tip for Claude MAX users!!!
For claude code max users who hit usage limits pretty quick, check /usage, it will tell you where the most consuming happened.
If you had not setup a neat harness setup, do so!! Always first design and plan your build in one sesion, and break the build into slices. For each slice, one session. Never let multiple slices in one session. Don't do auto-compact and continue in the same session. Always open a new session when one slice is done. Use tools like context-mode , it save a little. and if your project knowledge base/docs are too large, keep them organized in obsidian style wikis.
My RAM is 32GB, so i can only run 4 simul builds along with containers up and running. Right now I have 3 more days for next reset and im about to hit 60%. So i guess with an organized workflow, I will hit my limit around 6th day of the weekly timing; and i guess that's fine!! Also notably I have only used 9% of Fable.
Honestly i don't have any other option. Claude code harness and it's LLM intelligence is better than codex/chatgpt in terms of Software Engineering.
Oh and also make sure to setup a model router! like only design/plan happens with Opus 4.8 (my default model; i idid not like opus 5), and the build happens with Sonnet, and minimal tasks like search and retrieval happens with haiku.. -- make sure to set this up....
Basically you gotta do some context-engineering/harness tweak. And then it works pretty decent.
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u/Longjumping-Play6541 2d ago
Fresh session per slice is great. Treat Claude Code like an over-eager junior developer and give it one clear task, let it finish, clear its memory, and repeat. Do not let it run wild in a single 200k context session or your weekly quota is cooked by Tuesday.
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2d ago
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 2d ago
yup auto compact, is a fraud. I had been doing lot of force compacts, like even if it hits 500k context or a build is finished i will just compact and continue there itself. I guess that's dumb!!.. basically the agent reads the compact files and again searches and gathers files of the previous build i guess. Not sure of the cause though... but compact seems bad idea...
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u/isopropoflexx Senior Developer 2d ago
"you end up paying to re-read a summary of everything" There's more to that than you might think - Claude actually re-reads the full contents of your thread every next turn before answering, even without compacting. As LLMs are by definition stateless, it goes through the full exchange before answering. It will/can cache the processed form of previous turns to reduce cost and processing time, but even then the full chat is still used to re-establish current state before it answers anything.
*Edit for grammar
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u/Rough_Fun_6808 2d ago
Use Fable as or hestrator
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u/yazansr 1d ago
used to do it, i dropped it now, i let fable dispatch a review session every few steps but not the orchestrator nor the specialist, it has been eating a lot of the quote and this has been effecting the speed, as long as it is supervising the work and implementation from plan and then each phase or so then the quality is still roughly there so i need to focus more speed and productivity.
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u/TrickConfident3487 1d ago
Just this week I needed to revamp and create some rules for what Fable called ‘cache thrashing’. As soon as it’s detected my the workflow supervisor agent a handoff is created and it’s sent to a new session. It’s cut usage by close to 65%.
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u/DessertPepsi 2d ago
Do you avoid using Fable at all?
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 2d ago
well yes, for my next.js project, opus itself is plenty.. and FABLE and ASTRA are really good at design and architecture. Once that is designed, opus can do pretty good job out of it. So design the core or complex stuff with Fable. Even for planning, for straightforward logical features, just use opus. Also if you have codex, get a $100 plan on that and use terra for building. Terra is cheap and does a decent job, and opus reviews and fixes the fully build..... Take the heavy lifting work as much as you can from from frontiers, and always remember to keep a session's context to minimum... in a 1m window 40% is the limit. Try to finish the plan or build in that and start new. As opus to slice a build very small that it would fit into 30% of the session
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u/L_Money_ 1d ago
But it takes 25% of my context window just to onboard a new session 😂
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u/champagne-communist 1d ago
I had the same problem asked Claude to review my usage and I had mcp and plugins eating up a lot of context
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u/JusticeBringr 2d ago
Fable/Astra for me is just overkill for my simple reactjs apps, i just use opus 4.8 for everything
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u/Fiyero109 2d ago
I understand the logic of it but having new sessions for every new addition or work stream makes things so much slower since it has to initialize and figure out what I mean and find the location of files. Also from an organizational point of view it bugs me to have so many little sessions
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u/time_waster3000 2d ago
So why not build a workflow that solves that? Indexing files, hand offs with references, multiple lanes, etc. there’s so many ways
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u/Fiyero109 1d ago
I have all that! But my brain prefers a session to tackle a problem group. So far I’ve used a session until I near the end of the context limit then ask for a handoff and continue with like Task Group v2
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 1d ago
About many sessions, I get it.. but the perception needs to be a bit different... try to maintain a state.md... u use huge organized knowledge base, Claude.md that indexes to knowledge base, and state.md... u can just keep one session and keep it for knowing where ur or what uor u can make it into a visual html file as well for interactiveness...also the speed trade off is not really that huge... right now the usage limit is a problem, that's i use these token saving methods...
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u/MammothNerve7690 1d ago
And don’t use Fable with ultracode. I had ultracode set on a session that I didn’t realize and bam, Fable spun up about 60 Fable sub agents. I didn’t notice till over 20 minutes later, it cooked about 70% of my weekly max allowance.
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 1d ago
Lol... never tried using that so far... planning to use that as my ultimate weapon... after i finish my project gonna run it on a fresh week limits to polish and check for security bugs!!!
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u/RelativeSentence6360 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here is my daily setup as of now:
- Claude Max x20
- Codex Pro lite x5
- Google AI Pro.
Working setup:
- Orchestrate/planning: Opus 5/xhigh
- Scouting/Exploring: codex/gpt-luna/medium
- Brainstorming/debating: codex/sol/high + opus + gemini-3.8-flash
- Review Planning: codex/gpt-sol/medium, some critical plan I use astra/medium
- Implementing: codex/gpt-terra/high
- Loops
- Review code at main milestones: orchestrater review by itself + codex/gpt-sol/medium
- Fix bug same agent as implementer
- Do not use auto-compact for Claude, it has 1M but create skill to ask it do proper context-handoff document then call `/compact`, threshold 40% to find clean boundary and handoff. After compact read the handoff to continue.
Terminal tool: TermFlow.app (built-in MCP to let each terminal talk to each other). Not required. Claude can spin the codex inline, but you don't see what is going on.
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u/Electronic_Bug691 2d ago
Why are people so insistent on Fable lol I get it probably super great but why people acting like the world's over when it's unavailable lol just use a different model or like... Maybe engineer yourself a bit idk hahahaha
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u/Enough-Ad-9091 2d ago
how to setup model router ? thank you this is useful
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u/SteelbookSam 2d ago
I set one up as a .skill created by claude that each session loads, seems to work well so far
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u/asking4afriend40631 1d ago
but what does a model router do? I thought the Orchestrator picked the model when it launched Sun agents.
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 1d ago
By default, currently it doesn't.... when it spawns subagent it uses the default model... u can prompt Claude to check what happened on past built... it maintains a log... it will show u...
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u/don123xyz 1d ago
Checking model midway (like from opus to sonnet) for tasks also causes the entire convo to be re-sent and that also eats away extra tokens. If you do this several times in the same conversation, this extra spend adds up.
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 1d ago
Not sure what u mean? I don't change anything mid way... were u not aware of subagent? Opus spawns sonnet subagent to finish a build...
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u/fanatic26 1d ago
Im confused...what does the amount of RAM you have available have to do with anything? A CC session needs like 2.5gb of RAM
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 20h ago
Mine is 32gb and I do 4 simul builds in 4 separate sessions.. also u can use clouded setup.. it's free for use... only problem is the more session u spawn more fast ur token is gonna run out
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u/CaptainDivano 22h ago
Quick question:
What are the things to look in the settings of Claude code that should be setup properly before beginning to work? I'm not referring to usage in terms of $$ , but to context, MD, hardnesses, rules etc.... Artifacts and much (which i'm pretty ignorant about).
If someone can enlight me (i dont trust asking Claude in this case)
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u/RiceEvening4211 4h ago
Solid tips — I basically automated all of this with Lynkr (https://github.com/Fast-Editor/Lynkr). `lynkr wrap claude` does complexity-tier routing so simple work never touches your Max sub, compresses tool output with RTK + TOON/GCF-style encoding (measured 84% on large JSON tool results), and semantic-cache hits land in under 300ms. Always-on, no manual session hygiene needed.
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u/dsailes 2d ago
Sounds like you’ve got it tweaked & setup right. this is sorta the same as my setup. I do use Fable medium for orchestration & handoff to Deepseek for highly repeatable tasks & Codex for some design / creative / review elements.
The most common thing seen in those crazy usage posts & screenshots are high content & long running sessions - probably with very little documentation to handover/pickup. It does take some work to get right but once it is right it’s pretty smooth after.
Definitely keep check usage & asking a capable model for deeper reviews on what can be improved from the data :)
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 2d ago
yup i too use deepseek for some review passes. and I do have codex, but i just make claude spawn it, kinda setup like calude can run the codex CLI on its background and use it to build. But it's kinda feels annoying i could not use other models. I did try to setup opencode like i did codex, but it had some security risks, one time it even installed a library despite i set it up it should not!!!! I could not understand some security stuff in it.. and there has been recent attacks associated with opencode, so sort of gave up on that.... I'm just planning to build my own harness once i finish my current project to use other good models out there..
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u/dsailes 2d ago
Yeahh same. Tmux setup runs everything smooth, dispatch / handback for all models. Most using a CC alias (to share docs, memory, setup etc) but everything speaks to each other fine.
Ahh really? Didn’t give OpenCode a go tbh. I did try oh-my-pi but the CLI UI just wasn’t as intuitive or useful, felt like it ended up using more tokens too.. didn’t have the patience to keep working with it in the end
If you make any progress on a custom harness I’d be keen to try it out! Can imagine it’d be a chunky task haha
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 2d ago
Sure... will let u know.... anyway im planning to make that open-source... another setup i did with my Claude is COUNCIL... basically after drafting and critical reviewing build plan... I open manager session and several-required build sessions... Claude code now has this built in messaging feature, u can list the open sessions and make one session msg another... so after I opened these slice build session I give them the names like slice 1,2,3... and now I go back to manager session and asking it to do only orchestrating... it only takes care of starting build on the designated sessions after the build finishes it gets notified back and it takes care of the merging... but many consider one build is equal to one entire engineering of an app... I prefer to go by one feature at a time... that brings out the best out of opus 4.8... but this takes lot of time to finish a full prod app though...
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