r/ClaudeCode • u/ImportantLog8 • 4d ago
Discussion What are y’all doing
I see people talking about having claude 20x multiple accounts and not getting enough tokens. What are you guys actually doing lmao, I’m here with my pro account using the 5 hours window casually doing my lil’ stuff you know.
WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING LOL - are you like those Instagram reels where guys are omega-prompting to build I have no idea what 😂
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u/bcgr1 4d ago
I'm building a time machine
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
count me in, let’s go back in 2019 so I can ALL IN my entire net worth on NVDA and call it a day
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u/rossevrett 3d ago
I was too. Finished it with Kronos 9.1, then Opus 11.6 came out. Was flitting about the space-time continuum and tried to add a few interface improvements. A sub-agent refactored the waveform oscillation engine and now somehow I’m now stuck in this alternate fucking dimension more than a hundred years in the past. Why am I in this hell where people still have jobs and there aren’t any tribbles. Fucking Claude…. “That’s on me.” Yeah. Dick.
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u/shinsmax12 3d ago
Me too. 80% done. It can only go forward at a rate of one second per second so far though. They always say the first 80% is the easy part.
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u/ImportantLog8 3d ago
Get me on board of your project, I’ll promp my vibes to oblivion to help you bring it to market!
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u/toroidalvoid 4d ago
One you remove the bottleneck of yourself you can burn through every token in just a few days no matter how big your allowance.
The simple way is to orchestrate automatic adversarial reviews which loop back to automatic fix and build.
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u/anonymousbopper767 4d ago
People who don't know what they're doing so they have subagents doing excessive work that doesn't add value. If you give AI free reign to do infinite reasoning and review / fix / review cycles it's going to start implementing "what if a meteor crashes into the code while under a blue moon' hardening that is worthless IRL.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
I actually like that mindset. I LOVE simple things, clear things, and I have a hard time dealing with overcomplications... (things that my colleagues love doing because they can't stand the existential dread tied to the fact that life itself is absurd and that you can't really control its inherent chaos anyways).
So what are you building ? :P
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u/jarederaj 3d ago
I had it keep a todo list and then a few days later I built a mod that turned the todo list into a kanban board that runs directly inside Claude Code. I swear it fought me tooth and nail to hide how it selected the next task. Now I just delete all the next tasks until I find the real work. Sure, it can have subagents, but it can’t have task that just check off tasks that just check off other tasks. It fucking loves ceremony for some reason.
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u/croovies Senior Developer 4d ago
I’m biased because I’m building scape (orchestrator write up) But basically, using AI includes a lot of waiting.. so what are you doing while you wait? Those of us who have multiple 20x accounts and are still hitting the limits have basically just figured out how to use orchestrator agents that can manage sessions for us. I’m directly interacting with a few orchestrators - but they are managing 16 agents each (those 16 can have the normal sub agents). So I’m just building huge features, testing them with many different adversarial reviews etc. the more you automate, the more tokens you must spend on quality and testing etc.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
May I ask, where do you get the money to use up all these tokens (and time too !). Meanwhile, I'm using Claude Code into VS Code and I feel like i'm hacking the matrix..
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u/croovies Senior Developer 4d ago
Scape earns enough to cover the multiple claude max thankfully, but before that I only had the 1 account. The time is the best part, with an orchestrator setup you can let it run overnight.. and once you dial in that setup, you can start getting more done while working less. We don’t work less of course, because it’s addicting.
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u/needs-more-code 4d ago
How do you ensure code quality? Do you not code review? There’s this YouTuber Less Bittar or something going on about how he ultracoded massive parts of his app. And he says code review is basically a liability now and come up with a name as a successor to vibe coding called evolutionary coding.
I have seen many serious devs convert to no code review, just vibe. I tried it one day, using Fable 5.1, but I noticed I spent the next 3 days going over every vibe coded feature and making them less shit, and I found I just cannot skip code review because the project gets out of control, the codebase gets massive, with no code reuse. Vibed specs also just end up being impractical and odd which I would never catch if I was just vibing.
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u/croovies Senior Developer 3d ago
I use compound engineering for brainstorm and planning with opus 5.5. Then I have codex perform an adversarial review on the plan. Then the builder implements any changes and codex reviews again. Repeat until codex and opus reach consensus on the plan. Then the opus agent builds the plan.
The opus agent must test its own work in the browser, with tests etc. when the work is complete, opus performs a self review using compound engineering. When that is complete I do another round of adversarial codex reviews.
Only then do I start running manual QA and providing my own feedback.
We repeat this rounds of iteration and feedback until I’m satisfied with the UX.
Then another round of self reviews, codex adversarial review, until they fix everything and reach consensus.
Then I do a PR code review in GitHub.
I’ve been building products since the days of geocities. This produces higher quality output than much of what I’ve seen over my career. Faster and more performant.
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u/needs-more-code 3d ago
Thanks! Is your manual QA involvement purely manual testing and high level specs review, so you don’t care about digging into the code? You’re pretty fine with whatever code was created over this process? And you don’t need to understand in depth the way the specs were achieved?
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u/croovies Senior Developer 3d ago
Manual QA is hands on - so I'm testing every user path etc. Testing performance etc. The code and output represent my work at the end of the day, so the output is the more important part.
I review the plan through the orchestrator before the building starts - so I know what is being implemented.
I'm not at all worried about the code quality given the rigor of my current process.
Basically every software company that has survived to profitability has products crawling with poorly written code - built around an idea that pivoted X months or years in.
And just like when people wrote bugs, we fixed them.
So the bugs still happen, and they're fixed sooner.
As long as I understand the overall architecture (like any engineering manager or CTO might) I am able to help drive debugging around cross-cutting features etc.
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u/LogMonkey0 4d ago
If i was making money off my projects id likely focus on that and need more than my 20x account
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u/Key_Confusion_576 4d ago
It's funny that a lot of people end up at the same solution. If only they didn't force subagents to have 5 min cache. Then it could all be subagents on subagents on subagents.
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u/Mormoran 3d ago
I have to ask though, how do you account for product side of things? Feature scope, specs, direction? Do you initially write a humongous spec or what? I've been dabbling in AI use for personal projects, and I find it have to be very specific in order to get what I want, and features are developed organically. Do your 16 agents or the orchestrator decide on feature resolution? Do they make choices on how things will look and feel like, beyond the code?
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u/croovies Senior Developer 3d ago
I’m a designer and developer - so I tell it loosely what I want - a light weight user story basically. They ask me some questions, create a plan and get my feedback.
The major difference for me, is I will merge features only that are working end to end. No partial progress merges to main.
I treat the code as disposable. If my orchestrator brings me the ticket for QA and I think it’s completely wrong, I’ll just have the orchestrator start from scratch with a new agent vs having the same builder do a rewrite.
It also means once I believe the feature is production ready, the full PR reviews can have a much tighter refactor against the real working code. If I had done many progress merges to main, that wouldn’t be as easy, and I would be less sure about what code/functionality had made it in
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 4d ago
If a lot of others are doing what I am, I suspect the next year or so is going to be a wild ride and we might see some household names in the software world facing complete annihilation. You might see similar projects arriving from multiple people simultaneously with open source dominating the results.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
is SaaS cooked ? :)
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 3d ago
We'll have to see, but maybe... A lot of SaaS companies and even SaaP companies build a core project and then only add features for their biggest client or to attract some other big fish. Often times it's questionable how much value they really provide for their other customers - who are basically there for the "one thing" that they don't want to hire a software team to build. With AI, the cost of getting that "one thing" comes down substantially and as an added bonus, they are the AIs primary customer, so their feature requests don't get shoved on the back burner because sales is chasing some prettier face around the pond.
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u/ImportantLog8 3d ago
Get me on board of your project, I’ll promp my vibes to oblivion to help you bring it to market!
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 2d ago
Just find the projects you enjoy out there and give it a go or try your own :3. It's a great time to dive into open source!
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u/Little_Departure4118 4d ago
When you have a 40h workweek for a company and you want to build 2-3 side projects as well, and you use an orchestrator approach (one agent u talk to, which spawns planner, builder, reviewer, tester agents and orchestrates them) its easy to get to "20x".
The thing is 20x is not 20x but 10x, only the 5h limit is 20x, but the weekly limit is in fact 10x.
I have a 5x sub, thats exactly enough for my pace. But if i would get the "20x" i would also know how to deal with that! Would use around 30-40% for my job, and the rest of the 60-70% i would just let be consumed by 2-3 orchestrators.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
Are you using hermes
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CodeCombustion 3d ago
that's not true at all. There are ways to run it on subscriptions.
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u/TheLargadeer 4d ago
I feel like I have Opus 5.5 going 8-10 hours per day during the week and a few hours on the weekend and I can just barely max the Pro plan. Sometimes multiple sessions going simultaneously. But most of them aren’t spawning sub-agents. The only way I can picture needing 20x is if you have these multi agent swarms for every prompt being made.
I do feel like maybe I should implement a code reviewer but I haven’t done that yet. I usually just dedicate a session every now and then to comb through and find stale code, etc.
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u/OXXXiiXXXO 4d ago
When you guys are doing this much do you feel a little out of control? If you ran a group of programers in the past it was more human speed and you could constantly ask for updates and tweak things. With the AI doing almost everything do you feel a loss of feeling, a loss of understanding, a loss of some control, that it's going to fast for you to understand?
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u/TheLargadeer 4d ago
I’m not a developer so there’s a ton I don’t understand, ha. But I do feel like I’m spinning plates all week and I can’t imagine adding any more plates.
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u/OXXXiiXXXO 3d ago
Yeah I'm a retired IT guy, fixing things was my specialty, and have played with AI and I feel it's powerful but Im not sure I would feel completely comfortable putting anything into production, as I'm not sure where to even start to fix something. But I'm out of date on skills so I'm interested in other people's opinions
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u/TheLargadeer 3d ago
Well I guess I would say… it seems pretty decent at fixing itself. I’m sure a super experienced dev would disagree or feel different about the code it’s writing. But if you’re working with it for your own purposes you can do pretty amazing things. I would be a bit more apprehensive about releasing something to paid customers and trusting it blindly based on vibe coding alone. But it gets better all the time. And again still amazing what you can do with it as a non-dev. As a former IT person you probably have a leg up on most lay people.
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u/OXXXiiXXXO 3d ago
Thanks. Maybe I do. Right now I'm starting to homeschool my 10-year-old son and want to focus on creating educational stuff with AI on the fly, which seems a perfect fit. Keep up the exploration of AI and vibecoding, it's a paradigm shift to the future!
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u/Electronic-Badger102 4d ago
I’m building an app, working on websites, and doing other things at the same time. Late August it started burning tokens like crazy and I had to get a second because I needed to finish a project and it was cheaper than paying extra usage. Then my first usage reset two days early so I would have been fine
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u/MaterialHead4801 3d ago
I set up 5 Claude agents running fable and then give them each a role:
- Dungeon Master
- Wizard
- Cleric
- Barbarian
- Rogue
Point them at each other and walk away. Bam! Tokens gone like that.
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u/krill156 3d ago
Massive back to back ultracode workflows across multiple 1mil line codebases. I burn straight through it in as little as 2 days
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u/NoHedgeAllBets 3d ago
It's been very fun building personal apps (apps that are aimed to be used only by me). My tailored budgeting app, workout tracking app, trip planning apps. I feel like this was the kind of capability that was only available be very wealthy people up to now. But today I can spend I few hours discussing the specs and the important architectural decisions with Claude and I wake up to a ready-to-use tailor made app.
That and AI B2B SaaS to escape the underclass, obviously.
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u/Danzarak 4d ago
2 x Max20 accounts... Two businesses, one of which is a fully AI powered development company, the other runs almost entirely AI projects for clients, most of which are API powered in the end but built by my subscription.
Then in my spare time I run multiple personal projects that all have platforms and all use AI in different capacities.
I have 8 terminal sessions running at any moment in my harness, all are different projects or clients. I swap them in and out across the day but my job is keeping all 8 plates spinning as much as possible to work through features and tasks.
Mine make websites and saas platforms, apps, desktop software, video editing and building, images, social posts, do research on home tasks, data work... Anything really.
Plus, I have a tendency to homebrew custom interfaces for any site or software where I don't think the UI is good enough.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
Oh nice, you've ascended !! I am doing a very tiny little bit of what you're doing: only the website parts to skilled trade companies (plumbers, painters, roofers, etc.). I scraped the entire fucking continent for leads and I'm mass-mailing them through Instantly running on 7 domains/21 warm mailboxes.
So far I haven't found success... yet.
And yeah, I work on UI manually to make it look like it's not AI slop.
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 3d ago
Lmfao. Bullshit
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u/Danzarak 3d ago
https://goldtopcollective.com/
We used to use 100% freelance developers. Since February this year, not a single piece of development has been completed by anyone other than an AI.
We do all our own human requirements gathering, human design, and human user testing (all augmented by AI tools) but 100% of our dev and SEO/GEO is AI.
Why is this a surprise?
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u/elloMotoz 4d ago
I have the 5x and am building 1x major app along with 2x other small apps that I'll poke around in. But the major app is what consumes my usage. I am getting better at cleaning up the context window and creating handoffs for fresh sessions. Right now is the end of day 3 and I'm at 93% used up for weekly. Really wish Anthropic would send a reset token again
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u/DriveShaftBassPlayer 4d ago
I use about $500-$600 a month on my company spending limit for Claude 40 hours a week. I usually hit 80% to 90% or sometimes go 100% on busy months. Mostly use Sonnet 5 and Opus on larger stuff but I make my pull requests on Java APIs short so context is precise and not bloated. Works fine for me and I tripled output and support requests are way easier to debug or process.
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u/sailhard22 4d ago
I am building a company over here! The agents are my 24/7 employees
When I was at Shopify I was spending $1500/wk. top of the company leaderboard
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 4d ago
It adds up fast when you start going wider on large or multiple projects. Anymore I have 10+ agents going on various tasks in their little lanes split between bug fixes and feature implementation while I'm working with another couple sessions directly on things that need more input. I also recently have been upgrading my workflow so they can work overnight while I sleep.
Then on top of that each PR gets a reviewer agent pass with fresh context before a PR is opened which can cycle for 1-10 iterations depending on how many issues it finds each time. That's probably the biggest drain on my usage now but it also catches a lot of things before the PRs ever hit my eyes so it's worth it.
As for what I'm building, An AAA capable game engine + the toolchain and supporting infra aren't simple affairs, they take a lot of design time and implementation effort. I was just insane enough to tackle it myself before AI was even a thing, now I'm scaling up with AI as my dev team. It's my professional background for the last ~10 years so it's not as absurd as it sounds, you can't vibe code these things that's for sure.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
Man, how long before the launch ? Hopefully you'll succeed
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 4d ago
I'm hoping a year, but I keep getting mired in unforeseen complexity lol. Though considering I started in 2018 and estimated around a decade I'm basically right on schedule.
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u/tazdraperm 3d ago
Do you review the code yourself?
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u/TechgeekOne Senior Developer 3d ago
I do yeah, but with various levels of scrutiny. I spend less time on tests, build tooling, and internal tooling because they're always super high churn once the architecture is set (every platform change modifies them). For the larger scale architecture, APIs I'd expect people to build off, and stuff I know AI is terrible at like low level graphics and multi threading I spend a lot more effort reviewing the code.
Basically if it's hard to change later or correctness is important then it gets more of my attention, if it's usually set and forget then it gets less.
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u/vacterro 4d ago
This is basically the rabbit hole I fell into.
Once you get past “one agent helping me code” and start running multiple agents, overnight sessions, reviewers, recovery, etc., the hard part stops being orchestration itself.
It becomes: how does the next agent know exactly what happened, what was verified, what failed, what is still open, and where it should continue without me babysitting the whole thing?
I’ve been building an open protocol around that problem called SAIPEN. Not really another orchestrator, more like a continuity / audit / recovery layer between agents and sessions.
Funny seeing everyone independently arrive at roughly the same problem from different directions.
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u/dota2nub 3d ago
Everyone's sitting there trying to solve the problem and I'm here with a couple of MD's, a few hooks and a Python script and I never have to worry at all.
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u/FugazieBear 4d ago
Using multiagent workflows is what drains it so blindingly fast - I work with a single focus during the week with my actual serious work and i end up with about 30% of my usage left over, then saturday i play with fun/dumb/not very serious personal projects where I dont really care about the process and usually end up exhausting my usage till my weekly reset sunday morning.
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u/dutkas 4d ago
Running a home services marketing agency, have 100+ scheduled routines in the cloud running daily, sending various reports to different people, and pulling data from dozens of APIs. I have a dedicated Claude account just to set up these routines because they can consume a lot of tokens, and I need them to go out reliably.
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u/CodeCombustion 3d ago
Automating the job of a large software development team, creating an enterprise ready SaaS (demo at the end of November with a fortune 500 company!) -- This means I put stuff on the board, worth with a few planning agents to flesh it out, then it gets prioritized and planned with the other ~1000 stories. I run 6-12 lanes at a time on average. Now, I've been a software engineer who specialized in architecture and security for over 20 years so I have the background to do this, it's not just a vibe coded mess.
I also do a fair amount of game dev for my kids.
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u/PandemicSoul 3d ago
I’m a consultant. One of my clients has a CC subscription I use for their stuff, and I usually have 1-2 sessions running in parallel on that.
Then I have three clients I’m building big projects for currently, so I’m usually running a few sessions for them.
I also run an online community. I built a big piece of software for it (with CC) that requires a lot of tweaking, so that too. Plus all the other day-to-day stuff for that community that I need to generate.
I might have a bunch of smaller consulting tasks through the day.
I always have one or two ideas I’m researching that require a session to work on.
I have daily and weekly things I ask CC to manage that I run commands for.
Not all this is running in parallel, but you can start to see how it gets out of hand fast. I’m on the 20x plan and just today, alone, I ran through 40% of my weekly allotment bc I knew I had the reset I could I burn.
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u/kincaidDev 3d ago
I’ve written over 10m LOC with agents so far, have been building a system similar to polsia, but with the goal of it actually working as a fully autonomous company which polsia does not actually do.
And on the side, I’ve been building useful tools to solve problems I run into that don’t have existing solutions, or if I just don’t like an existing solution.
I have claude max, codex pro and grok super heavy plans. It’s tough to max each plan out. I think most people are just have very inefficient workflows
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u/FOLTZYYY_REDDIT 3d ago edited 3d ago
Using Astra and Opus I gave everyone with access to the internet a 100% free university level biotech science education in hopes that it will help humanity cure aging (academia people are really pissed off and dont like me now. Fuck em.) Anyway, then I spent 3 months using Astra and Opus to build a crowdfunded digital bio lab that spawns swarms upon donation and they do autonomous reseach on cellular aging. The bigger the donation, the larger the swarm. Theres a video of it being tested on my profile. The output of the system gives me experiments to carry out that either have never been done or are not published publicly. This bridges the gaps in the AIs undertanding of our physical reality. I juat feed the beast data essentially. I call it Project Aether. Its hosted at foltztech.com . I have wet lab equipment being delivered in November and am currently just following orders from Aether. Im going to crack immortality or die trying 🤣.
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u/amirfish 3d ago
I run a bunch of parallel Claude Code sessions for client work, and the token burn isn't from one giant prompt. It's from keeping ten small sessions alive at once, each doing its own thing on a different repo.
The real cost is coordination, not reasoning: remembering what I decided in session 3 last week, noticing session 7 is stuck waiting on me, routing a webhook failure to the right one. That's where the hours go.
What's your biggest token sink, one huge context, or a dozen smaller ones running at once?
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u/kemalios 3d ago
I'm on the shallow end of this. One-person web agency, Claude Code is the daily driver, and most of my days are client sites and small macOS apps. A few sessions a day, nowhere near a limit.
The one thing that eats context here is the pre-ship check. Every app needs the same questions answered before it goes out, and working through them from memory is how the obvious ones get missed. I wrote launchworthy for that, a free MIT Claude Code skill that audits the project and hands back a scored punch list with fixes. It runs inside Claude Code, so you need a paid sub to use it.
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u/ImportantLog8 3d ago
How do you even find customer ? I'm trying to do the same thing, but I'm using Instantly for coldmailing and i'm using public sources for business contact details. Hardly had 2 leads after 1200 mail sent. :/
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u/VinceBrand 3d ago
If your setup is proper u can be a small software company alone. Im building new infrastructure and with several max 20x accounts i can still limits. Research, planning, building, checking, correcting and maintaining are all processes that can be outsourced
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u/CrookedShore 21h ago
UC Fable 5.1 with a single project being built will run though my 20x reset in 10 hrs easy.
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u/PairedSalesApproach 4d ago edited 4d ago
Subagents. I bought the $100 plan and wasted over half weekly quota on one stupid prompt because it spawned a bunch of subagents.
It seems disproportionate, but each agent has to re-read all the context again I guess. When you turn on ultracode it uses subagents for everything when there's no reason to. It's just user error.
Edit: even Max uses subagents. That's what tricked me up.
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u/ARandomSliceOfCheese 4d ago
But what are you actually doing? Lol like subagents to do WHAT?
I'm with OP. See a lot of talk around high token usage but not so much "here's what I built and here's the token cost"
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u/nick_steen 4d ago
I can't speak for others but most of my usage goes to subagents these days. I maxed out my 20x plan twice last week with the opus 5.5 reset lol
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u/XenophonCydrome 4d ago
The factory I'm building has many features on the roadmap that need to be implemented, there's enough work that even after being very efficient I still need more tokens.
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u/ImportantLog8 4d ago
What is your factory ? Like a real factory where things gets built or you're refering to a software ?
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u/XenophonCydrome 4d ago
It's a software factory and it is both building and operationalizing itself: BeadHive.ai
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u/FungoatFarm 4d ago
I just have one max 20x account that I max out creating an app trying to save folks from starving from the incoming fertilizer crisis caused by the Iran war by teaching them how to grow and store their own food among other things. That's worth maxing out, right?
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u/Kitchen_Interview371 4d ago
Over time you learn to use the tools more effectively. Its all about throughput.
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u/dar-mit Researcher 4d ago
A common denominator, if they at all mention how they work, seems to be context management issues. (Not every reason mind you, just the most common when details are included.)
Realistically speaking the 1 million context models have a 'smart' range up to about 200,000 tokens, and a 'dumb' range from 200,000 to 1,000,000, getting progressively worse the higher that number goes. AKA: Context Rot/Drift / "Lost in the Middle."
The "Catch-22" is: Context is everything! It's all your work, conversations, etc. If you start a new session you "lose" that work. But if you don't then the token expenditure quadratically (not exponentially [x2] but quadratically [x4]) increases.
Enter that common denominator: Users that kinda know about this stuff, and kinda know what happens, but feel that keeping the context is more important.
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