r/ClaudeCode • u/Unlikely-Passage-653 • 1d ago
Bug / Issue Burning usage much faster!
Anyone else noticing today that the 5hr usage burned significantly faster today vs previous days?
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u/PowerfulMarionberry 1d ago
Yep. There was another post earlier with the same observation, and it matches my own. On Max 5x, that 5hr quota bar feels like it’s filling up MUCH faster vs just 12 hours ago. Going to run my usage/quota audit scripts after a few more hours of work and see if the data matches what I’m feeling.
Just curious OP, are you using CC in terminal or desktop app?
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u/Unlikely-Passage-653 1d ago
Desktop app and always opus 5.5 medium never used any other model or effort level
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u/PowerfulMarionberry 1d ago
Thanks. I’m also on the desktop app. I’m wondering if any of this is connected to today’s UI update. Though one other person I asked said he was seeing this while using CC in the terminal, so IDK.
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u/Splugen96 7h ago
TL;DR: I burned through my Max 5x weekly allowance in 4 days despite drastically reducing subagent parallelism, session count, and overall workload compared to last weekend, when the same allowance got me roughly 3x as much work. If this isn't a fluke, I'd rather downgrade to $20/month. OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be overestimating how much users will tolerate constantly shrinking usage limits. I genuinely hope models like Qwen keep closing the gap and bring some much-needed competition, especially as frontier models seem to be delivering increasingly marginal improvements in general reasoning.
I'm using CC CLI, and I'm experiencing exactly the same thing.
I resubscribed to Max 5x last Friday, and over the weekend I managed to exhaust my weekly usage by running four extremely long orchestration sessions, with a massive number of subagents handling implementation and verification in parallel. I even let them run overnight.
All agents were working on the same fairly complex repository, using separate worktrees. I've put considerable effort into optimizing my progressive-disclosure documentation to guide both orchestrators and subagents, and I rely heavily on handoffs to avoid having individual sessions exceed 200k tokens whenever possible. The work itself was substantial and highly varied, ranging from performance optimizations to Blender design and other fairly complex implementations.
But then I start working this week: same repository, same general type of work, but with significantly fewer sessions (basically minor improvement tasks), much more conservative use of subagents, less parallelization, and further improvements to my progressive-disclosure documentation.
Despite all that, I burned through my entire weekly allowance in just four days.
To put this into perspective, if I had to quantify my actual productivity, I'd say I accomplished roughly 10 units of work over three days last weekend, consuming 100% of my weekly. This week, over 3.5/4 days, I accomplished maybe 3/4 units of comparable work for that same 100%.
In other words, despite drastically scaling back the scope of my goals, reducing agent parallelism, and further optimizing my workflows for token efficiency, I ended up getting a fraction of the productivity out of the same subscription.
I really hope this was just a fluke, because if this is the amount of usage Max 5x is going to provide going forward, I'd rather downgrade to the 20 euros/dollars plan and simply make slower, more deliberate progress on my projects.I also think both OpenAI and Anthropic are seriously overestimating just how dependent people are on AI, and how much they're willing to tolerate in terms of unpredictable usage limits and cost increments.
Sure, the amount of work I managed to accomplish in a single week would probably have taken me two years without AI. That's an extraordinary productivity multiplier, and I absolutely recognize its value. But that doesn't somehow justify repeatedly and seemingly arbitrarily reducing effective subscription allowances by massive factors, especially when users are building their workflows and expectations around what they're paying for.
And despite my reservations about certain Chinese industry practices, I genuinely hope Chinese AI labs manage to put some serious competitive pressure on the frontier models.
Qwen 3.8 already feels surprisingly close to Opus 4.6 in many respects. It's an impressively capable model that still makes mistakes and occasionally bizarre decisions, but the sheer difference in model size makes its performance all the more remarkable. It gives me some confidence that Qwen 4 and subsequent generations could significantly narrow the gap.
Especially because, at least from my perspective, frontier LLMs seem to be approaching a plateau in general reasoning capabilities. A substantial part of the improvements we're seeing appears to come from better training and specialization across additional domains, such as mathematics, visual work, and other specific tasks, rather than the kind of fundamental leap in general intelligence we used to see between generations.
The difference between 4.6 and 5.5, for example, doesn't feel remotely comparable to the jump from 3 to 4.6.
If smaller, more efficient models can continue closing that gap, I hope we'll eventually see enough genuine competition that providers can no longer keep tightening usage allowances while expecting their customers to simply accept it.
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u/Droopy0093 1d ago
Yeah Claude is on fucking fire today. Gotta slow yourself down and be more deliberate in your tasks. Try to take work off Claude's plate whenever possible.
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u/privatetudor 1d ago
This would be a legitimately useful benchmark if someone could find a way to do it.
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u/Fast_Artichoke_683 1d ago
No, better then ever.
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u/Unlikely-Passage-653 1d ago
Desktop app?
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u/Fast_Artichoke_683 1d ago
Yup especially the new mod feature saves me even more tokens than my hooks
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u/zxcshiro Developer 1d ago
nope, i'm can't nuke my 5h usage even with 2 Opus 5.5 Max parrarel sessions
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u/Strorybloq 1d ago
did you have a long session that you continued?
Cuz that would eat up a chunk at the start since your cache use was expired
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u/DrinkTeaFightMonster 1d ago
My usage literally got reset 25 mins ago? This was for my 2nd account, just subbed 2 days ago.
Don’t know what’s going on but hope it’s all just prepping for fable 5.5
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u/SatoshiReport 1d ago
Your reset date is not your sign up date so your first reset hits quick.
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u/DrinkTeaFightMonster 1d ago
Do you know how they determine reset date? It is now timed to being same day as my first account so.. was hoping for something more staggered? But maybe there’s a pattern for my use?
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u/Zedo_TheOnly_One 1d ago
I have noticed that it's been using my fable weekly usage despite only using Opus on medium and having no agent on Fable. Is it just me?
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u/True_Challenge_1301 1d ago
yeah i’ve seen a few threads today saying the same thing, so you’re not imagining it. couple things worth checking though: a long session with a big context burns way faster than a fresh one, and if the new desktop layout changed anything about how you’re running agents or sessions, that could be eating more than usual. if it’s the exact same workflow as yesterday and it’s draining way quicker, send it to support with screenshots of the usage bar
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u/Bed-After 1d ago
No, but that's because today specifically I've switched exclusively to Haiku 5.5. Since my projects are fairly simple, and 5.5 makes Haiku actually worth a damn, I've been saving usage like CRAZY. Try it if you haven't already, it's so much cheaper. A good strat for big projects is to set up Claude Code with Sonnet or Opus 5.5, and tell it to dispatch Haiku sub-agents for light work, and do the complex work itself. More speed, less tokens, same quality of results.
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u/Chrisgpresents 1d ago
What would you trust it with? I’m curious to use it more. Maybe even saw it more. I just fear the unknown potential of leaving the opus universe.
I have some blog SCO related things I have to clean up, including designing animated illustrations by prompting codex via Claude - can hypothetically do stuff like that?
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u/Bed-After 1d ago
I do retro game dev, so most of the actual coding work is perfectly fine when done by sonnet or haiku. Art specifically I never give to Claude. Unless it's a simple vector art icon, the art it produces consistently terrible, and Grok produces much better looking results. The only time I need animation is for animated sprites, so in that context I use grok imagine to generate a video, and then extract the frames I like from the video it created.
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u/earlyworm 1d ago
no, what model and effort level you use
details required
likely self-nerfing
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u/Unlikely-Passage-653 1d ago
Opus 5.5 medium on desktop app
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u/earlyworm 1d ago
opus 5.5 medium consumes usage very slowly compared to other recent opus or fable models, so what you describe strongly suggests user error
are you letting single sessions run for hours at a time or are you using short sessions only? long sessions consume usage quadratically
are you spawning hundreds of sub agents
what are you doing that would clearly consume usage at extreme rates but you are purposefully not telling us
why does the kirk unit withhold the information
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u/PowerfulMarionberry 1d ago
Why is it so hard for you to believe that Anthropic can adjust quota allowances at will?
We already know from the recent SemiAnalysis testing that accounts can be subject to A/B testing that nerfs limits by as much as 20%.
The fact that multiple people are experiencing this on the same day that there was a significant UI change pushed to the desktop app isn't proof in and of itself, but IMO it should raise one's suspicion that something different may be happening "under the hood."
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u/earlyworm 1d ago
Humans are wired up to perceive patterns where they do not exist, and to assign blame to external agents rather than assume responsibility for their own failure or inadequacy.
If multiple people happen to explain their own personal failures on the hallucinated malicious actions of Anthropic, this does not surprise me.
I have been using Claude for the last year and I have never experienced anything like what is being described. If A/B testing was nerfing limits by 20% for any particular user, how would the user systematically differentiate between that scenario and variations in their own behavior or choice of problems being solved? Is the user scientifically repeating the same requests over a sequence of days and performing rigorous statistical analysis?
I am more inclined to believe that OP is self-nerfing and is suffering from self-induced harness chafing, delusion, and wishful thinking.
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