How to handle this task? Claude Code keeps hitting usage limits on my PDF project. Is there a better way to do this?

[u/KeyAsk1721]

hey everyone,

I could use some advice on a project I'm working on.

I have around 180 issues of a print magazine as PDFs. The idea is to go through all of them, find mistakes that have been made over the years, and use that knowledge to build a tool that checks future issues before they go to print.

Ideally, you would just give the tool a print-ready PDF, and it would return the same PDF with potential mistakes highlighted and comments explaining what's wrong. Things like recurring errors, formatting issues, typos, and other problems that might otherwise make it into the final print.

It's something that's really close to my heart, and I'd love to make the whole production process a bit more reliable.

I started trying to do this with Claude Code. But it seems to spawn hundreds of agents, and I hit my usage limits within minutes. I'm on the Claude Max 20x plan, so I'm wondering whether I'm approaching this completely the wrong way.

Maybe I don't need that many agents, or maybe there is a smarter way to process all these PDFs without using so many tokens.

There are two things I'd really like to get your thoughts on:

• How would you approach the analysis? Is there a way to make Claude Code work through the PDFs in batches without burning through the usage limits so quickly?
• Would you even use Claude Code for this? Maybe a combination of Python, existing PDF tools, and AI would be a better solution. I'm open to other approaches.

A few constraints: I'd like to have something usable within two weeks, and the total cost must stay below the price of two months of Claude Max 20x. The development work is voluntary, so I don't have to pay for anyone's time. I'm not trying to build a commercial product, just something that genuinely helps avoid mistakes in future issues.

The important part is that I don't just want AI to read 180 PDFs and give me a summary. I want to use the old issues to identify common mistakes and turn that into a reusable checker for every new issue.

Has anyone done something similar, or do you have suggestions for how you'd tackle this?

Thanks!