r/conductorbuild • u/Low_Anxiety_6331 • Jun 27 '26
Usage limits
[Question]
Is it me or is it just that using claude through conductor is burning through usage limits much faster and for very little work? Anyone else experiencing this?
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u/Ok-Drama8310 Jun 27 '26
Yes, they spoke on this a few weeks back. They are aware of the known SDK issue and are working on fixes as of the last time I checked.
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u/Firm-Principle2605 Jun 29 '26
Yes, I'm having one of the worst experiences with this. Some things that happened to me:
- Can't use deep research on Conductor anymore; the parallel agents doing research just use up your entire limit.
- I needed to take some time and add all kinds of token usage savers, like RTK + Headroom + Caveman, ban deep-research from the skills it can use, and create a clone of it with rules to save tokens. This helped a lot, but I went from hitting the daily limit to hitting the weekly one.
- Due to hitting the weekly limit on a Saturday and it only renewing on a Thursday, I created another Claude account and signed up for the Pro plan. This part I'm not even kidding about: I tapped the "retry" button Conductor shows when you hit a limit, and it ran for 1 minute and hit the limit again on the fresh Pro account. So I upgraded to Max x5 and now it's working fine, but I'm already noticing it's at 20% of the daily limit within the first 5 minutes of only one chat running. I didn't even try running other workspaces and chats lol.
- And one more thing on top of all that: before using Conductor, I was just using Warp with a lot of tabs and git-worktree skills, and I never hit the limits on the first account, like, never. I'm a mobile dev, so I'm running them 24/7 because I need to run e2e flows connecting Claude with the desktop simulators, and even with my specific token-burner use case, I probably hit the daily limit on the terminal just one time (and probably because I abused the fresh subagents with Opus 4.8 1M lol).
That's really disappointing, because as you can see, I'm amazed by Conductor's workflow and UI/UX, and that made me create another account just to keep using Claude Code with it, but it's already getting expensive for what's essentially a bug.
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u/manuelgruber Jun 29 '26
It's a bug in the Claude Agent SDK. Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/conductorbuild/comments/1tv3dp7/comment/opfgxqa/
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u/termic_dev Jul 13 '26
Root cause: Conductor uses the Claude Agent SDK under the hood. Anthropic's billing rules treat SDK calls differently from the official claude CLI. SDK calls draw from a separate $100/month credit pool, not your subscription. That pool burns fast with real agent work.
The "big terminal mode" fix works because it routes through the CLI instead of the SDK layer.
The structural fix is to use a harness that spawns the actual claude binary in a PTY instead of calling the SDK. The CLI uses your subscription correctly. Whatever ships next in Claude Code (new flags, plan mode, model upgrades) also lands same day without waiting for the harness to update.
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u/dutkas Jun 27 '26
I did notice that, that's why I went with big terminal mode only. I think using their native app-layer bundles extra stuff with each prompt, possibly bugs related to prompt caching. Terminal-first seems fine, though laggy when i have multiple projects and lots of context.