The lack of transparency and accountability behind all of this is incredible in my perception.

One reddit user reverse engineered the binary and found that it was a cache invalidation issue.

They are doing some hidden string replacement if the claude code conversation talks about billing or tokens. Looks like that invalidates the cache at that point.

If that string appears anywhere in the conversation history, I think the starting text is replaced, your entire cache rebuilds from scratch.

So, nothing devious, just a bug.

I have seen more than one comment on this thread mentioning kimi though - I'll have to test it out.

qwen3-coder-next has been surprisingly capable as a local model too - needs to be used to make small changes where you know exactly what the final code should look like rather than implementing whole features, but it is free (except for the power bill).

Even if you show them benchmarks that show another model equally as good if not better, they refuse to use it. My suspicion is they've convinced themselves that Opus must be the best, because of reputation and price. They might've used a different model and didn't have a good experience, making them double down.

I hope a research institution will perform an experiment. My hypothesis is that if you swapped out a couple similar state-of-the-art models, even changing the "class" of model (Sonnet <-> Opus, GPT 5.4 <-> Sonnet), the user won't be able to tell which is which. This would show that the experience is subjective, and that bias is informing their decision, rather than rationality.

It's like wine tasting experiments. People rate a $100 bottle of wine higher than a $10 bottle. But if they actually taste the same, you should be buying the $10 bottle. But people don't, because they believe the $100 bottle is better. In the AI case, the problem is people won't stop buying the expensive bottle, because they've convinced themselves they must use the more expensive bottle.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi...

Just a shockingly constrained service tier right now.

You've hit your limit · resets 2am (America/Los_Angeles)

I waited until the next day to ask it to do it again, and then:

You've hit your limit · resets 1pm (America/Los_Angeles)

At which point I just gave up

Claude recently improved Opus 4.6 to have a 1Mtoken context. Cache normally invalidates after 5 minutes.

If you come back or --continue after a break (or 5 minutes), that's a MASSIVE hit to your session limit. 250000 tokens at Max x5 will ding you 10% of your session for "Hi, I'm back".

So say you don't typically do /compact very often. And say you're not very chatty and "do the right thing" by only asking a question once in a while? You'll burn through context like crazy.

Meanwhile if you have ADHD and anthropomorphize the bleep out of your claude and chat with them all day long? Hardly a dent!

This trick seems to work for now (ymmv)

Tell your system to

   CronCreate
      cron: "*/4 * * * *"
      prompt: "heartbeat — no action needed"

I'm sure anthropic will be thrilled by this, but I don't have a better solve at this time yet.

Context management is a thing. Unfortunately you're not allowed to use any tool other than claude code with the Anthropic Subscription, so I guess this is the solve they asked for. Allowing people to write their own tools with superior context management would seem to be a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?

There's no other way that these companies can compete against the likes of Google, and Facebook unless they sell themselves to these companies. With AWS and GCP spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there's no way that Anthropic or OpenAI can continue competing unless they make an absurd amount of money and throw that at resources like their own datacenters, etc and they can't do that at $20/month.

Anthropic has said they are investigating. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

* Models will manage tokens more efficiently

* Agents will manage models more efficiently

* Users will manage agents more efficiently

Why are we acting like technology is on pause?

Anyways I don't have the knowledge as to how to audit this (claud pro) to confirm what feels like an onboard at any cost business behavior.

Is anyone currently auditing through openrouter/litellm and seeing any poor correlation to the session/weekly limit?

This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

Unilaterally changing the deal to give customers less for the same price should not be legal, but companies have slowly boiled the frog in such a way that now we just go "welp, it's corporations, what can you do", and forget that we actually used to have some semblance of justice in the olden days.

TIP (YMMV): I've found that moving the current code base into a new 'project' after a dozen or so turns helps as I suspect the regurgitation of the old conversations chews up tokens.

As the tooling matures I think we'll see better support for mixing models — local and cloud, picking the right one for the task. Run the cheap stuff locally, use the expensive cloud models only when you actually need them. That would go a long way toward managing costs.

There's also the dependency risk people aren't talking about enough. These providers can change pricing whenever they want. A tool you've built your entire workflow around can become inaccessible overnight just because the economics shifted. It's the vendor lock-in problem all over again but with less predictability.

If you’re not listening to Ed Zitron you’d better start if you don’t want to get whiplash in the coming months.

i just refuse to use openai/google/anthropic subscriptions, i only use open source models with ZDR tokens.

- i like privacy in my work, and i share when i wish. somehow we accepted that our prompts and work may be read and moderated by employees. would you accept people moderating what you write in excel, google docs, apple pages?

- i want a consistent tool, not something that is quantised one day, slow one day, a different harness one day, stops randomly.

- unless i am missing something, the closed source models are too slow for me to watch what they are doing. i feel comfortable with monitoring something, usually at about 200-300tps on GLM 5. above that it might even be too fast!

Considering how much progress I made vs how much I paid, I couldn't make a scientific assessement, but it felt pretty close.

But if I was doing deep coding on pro plan it would have sucked.

You can't expect to use massive context windows for $20

- If I ask Claude to go and build a product idea out for me from scratch, it can get quite far, but then I will hit quota limits on the pro plan ($20pm).

- I have not drunk the Kool-aid and tried to indulge in ClaudeMaxxing (Max plan at $200pm). I need to sleep and touch grass from time to time.

- I don't bother with a Claude.md in my projects. I just raw-dog context.

- If I have a big codebase, and I'm very clear about what code changes I want to make Claude do, I can easily get a lot of changes made without getting near my quota. It's like Mr Miyagi making precision edits to that Bonsai Tree in Karate Kid.

My last bit of advice - use the tool, but don't let the tool use you.

It was a big disappointment and it just burned through tokens so fast that I hit first limit after 30 minutes while it was gathering info on my project and doing websearches.

My experience was that when I wanted to use it, maybe 2-3 days per week, Pro sub was not enough. On some days I did not use it at all. The daily or weekly token limit was really restrictive.

Input $5 / M tokens Output $25 / M tokens

GPT Codex 5.3:

Input $1.75 / M tokens Output $14 / M tokens

> Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

No shit, Sherlock.