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Hacker News Hacker NewsWe've been investigating these reports, and a few of the top issues we've found are:
1. Prompt cache misses when using 1M token context window are expensive. Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead, with an option to configure your context window to up to 1M if preferred. To experiment with this now, try: CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000 claude.
2. People pulling in a large number of skills, or running many agents or background automations, which sometimes happens when using a large number of plugins. This was the case for a surprisingly large number of users, and we are actively working on (a) improving the UX to make these cases more visible to users and (b) more intelligently truncating, pruning, and scheduling non-main tasks to avoid surprise token usage.
In the process, we ruled out a large number of hypotheses: adaptive thinking, other kinds of harness regressions, model and inference regressions.
We are continuing to investigate and prioritize this. The most actionable thing for people running into this is to run /feedback, and optionally post the feedback ids either here or in the Github issue. That makes it possible for us to debug specific reports.
I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.
That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”
On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.
I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.
My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best
Here’s what I’ve done to mostly fix my usage issues:
* Turn on max thinking on every session. It save tokens overall because I’m not correcting it of having it waste energy on dead paths.
* keep active sessions active. It seems like caches are expiring after ~5 minutes (especially during peak usage). When the caches expire it sees like all tokens need to be rebuilt this gets especially bad as token usage goes up.
* compact after 200k tokens as soon as I reasonably can. I have no data but my usage absolutely sky rockets as I get into longer sessions. This is the most frustrating thing because Anthropic forced the 1M model on everyone.
For those not in the Google Gemini/Antigravity sphere, over the last month or so that community has been experiencing nothing short of contempt from Google when attempting to address an apparent bait and switch on quota expectations for their pro and ultra customers (myself included). [1]
While I continue to pay for my Google Pro subscription, probably out of some Stockholm Syndrome, beaten wife level loyalty and false hope that it is just a bug and not Google being Google and self-immolating a good product, I have since moved to Kiro for my IDE and Codex for my CLI and am as happy as clam with this new setup.
[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/24937
"effortLevel": "high",
"autoUpdatesChannel": "stable",
"minimumVersion": "2.1.34",
"env": {
"DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": 1,
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": 1
}
1. Nuke all other versions within /.local/share/claude/versions/ except 2.1.34. 2. Link ~/.local/bin/claude to claude -> ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.34
This seems to have fixed my running out of quota issues quickly problems. I have periods of intense use (nights, weekends) and no use (day job). Before these changes, I was running out of quota rather quickly. I am on the same 100$ plan.
I am not sure adaptive thinking setting is relevant for this version but in the future that will help once they fix all the quota & cache issues. Seriously thinking about switching to Codex though. Gemini is far behind from what I have tried so far.
I have a day job, a side business, actively trade shares options and futures, and have a few energy credit items.
All were given the same copied folder containing all the needed documents to compose the return, and all were given the same prompt. My goal was that if all three agreed, I could then go through it pretty confidently and fill out the actual submission forms myself.
5.4 nailed it on the first shot. Took about 12 minutes.
3.1 missed one value, because it decided to only load the first 5 pages of a 30 page document. Surprisingly it only took about 2 minutes to complete though. A second prompt and ~10 seconds corrected it. GPT and Gemini now were perfectly aligned with outputs.
4.6 hit my usage limit before finishing after running for ~10 minutes. I returned the next day to have it finish. It ran for another 5 minutes or so before finishing. There were multiple errors and the final tax burden was a few thousand off. On a second prompt asking to check for errors in the problem areas, it was able to output matching values after a couple more minutes.
For my first time using CC and 4.6 (outside of some programming in AG), I am pretty underwhelmed given the incessant hype.
It seems a counter intuitive to Anthropic's message that Claude uncovered bugs in open source project*.
Fair transactions involve fair and transparent measurements of goods exchanged. I'm going to cancel my subscription this month.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s4idaq/update_on...
It’s been unusable for me as my daily coding agent. I run out of credits in the pro account in an hour or so. Before that I had never reached the session limit. Switched back to Junie with Gemini/chatgpt.
I'm curious what are people doing that is consuming your limits? I can't imagine filling the $200 a month plan unless I was essentially using Claude code itself as the api to mass process stuff? For basic coding what are people doing?
How is this normal?
Now a single question consistently uses around 15% of my quota
I only did the $20/month subscription since 9/2025
It was great for about 5 months, amazing in fact. I under utilized it.
For the past month, it’s basically unusable, both Claude code and just Claude chat. 1-2 prompts and I’m out. Last week I prob sent a total of 15 messages to Claude and was out of daily and weekly usage each day.
I get that the $20/month subscription isn’t a money maker for them, and they probably lose money. But the experience of using Claude has been ruined
a) quotas will get restricted
b) the subscription plan prices will go up
c) all LLMs will become good enough at coding tasks
I just open sourced a coding agent https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac
The entire goal is to be token efficient (over 50% cheaper), and by extension, take advantage of LLM's better reasoning at shorter context lengths
This really started as an internal side project that made me more productive, I hope it will help others too. Apache 2.0
Currently it still can't compete the subsidized coding plan rates using Anthropic API pricing though (even though it beats CC while both use API key), which tells me that all subscription plan operators are losing money on such plans
Yet, there must obviously be something different for so many people to be reporting these issues.
I feel for the Anthropic devs that have to deal with this, having to figure out what setup everyone has, what their usage patterns are to filter out the valid reports, and then also deal with the backlash from people that were just pulling obvious footguns like having a ton of skills/MCPs polluting their context window.
I am getting bored of having to plan my weekends around quota limit reset times...
We're generating all of the code for swamp[1] with AI. We review all of that generated code with AI (this is done with the anthropic API.) Every part of our SDLC is pure AI + compute. Many feature requests every day. Bug fixes, etc.
Never hit the quota once. Something weird is definitely going on.
Opus is not worth the moat, there are multiple equivalent models, GLM 5.1 and Kimi K2.5 being the open ones, GPT 5.4 and Gemini 3.1 Pro being closed. https://llm-stats.com/ https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models https://benchlm.ai/
Even API use (comparatively expensive) can be cheaper than Anthropic subscriptions if you properly use your agents to cache tokens, do context-heavy reading at the beginning of the session, and either keep prompt cache alive or cycle sessions frequently. Create tickets for subagents to do investigative work and use smaller cheaper models for that. Minimize your use of plugins, mcp, and skills.
Use cheaper models to do "non-intelligent" work (tool use, searching, writing docs/summaries) and expensive models for reasoning/problem-solving. Here's an example configuration: https://amirteymoori.com/opencode-multi-agent-setup-speciali... A more advanced one: https://vercel.com/kb/guide/how-i-use-opencode-with-vercel-a...
Ask claude code to give you all the memories it has about you in the codebase and prune them. There is a very high chance that you have memories in there which are contradicting each other and causing bad behavior. Auto-saved memories are a big source of pollution and need to be pruned regularly. I almost don't let it create any memories at all if I can help it.
Disclaimer: I'm also burning through usage very quickly now - though for different reasons. Less than 48 hours to exhaust an account, where it used to take me 5-6 days with the same workload.
Cache reads cost $0.31
Cache writes cost $105
Input tokens cost $0.04
Output tokens cost $28.75
The total spent in the session is $134.10, while the Pro Max 5x subscription is $100.
Even taking the Anthropics API pricing, we arrive at $80.58. Below the subscription price, but not by much.
It's just the end of the free tokens, nothing to see here. It's easy to feel like you're doing "moderate" or even "light" usage because you use so little input tokens, but those "agentic workflows" are simply not viable financially.
I am tired of all the astroturf articles meant to blame the user with “tips” for using fewer tokens. I never had to (still don’t) think of this with Codex, and there has been a massive, obvious decline between Claude 1 month ago and Claude today.
For context, with Google AI Pro, I can burn through the Antigravity weekly limit in 1-2 hours if I force it to use Gemini 3.1 Pro. Meanwhile Gemini 3 Flash is basically unlimited but frequently produces buggy code or fail to implement things how I personally would (felt like it doesn't "think" like a software dev)
I also tried VS Code + Cline + OpenRouter + MiniMax M2.7. It's quite cheap and seems to be better than Gemini 3 Flash, but it gets really pricy as the context fills up because prompt caching is not supported for MiniMax on OpenRouter. The result itself usually needs 3-6 revisions on average so the context fills up pretty often
Eventually I got Claude Max 5x to try for a month. VS Code + Claude Code extension on a ~15k lines codebase, model set to "Default", and effort set to "Max". So far it's been really good: 0-2 revisions on average, and most of the time it implements things exactly how I would or better. And, like I said, I can only consume 40-60% of the 5-hour limits no matter how hard I try
Granted, I'm not forcing it to use Opus like OP (nor do I use complicated skills or launch multiple tasks at the same time), but I feel like they really nailed the right balance of when to use which model and how to pass context between the them. Or at least enough that I haven't felt the need to force it to use Opus all the time
The thing is, if it's going to be this expensive it's not going to be worth it for me. Then I'll rather do it myself. I'm never going to pay for a €100 subscription, that's insane. It's more than my monthly energy bill.
Maybe from a business standpoint it still makes sense because you can use it to make money, but as a consumer no way.
In theory the /stats command tells you how many tokens you've used, which you could use to compute how much you are getting for your subscription, but in practice it doesn't contain any useful info, it may be counting what is printed to the terminal or something - my stats suggest my claude code usage is a tiny amount of tokens, but they must be an extremely underestimated token count, or they are charging much more for the subscription than the API per token (which is not supposed to be the case).
Last week's free extra usage quota shed some light on this. It seems like the reported tokens are probably are between 1/30th to 1/100th of the actual tokens billed, from looking at how they billed (/stats went up 10k tokens and I was billed $7.10). With the API it should be $25 for a million tokens.
Something materially changed in last 4 weeks.
Also, see made up boosterism about finding security holes everywhere. Its just fanning the flames of the industry worries about all the stupid account take overs.
I’ve moved away from Claude and toward open-source models plus a ChatGPT subscription.
That setup has worked really well for me: the subscription is generous, the API is flexible, and it fits nicely into my workflow. GPT-5.4 + Swival (https://swival.dev) are now my daily drivers.
There's this honeymoon period with Claude you experience for a month or two followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then a rebound after a model update (rinse and repeat). It doesn't help that Anthropic is experiencing a vicious compute famine atm.
For general queries and investigation I will use whatever public/free model is available without being logged in. Not having a bunch of prior state stacked up all the time is a feature for me. This is essentially my google replacement.
For very specific technical work against code files, I use prepaid OAI tokens in VS copilot as a "custom" model (it's just gpt5.4).
I burn through maybe $30 worth of tokens per month with this approach. A big advantage of prepaying for the API tokens is that I can look at everything copilot is doing in my usage logs. If I use the precanned coding agent products, the prompts are all hidden in another layer of black box.
On the flip side- Using Opus with a baby billy freeman persona has never been more entertaining.
For something I spend all my time using- I’d rather iterate with Claude. The personality makes a big difference to me.
They inflated how much their tools burn tokens from day one pretty much,remember all the stupid research and reports Claude always wanted to do, no matter what you asked it. Other tools are much smarter so this is not such a big deal.
More importantly, these moves tend to reverberate in the industry, so I expect others will clamp down on usage a lot and this will spoil my joy of using AI without countring every token.
Burning tokens doesn't just wastes your allotment, it also wastes your time. This gave rise to turbo offering where you get responses faster but burn 2x your tokens.
Taking a second opinion has significantly helped me to design the system better, and it helped me to uncover my own and Claude blindspots.
Also, agree that, it spent and waist a lot of token on web search and many a times get stuck in loop.
Going forward- i will always use all 3 of them. Still my main coding agent is Claude for now.. but happy to see this field evolving so fast and it's easy to switch and use others on same project.
No network effects or lock in for a customer. Great to live in this period of time.
I'm using the free model via chat from the beginning. This is the first time, I'm seriously considering moving away from Claude. Before last month, Claude's Sonnet model was consistent in quality. But, now the responses are all over the place. It's hard to replicate the issue as it happens once in a while. I rarely encountered hallucinations from Claude models with questions from my domain however since last month I have observed abundance of them.
To be fair I have a pretty loose harness and pattern but it’s been enough to pull in 20k in bounties a month for a long time without going over plan with very little steering (sometimes days of continuous work)
That being said I’ve figured this was coming for a long time and have been slowly moving to local models. They’re slower but with the right harnesses and setup they’re still finding much the same amount in bounties.
Anthropic is not incentivized to reduce token use, only to increase it, which is what we are seeing with Opus 4.6 and now they are putting the screws on
It does seem like this new routing is worse for the consumer in terms of code quality and token usage somehow.
Probably a combination of it being vibe coded shit and something in the backend I expect.
I don't have the receipts, but I think they were somewhat closer in Jan/Feb.
Since then, I've been seeing increased critique of Anthropic in particular (several front page posts on HN, especially past few days), either due to it being nerfed or just straight up eating up usage quota (which matches my personal experience). It appears that we're once again getting hit by enshittiffication of sorts.
Nowadays I rely a lot on LLMs on a daily basis for architecture and writing code, but I'm so glad that majority of my experience came from pre-AI era.
If you use these tools, make sure you don't let it atrophy your software engineering "muscles". I'm positive that in long run LLMs are here to stay. The jump in what you can now self-host, or run on consumer hardware is huge, year after year. But if your abilities rely on one vendor, what happens if you come to work one day and find out you're locked out of your swiss army knife and you can no longer outsource thinking?
Please unsubscribe to these services and see how they perform:
"Maybe if I spend more money on the max plan it will be better" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I change my prompt it will work" > no it will be the same "Maybe if I try it via this API instead of that API it will improve" > no it will be the same.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini etc all of these SOTA models are carefully trained, with platforms carefully designed to get you to pay more for "better" output, or try different things instead of using a different product.
It's to keep you in the ecosystem and keep you exploring. There is a reason you can't see the layers upon layers of scaffolding they have. And there's a reason why after 2 weeks post major update, the model is suddenly "bad" and "frustrating". It's the same reason its done with A/B testing, so when you complain, someone else has no issues, when they complain, you have no issues. It muddies the water intentionally.
None of it is because you're doing anything wrong, it's not a skill issue, it's a careful strategy to extract as much engagement and money from customers as possible. It's the same reason they give people who buy new gun skins in call of duty easier matches in matchmaking for the first couple games.
Stop paying more, stop buying these pro max plans, hoping it will get better. It won't, that's not what makes them money. Making people angry and making people waste their time, while others have no issues, and making them explore and try different things for longer so they can show to investors how long people use these AI tools is what makes them money.
When competitors have a better product these issues go away When a new model is released these issues don't exist
I was paying a ton of money for claude, once I stopped and cancelled my subscription entirely, suddenly sonnet 4.6 is performing like opus and I don't have prompts using 10% of my quota in one message despite being the same complexity.
What I wish for right now is for open-weight models and hardware companies (looking at you Apple) to make it possible to run local models with Opus 4.6-level intelligence.
@Anthropic I've cancelled my subscription. Good luck :)
I don’t understand why people insist on these subscriptions and CC.
Fanboyism is a bit too hardcore at this point. Apple fanboys look extremely prudent compared to this behavior.
This is by design, of course. Anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows these subscriptions are not sustainable, and the prices will have to go up over time. Quietly reducing the usage limits that they were never specific about in the first place is much easier than raising the prices of the individual subscription tiers, with the same effect.
If you want to know what kind of prices you'll be paying to fuel your vibe coding addiction in a few years, try out API pricing for a bit, and try not to cry when your 100$ credit is gone in 2 days.
It is hard now to hit the limit...
No FOMO
What I did instead is tune the prompt for gemma 4 26b and a 3090. Worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to run the main prompt and then a refinement prompt or split the processing into cases but it’s doable.
Now I’m waiting for anyone to put up some competition against NVIDIA so I can finally be able to afford a workstation GPU for a price less than a new kidney.
I strongly believe google's legs will allow it to sustain this influx of compute and still not do the rug-pull like OAI or Anthropic will be forced to do as more people come onboard the code-gen use case.
however his response gaslights us because in the OPs opening post his math demonstrates this is not true, it shows reads 26x more so at least in his case the cache is not doing what the anthropic employee describes.
clearly we are being charged for less optimization here and being given the message (from my perspective by anthropic) that if you are in a special situation your needs don't matter and we will close your thread without really listening.
Try it out and you will quickly see how much money they‘d really like for your excessive usage.
I guess this is fitting when the person who submitted the issue is in "AI | Crypto".
Well there's no crying at the casino when, you exhaust your usage or token limit.
The house (Anthropic) always wins.