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Comment by mudkipdev | Hacker News Reader

Claude's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to another coding agent to take over. I understand you can't expect much from a $20 subscription, but the next jump up costing $80 is demotivating.

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> Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes.

That hasn't been true with Opus 4.5. I usually hit my limit after an hour of intense sessions.

Daily limit? Weekly limit? Hitting a weekly limit after an hour still doesn't seem very productive.

Session limit that resets after 5 hours timed from the first message you sent. Most people I’ve seen report between 1 to 2 hours of dev time using Opus 4.5 on the Pro plan before hitting it unless you’re feeding in huge files and doing a bad job of managing your context.

Okay, that sounds pretty reasonable for a $20 subscription.

Yeah it’s really not too bad but it does get frustrating when you hit the session limit in the middle of something. I also add $20 of extra usage so I can finish up the work in progress cleanly and have Opus create some notes so we can resume when the session renews. Gotta be careful with extra usage though because you can easily use it up if the context is getting full so it’s best to try to work in small independent chunks and clear the context after each. It’s more work but helps both with usage and Opus performs better when you aren’t pushing the context window to the max.

I half agree, but it should be called “Hobbiest” since that’s what it’s good for. 10 minutes is hyperbolic, I average 1h30m even when using plan mode first and front loading the context with dev diaries, git history, milestone documents and important excerpts from previous conversations. Something tells me your modules might be too big and need refactoring. That said, it’s a pain having to wait hours between sessions and jump when the window opens to make sure I stay on schedule and can get three in a day but that works ok for hobby projects since I can do other things in between. I would agree that if you’re using it for work you absolutely need Max so that should be what’s called the Pro plan but what can you do? They chose the names so now we just need to add disclaimers.

I actually get more mileage out of Claude using a Github Copilot subscription. The regular Claude Pro will give me an hour or up to 90 minutes max, before it reaches the cap. The Github version has a monthly limit for the Claude requests (100 "premium requests") which I find much easier to manage. I was about to switch to the max plan but this setup (both Claude pro and Github Copilot, costing 30 a month together) was just enough for my needs. With a bonus that I can try some of the other model offerings as well.

In practice, how does switching between Claude and GitHub Copilot work?

1. Do you start off using the Claude Code CLI, then when you hit limits, you switch to the GitHub Copilot CLI to finish whatever it is you are working on?

2. Or, you spend most of your time inside VSCode so the model switching happens inside an IDE?

3. Or, you are more of a strict browser-only user, like antirez :)?

I always start in the Claude CLI. Once I hit the token limit, I can do two things: either use Copilot Claude to finish the job, or pick up something completely different, and let the other task wait until the token limit resets. Most importantly, I'm never blocked waiting for the cap.

Good to hear that’s working. When I was using copilot before Opus 4.5 came out I found it didn’t perform as well as Claude Code but maybe it works better now with 4.5 and the latest improvements to VSCode. I’ll have to try it again.

The word is hobbyist btw, not that you're the source for this typo, it seems to have percolated downwards from the blog post through these comments.

the only thing that matters is whether or not you are getting your money’s worth. nothing else matters. if claude is worth $100 or $200 per month to you, it is an easy decision to pay. otherwise stick with $20 or nothing

> With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours.

Do you mean that users should start a new chat for every new task, to save tokens? Thanks.

Short answer is yes. Not only is it more token-friendly and potentially lower latency, it also prevents weird context issues like forgetting Rules, compacting your conversation and missing relevant details, etc.

Yep. I have Claude snapshot to a markdown doc with key points and resume and iterate. Saves so many tokens.

Yes, it also helps keep it focused.

Gemini 3 on Gemini CLI (free version) would meet quota limit for about 3-4 messages, but it will take much longer time since it responses pretty slow.

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