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Comment by impulser_ | Hacker News Reader

"Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work"

This has not been my experience at all. The only time I even got close to this is multiple long sessions that had multiple compacts.

The key is if you hit compact, start a new session.

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This hasn't been my experience either. I personally find the max plan is very generous for day-to-day usage. And I don't even use compact manually.

However, when I tried out the SuperPower skill and had multiple agents working on several projects at the same time, it did hit the 5-hour usage limit. But SuperPower hasn't been very useful for me and wastes a lot of tokens. When you want to trade longer running time for high token consumption, you only get a marginal increase in performance.

So people, if you are finding yourself using up tokens too quickly, you probably want to check your skills or MCPs etc.

As a regular user, I hit these walls so often. I am experimenting with local model and open code. I am hoping to see some good results with qwen3 coder

It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two. Meanwhile, I've had ample usage testing out Codex on the basic $20 ChatGPT Plus plan without a problem.

As for Anthropic's $100 Max subscription, it's almost always better to start new sessions for tasks since a long conversation will burn your 5-hour usage limit with just a few prompts (assuming they read many files). It's also best to start planning first with Claude, providing line numbers and exact file paths prior, and drilling down the requirements before you start any implementation.

> It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two.

I genuinely have no idea what people mean when I read this kind of thing. Are you abusing the word "prompt" to mean "conversation"? Or are you providing a huge prompt that is meant to spawn 10 subagents and write multiple new full-stack features in one go?

For most users, the $20 Pro subscription, when used with Opus, does not hit the 5-hour limit on "a single prompt or two", i.e. 1-2 user messages.

Today I literally gave Claude a single prompt, asking it to make a plan to implement a relatively simple feature that spanned a couple different codebases. It churned for a long time, I asked a couple very simple follow up questions, and then I was out of tokens. I do not consider myself to be any kind of power user at all.

The only time I've ever seen this happen is when you give it a massive codebase, without any meaningful CLAUDE.md to help make sense of it and no explicitly @ mentioning of files/folders to guide, and then ask it for something with huge cross-cutting.

> spanned a couple different codebases

There you go.

If you're looking to prevent this issue I really recommend you set up a number of AGENTS.md files, at least top-level and potentially nested ones for huge, sprawling subfolders. As well as @ mentioning the most relevant 2-3 things, even if it's folder level rather than file.

Not just for Claude, it greatly increases speed and reduces context rot for any model if they have to search less and more quickly understand where things live and how they work together.

I have a tool that scans all code files in a repo and prints the symbols (AST based), it makes orienting around easy, it can be scoped to a file or folder.

> spanned a couple different codebases

It's either that, or you have a lot of skills loaded or something. I use Claude for hours a day and usually don't run out of tokens.

I should note this only happens in Claude Code, not the web UI. Since CC is agentic and spawns subagents on prompts that require a lot of thinking.

It will spend a lot of time grokking the codebase, which would consume more tokens on larger projects.

> you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two

My experience has been that I can usually work for a few hours before hitting a rate limit on the $20 subscription. My work time does not frequently overlap with core business hours in PDT, however. I wonder whether there is an aspect of this that is based on real-time dynamic usage.

I am on $100 max subscription, and I rarely hit the limit, I used to but not anymore, but then again, I stopped building two products at the same time and concentrate to finish up the first/"easiest" one.

I'm considering dropping the Max plan for the API.

Using the Max plan with tools like OpenClaw violates Anthropic's ToS [1].

The API gives you the same flexibility without the risk of getting your account suspended.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms (Section 3-7)

At ten times the price. At least you keep the ability for them to charge you a hundred a month.

i never had these issues with gemini cli using google vertex endpoint, and i never even reached $50 per month

i don't want to think about how to hack a tool i'm paying for not locking me out because "i promped wrong"

I wonder what do you mean by "if you hit compact". Claude Code does not show used tokens.

When I used it before Christmas (free trial), it very visibly paused for a bit every so often, telling me that it was compressing/summarising its too-full context window.

I forget the exact phrasing, but it was impossible to miss unless you'd put everything in the equivalent of a Ralph loop and gone AFK or put the terminal in the background for extended periods.

if you enable verbose mode, it does.

However I run like 3x concurrent sessions that do multiple compacts throughout, for like 8hrs/day, and I go through a 20x subscription in about 1/2 week. So I'm extremely skeptical of these negative claims.

Edit: However I stay on top of my prompting efficiency, maybe doing some incredibly wasteful task is... wasteful?

Run /usage or configure your statusline

It's my experience however.

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