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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

Mounting evidence that claude max users are put into one big compute fuel pool. Demand increased dramatically with OpenAI's DoD PR snafu (even though Anth was already working with the DoD? But I digress...). The pool hit a ceiling. Anth has no compute left to give. Hence people maxing out after 1 query. "Working on it" means finding a way to distill Claude Code that isn't enough of a quality degradation to be noticed[0], in order to get the compute pool operational again. The distillation will continue until uptime improves.

0 as of this writing, it's noticeable. Lots of "should I continue?" And "you should run this command if you want to see that information." Roadblocks that I hadn't seen in a year+

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There's another piece of the puzzle. Dario has very clearly stated they are not taking the OpenAI approach of spending $trillion to scale right now and assume the money comes later. They are spending significantly less and working towards profitability sooner.

That means they are going to be far more constrained infrastructurally than some of the competition. I think this is some of the constraints that we are seeing.

He did say that. And, in virtually the same breath, said they would have to spend $trillions if they hope to remain SOTA, which they have to be [0],[1].

They don't have compute because they didn't play the game and get the good rates a couple of years ago, and are now forced to work with third-rate providers. That's not a strategy.

I would take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.

[0] “We’re buying a lot. We’re buying a hell of a lot. We’re buying an amount that’s comparable to what the biggest players in the game are buying.”

“Profitability is this kind of weird thing in this field. I don’t think in this field profitability is actually a measure of spending down versus investing in the business.”

[1] “You don’t just serve the current models and never train another model, because then you don’t have any demand because you’ll fall behind.”

So he's not spending so they can be profitable, AND spending as much as the biggest players are spending, AND not really looking at profit as a measure of anything? K.

no grand strategy behind that

they're looking to IPO in 2028 vs 2030 for OpenAI, who have raised more than double the funds

so they're willing to play fast and loose with the terms and conditions of existing customers trying to make it happen

those pockets must be drying up really fast

Alternatively, the elephant in the room I'm surprised no one wants to talk about: the vibe coding is catching up with them.

That's not an elephant in the room.. it's just proof of how insanely useful the tool is and the reality that so much more hardware is needed. Thus people saying "why are these companies building insanely large data centers" ... this is why!

I have no particular insight into the Anthropic backend, but it's possible in general for systems to have architectural issues which cannot be mitigated by just adding more hardware.

maybe you should study up on correlation and causation before you declare "proof"; it's also possible that it goes the other way.

The proof is already there. It's concrete. I've seen it directly the last few months of using claude code. It closed the loop. It's insanely beneficial when used properly- that is a pure fact. You act like it's an opinion.

I think it is telling that this audience down votes this. It's kind of obvious that the thing is being used a lot. Doesn't mean it works as well as advertised. Doesn't mean the business model they have works. Just means there is a lot of demand. You can't ignore that.

The problem is that vibe-coding, when it fails (i.e. it's non-useful, at least for a bit), is usually solved by more vibes. Try again and hope it works. Ask it to refactor and hope the cleaner code helps it along. If you're willing to think about the code yourself you'll likely ask it questions about the codebase. High vibe-code usage is both a metric that it is working and that it's failing.

That is only true if there's a pricepoint that vibecoders are willing to pay per token that allows Anthropic to make a profit.

that is a separate issue indeed, but their comms make it rather obvious they are scrambling to reduce compute and they're just slashing their service selectively - with openclaw and max users being the first in the chopping block

I don't think anyone is talking about it because it's not a very productive conversation to have. I'm not particularly bullish on vibe coding either but if you could explain what exactly about vibe coding causes these specific issues then it could be more interesting to discuss.

But as it stands, the more likely reason is capacity crunch caused by a chips shortage and demand heavily outpacing supply. You vibe coding reason is based on as much vibes as their code probably is.

Vibe coding does not usually produce performant code, it produces spaghetti with the goal of making the user asking for work to be done to go away as soon as possible with a (often barely) working solution.

I recently vibe-translated a simple project from Javascript to C, where Javascript was producing 30fps, and the first C version produced 1 frame every 20 seconds. After some time trying to get the AI to optimize it, I arrived at 1fps from the C project. Not a win, but the AI did produce working C code.

I have no doubt that if I had done this myself (which I will do soon), with the appropriate level of care, it would have been 30fps or more.

It should catch up faster. It's absolutely useless for the bulk of the tedium—notably, soldering together random repos to satisfy executives—that makes up my job now.

That's mostly been my job since I started around 2010 haha

If an AI doesnt generate perfect code, if left to its devices it will at some point create a codebase big and nasty enough that it will not be able to deal with it.

I was vacationing! What's up with OpenAI now? Asking with some morbid curiosity tbh.

Codex switched to paid API tokens only. Not to mention their alignment with the department of war.

> Codex switched to paid API tokens only.

They’re still doing subscriptions: https://developers.openai.com/codex/pricing

I'm happy I invested in setting up Codex CLI and getting it to work with ollama. For the toughest jobs I can use Github Copilot (free as an academic) or Gemini CLI. If we see the per token price increase 5x or 10x as these companies move to focusing on revenue, local models will be the way to go, so long as stuff like Gemma 4 keeps getting released.

Can you give context for the API thing?

Edit: Looks like it still works with subs, they just measure usage per token instead of per message.

That's not true.

There was a headline saying they were, and the actual article showed they were doing nothingbof the sort.

If you read HN headlines, and don't even bother to click into the comments and see everyone calling out the headline as bogus, you might think something like your statement is true.

Nothing, Effective Altruist dweebs realizing that the world isn't their psychology experiment.

As a person that hasn’t used Claude code before, I’ve been using OpenAI’s Codex and it is pretty amazing. I wonder how much more amazing Claude is.

Both are great, where they differ is: Claude Code has a better instinct than Codex. Meaning it will naturally produce things like you, the developer, would have.

Codex shines really well at what I call "hard problems." You set thinking high, and you just let it throw raw power at the problem. Whereas, Claude Code is better at your average day-to-day "write me code" tasks.

So the difference is kind of nuanced. You kind of need to use both a while to get a real sense of it.

I think the way I and others use it is code with clause, review or bug hunt with codex. Then I pass the review back to Claude for implementation. Works well. Better than codex implementation and finds gaps versus using Claude to review itself in my opinion.

Codex just changed the way they calculate usage with a massive negative impact.

Before a Subscription was the cheapest way to gain Codex usage, but now they've essentially having API and Subscription pricing match (e.g. $200 sub = $200 in API Codex usage).

The only value of a subscription now is that you get the web version of ChatGPT "free." In terms of raw Codex usage, you could just as easily buy API usage.

edit: This is currently rolled out for Enterprise, but is coming to Pro/Plus soon. The people below saying "I haven't had this issue" haven't yet*.

This is not true. The change applies to the credits, ie the incremental usage that exceeds your subscription limits.

OpenAI's own help page suggests otherwise.

> e.g. $200 sub = $200 in API Codex usage [...] In terms of raw Codex usage, you could just as easily buy API usage.

I don't think it's made out like that, I'm on the ChatGPT Pro plan for personal usage, and for a client I'm using the OpenAI API, both almost only using GPT 5.4 xhigh, done pretty much 50/50 work on client/personal projects, and clients API usage is up to 400 USD right now after a week of work, and ChatGPT Pro limit has 61% left, resets tomorrow.

Still seems to me you'd get a heck more out of the subscription than API credits.

ChatGPT Personal Pro plan hasnt had the change yet. It is rolling out to Enterprise users first.

This. ChatGPT Pro personal at $20/month and using GPT 5.4 xhigh is the best deal currently. I don't know if they are actually losing money or betting on people staying well under limits. Clearly they charge extra to businesses on the API plans to make up for it.

In the future, open models and cheaper inference could cover the loss-leading strategies we see today.

Right, because you're on the old and not new structure.

They just rolled it out for new subscribers and existing ones will be getting it in the "coming weeks." Enterprise already got hit with this from my understanding.

I believe the first part is referring to these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186677

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199948

I looked at my cc usage and I was at 90% of my weekly allowance after 3 days of use...BUT, if I looked at the usage stats with the chart, it showed, on a scale of 1-4 intensity of usage (4 being most intense), the three days as such:

Day 1: 2

Day 2: 3

Day 3: 1

Not sure how I can hit such limits so quickly with such low scores on its own chart.

The limits are smaller now, is how.

Then why not update their chart to at least say that? The numbers (shading, actually) on the chart are not absolute numbers, they're relative, so just make it look as if I spent a lot of time on it. If they're gonna change their limits without being clear about it, at least go all the way. Right now, I can go, "See, you're actually saying I didn't use that much compared to the limits."

Which is fine, but the way they're tightening the screws, and not saying until they announce the results of their A/B tests is very frustrating.

I agree; I think that's what happened. But it's a shame—I'm having a lot of trouble with poor-quality results from Claude-Code, and the session limit is being used up quickly.

Makes sense, even plan name seems to agree: "Claude Max".

Reminds me of an “all you can eat” buffet I was at once where the owner told me, “that’s it, that’s all you can eat” and cut it off.

Did this prompt some reflection on your part?

What, that businesses lie?

It’s like most lifetime warranties. They’re not what they seem to mean colloquially. They have a contractual meaning.

They never said WHOSE lifetime...

I think with some it’s the lifetime of the product line. If it’s sunset, no longer sold; lifetime ends when support ends.

Or my grocery store that has certain products with signs "Always $n" but over the past 5+ years n has increased regularly and dramatically.

That we accept the lying doesn't mean it's good.

Sounds like the most blatant case of false advertising since the movie The Neverending Story

The responsible thing would be to not sell way more subscriptions than their capacity. But they have to show the exponential revenue curves to their investors. I cancelled my subscription yesterday.

What is openai's involvement here, as I am out of the loop.

I assume it's anthropic rejecting the US Government's use of their software for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, and openai happily agreeing to it.

That has led to a significant number of people switching over from openai, or at least stating they were going to do so.

Claude: Autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance are our red line

Pentagon: No

OpenAI: We are okay if the line is merely a suggestion and we encourage you not to cross it!

Pentagon: Yes we pick that option

They made a $25 million donation to Trump, which was repaid in kind by designating Anthropic a supply chain risk. Unfortunately, they weren’t nearly subtle enough about this, and went “sure, we’ll take over the contract with no limits on killbots or domestic surveillance, no problem!” on the same day as Anthropic got in trouble, and people put two and two together.

On the nose. Dealt with this last week. Ran maybe 5 queries (not even in code) and was maxed out for the day. What a great way to spend my money

Distillation is how they're planning to make money? What a poor strategy. This is next level FOMO (Fear Of Not Being The #1 LLM Provider).

I have cancelled my subscription last week, I'll see them when they fix this nonesense

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