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> People need to understand a few things: vague questions make the models roam endlessly “exploring” dead ends.
> If people were considerably more willing to aggressively prune their context and scope tasks well, they could get a lot more done with it
If this were the problem, people would've encountered this when they started using Claude. The problem is not that they can't get anything done. It's being able to get things done for months, but suddenly hitting rate limits way too easily and response quality being clearly degraded, so they can't get things done that used to be possible.
The ecosystem is evolving super quickly so, our own experiences and workflows must keep adapting with it to experiment, find limitations and arrive at the "tightest possible scope" that still allows you to get things done, because it is possible.
Another example: pre-paid monthly subscription aggregates usage towards web and Claude Code, for eg. So if you're checking for holiday itineraries over your lunch break, then decide to sit down and ask a team of agents to refactor a giant codebase with hundreds or thousands of files, context will be exhuasted quickly, etc, etc.
I see this "context economy" as a new way of managing your "mental models": every token counts, and every token must bear its weight for the task at hand, otherwise, I'm "wasting budget". I am also still learning how to operate in this new way of doing things, and, while there have been genuine issues with Claude Code, not every single issue that people encounter is an upstream problem.
Again, I agree with you and the service should be at least reliable but to be completely fair, if I had to bet, the amount of usage people get for 100/mo is probably only balanced out by the corporate/entreprise customers paying their bill to Anthropic via API usage.
If we look at it through this lens, this limits are not surprising at all, except maybe on how generous they are/were. It’s pretty obvious that they want to force people to pay as they go….
No they can't. When I buy an annual subscription and prepay for the year, they can't just go "ok now you get one token a month" a day in. I bought the plan as I bought it. They can't change anything until the next renewal.
So no new models, no new features?
If they're selling me compute and bundling the features in, they better not go back on the compute I paid for.
If your limits stay "the same", but you then use Opus 4.6, your quota will be exhausted much faster, it's just how it works.
Note that some features are simply NOT made for these Pro, Max, Max 5x or whatever pre-paid plans. I'm pretty sure this is by design and not an accident or a bug: If you have 6/7 MCP servers configured or if you want to use this new feature of "Agent Teams", you will exhaust your entire quota before ANY work is even done. This is not a bug. Each agent has its own context window and tools and they all count separately.
MCP servers, when active, add A LOT of context to your sessions before you even use them, etc, etc.
It feels to me that people want to have their cake and eat it too, but, that would NOT be a sustainable business model. You can not complain about the tools if you can't understand them in-depth.
I want to state that I don't think Anthropic are fully aware of the ramifications that ANY small change in ANY of their models might have, because their entire ecosystem is a bit messy atm, but, I'm certain they're aware that if people dont like it, they will cancel the subscription and flock to a competitor very quickly, since there's no real moat anymore. So, it's in their own interest to keep things minimally usable even on the "cheaper plans".
I have seen people with 5-10 "active MCP servers" that they "wanted to try out" then they forget about it and wonder why their context is always full... Cmon... that's almost bad faith.
I don't fully defend Anthropic as they've had several issues with degraded model quality after releasing "the latest model", and CLI usability that cost me real money and real tokens, so, there's a lot of room for improvement, but, to claim that quota gets exhausted after 1h it points out to either some forgotten MCP servers, skills or giant files being accidentally read in, or some sort of mis-use which these limits were put in place to prevent exactly.
There's a very thin line between: quota is exhuasted on a regular, normal session after 1h and I think there's a bug versus I had 3-4 MCP servers active that I am not using at all but forgot to disable and my CLAUDE.md file is 1000 lines...