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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

Doubling the five-hour rate limits is merely a marketing stunt if the weekly rates are not also doubled. It simply means that you can reach the weekly limits in three days instead of five.

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I have never come close to my weekly limit, but have hit my hourly limit frequently.

For me it's the opposite. I almost never hit hourly limit, but I hit weekly limit in about 5 days.

What does your usage look like day to day? Are you using a low level amount all day long? I'm with the others here, I've never hit the weekly limit ever, only the hourly, and I consider myself a heavy user.

I dedicate a significant amount of time to defining the precise actions that agents should perform (PRD/ADR). I break down the feature sets into Milestones and slices (tasks). These tasks are small, well-defined, and scoped. I have a prompt template that the “architect” agent prepares whenever I want to initiate a new feature. This ensures that the prompt structure remains consistent and standardized over time. The generated prompt is then pasted to the “orchestrator,” which performs context discovery (using Repoprompt) and finalizes the plan then proceeds to launch subagents to do the work.

Based on the size and complexity of the task, as well as any inter-task dependencies, the orchestrator deploys one or more subagents (sometimes 5 or 6 subagents) to work on these mini tasks. Once all tasks are completed, the orchestrator initiates verification and launches a review workflow. This workflow uses the original prompt, acceptance criteria, repository internal guidelines, and relevant skills to conduct a thorough review of the agents’ work.

Typically, there are one or two review iterations, during which the review agent identifies any issues. Sometimes, I may also notice issues and have to "steer" the orchestrator. The time required for a slice to complete ranges from 30 minutes to 4 or 5 hours, depending on its size, complexity, and the number of subtasks it contains.

Only if I run about 3 such orchestration in parallel I can reach hourly limit.

I have found that it uses a lot more tokens if I give it a very detailed todo and loop over every task 1 by 1. I now keep it to phases with detailed tasks underneath and use /loop over the phases and it uses a lot less. I also manage the context windows and tend to clear it often to keep it under around 200k (or less depending on project size)

Yeah, I do that too. Essentially, the system I described begins working on a task that is small enough and clearly defined. Each “slice” in a milestone usually have 5-10 subtasks (for instance, Slice E1 has P1...P6 subtasks). The orchestrator then receives the prompt to implement E1-P1.

It sounds like you are describing oh my open agent

I use Repoprompt's workflows for this. They are pretty good.

Would be more meaningful if everyone said what plan they are on, as there are 3 different ones that users could be discussing.

I'm on $200 Max plan

last week with claude i saturated a team premium seat at day 6 of its cycle, and a max 20x seat at day 4, plus ~$150 extra usage spend, with a 60hr work week where i am not even primarily an IC, as well as a codex 20x plan at day 3 with a personal project

Along with how many 5-hour windows they use in a day.

If you're using it 24/7 then yes, I'm sure the weekly limit is more of a concern.

If you're just using it during working hours - ie. you only use two 5-hour windows per day - then you probably, like me, struggle to hit the weekly limit even if you do max out some 5-hour windows.

Hit weekly limits all the time with Pro. Too cheap to go for Max.

same, I struggle to use more than half of my weekly, even if I max out my 5-hour windows regularly during the day.

Same. I hit limits after 45 minutes. I'm on a measly Pro plan. I'm usually building small, open source projects, often from scratch. I only work on these projects in a 2-hour window in the morning. This is my "free time" development. I hope this change helps, because I was days away from switching back to Codex, though I like Claude Code a bit better these days.

I also hope that the fact I had OpenClaw in my sandbox once is not why I hit these limits so damn fast. I don't use it anymore and I've tried to rid my sandbox of anything "openclaw" but it is in my git history in various places on various projects. Claude doesn't seem to be transparent about this limitation.

Are you using haiku for most tasks? I'm in the Google ecosystem so I'm curious how it is on the other side.

Nope, I use Opus 4.7, mostly. Sometimes Sonnet 4.6 if I’m trying to use less tokens.

You should definitely try:

- Codex

- OpenCode Go

- Ollama Cloud

All are very useful, still a subscription, but with higher usage limits.

Specific providers like GLM also provide subscriptions like Z.ai.

Using DeepSeek, Kimi etc. through OpenRouter or from them directly is also great, here you pay per token but it's still more usage overall.

I hit my weekly limit in 3 days this week. Irregularly do in 5. With the top MAX sub.

Wow, then you are most likely doing something very wrong.

No, I'm just using it a lot. It's productive enough that I've found it worthwhile tacking on subs for GLM 5.1 and Kimi as well (GLM is fantastic, Kimi is good when it works but temperamental)

That’s because the week ends before you can use them because you’re waiting for your hourly resets. Now the week essentially got longer with the same limit

For me personally, I have the basic Claude Code subscription that I use to rewind on some evenings or on weekend, to code a bit for 1-2 hours. I have like 3-5 session with it every week.

The 5h windows are frustrating because I can go through them quickly if I have a more complex task. I haven't yet met the weekly limit. I'd say there are many cases similar to mine.

I disagree. I routinely hit the 5 hour limit on Pro with Opus 4.7 just trying to have it do one design task or comprehensive code review on a large PR, and the worst part is, the overhead and bringing all that context back into another 5 hour window blows through 30%+ of my 5 hour usage limit.

I don’t think I’ve hit either limit a single time in the past 5 months after upgrading to the $100 plan.

On heavy weeks I probably am using it consistently for at least 6+ hours a day.

Although, I’m pretty rigorous about always keeping my sessions under 200-250k tokens.

I've maxed out weekly limits for 2 $200 accounts before

I've found with opus 4.6 which im still stubbornly using i can burn about 10% of the weekly within a 5 hour window with my workflow.

Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day which results in me not using that much early in the week so i can kinda "burn freely" later on. which leads me to a spot where usually on the final two days im sorta thinking about how can i expend that usage ive "saved".

the 5 hour windows make this harder, sometimes the final day of the week im trying to get that 10% in every 5 hour window of my waking hours and i HATE that, i wanna work when i am most productive, not around some ridiculous window of time, i dont wanna think "I am gonna be utilizing claude the most around 11am so i should send a dumb message to haiku to get my 5 hour window started at 7:30am so i can have it roll over at 12:30."

So im happy about this change sure. But it is 100% them creating a problem and pretending having some relief from that problem is them doing their users a favor. I understand they are doing it to lower peak hours usage and all that, I still despise it.

> Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day

20%, there are 5 work days in a week, not 7.

weird distinction to make when replying to someone talking about their own personal usage of the weekly limit that is a 7 day window of time.

People are waisting tokens by using Opus for everything.

Using Advisor [1], you can use Sonnet most of time; Sonnet can handoff work it can't handle to Opus. When Opus is done, you automatically go back to Sonnet.

[1]: https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/claude-code-advisor-strategy-...

I rarely use Opus for planning (in the Pro plan). Spec a feature in Sonnet, hand it to Haiku, come back for review. That’s a 5-hour window gone, sometimes 2.

I hit my weekly limit around day 4, with 2 maxed out windows per day (and sometimes a bit of usage at night).

I completely understand why people would use Opus for everything, it’s much more thorough and effective. Sonnet as well, but on Pro it’s gonna be Haiku all the time.

my workflow allows for about 10 windows being maxed out each week(if this threads claim is true that is now 5 windows), i always use Opus for planning and just have strict rules for delegation when its actually crafting the code.

I have a pretty nailed down .claude/ where the goal is single sources of truth, so agent md files all reference the relevant files for what domain they are working within with that domain's conventions and structure etc, i think keeping this stuff up to date is massive compounding context savings, as well as just better for performance because it keeps all agents context windows free of noise by helping them only load in what is actually needed.

I've never really messed with haiku for anything besides absolute low end repetitive tasks, its usually an agent i have crafted when i want to ask it to generate a bunch of seed data or generic questions for tests or something similar. My assumption is that it would just be terrible and even though its super cheap, it is still inevitably bringing the final results back to the better models and if thats not valuable tokens then im wasting the haiku tokens and the passoff to the better models with work that will be repeated anyway.

On the Pro plan you can max 10 windows per week using Opus for planning? I’m impressed. Even with Serena and really tight context management, I use Sonnet for most planning and Haiku for implementation. That gets me through the week doing 1 or 2 features and 10-ish windows of bug fixing.

I think the main reason that workflow has not worked for me is because im using an ide version of claude code, which means my main agent isn't a crafted agent and is "stock" sonnet or "stock" opus. I'll likely swap to the cli version soon enough and see if that remedies it (this isn't laziness on my part, i instead learned opencode workflows first because it applies more broadly, the only limitation is usage of a claude subscription within it).

So with the stock sonnet i get the chatty confidently wrong sonnet instead of a strict crafted agent. Stock Opus is a lot more reasonable, and hands off simple tasks to crafted sonnet agents with the chatty and more strict workflows, so i guess im literally doing the opposite(closer to what that old article describes).

Exactly, the weekly limits are the real limiting factor. If you really push it, you can easily hit the weekly $200/mo Max limit in a day.

5 hours were the painful ones. If you're hitting your weekly you've outgrown the sub and should use extra billing

Or start switching to open-weights, local LLMs for basic development. Would rather invest in my own hardware than Anthropic’s, tbh.

It's not, because I've never hit my weekly limits because of the very restrictive 5 hours limits. Let's see if I really hit my weekly limits now.

However you see it, it's an improvement for the consumer.

Who cares about rate limits if they serve your prompt using dumbed down model.

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