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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan only when I'm really having the LLMs go wild with the Xtra high effort on the newest/biggest models on abstract problems or where I don't really understand the problem well. (E.g. improving ML models, planning creative molecule synthesis pipelines, identifying subtle performance problems etc)

Generic CRUD/Config stuff I do for work (and assume most software jobs entail? Maybe not correct) doesn't use a significant amount of tokens.

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I routinely hit the limits on a Claude pro max 20 account for personal projects. For context I have 26 years of professional experience and have been programming for around 40 years.

In addition I have virtually unconstrained usage at work (for now).

Tasks that I do on my personal account: - building stuff for my wife's business - analyzing and experimentation and building harnesses to test other models/services - processing interesting research papers that publish without code or sufficient data to replicate the work

And that's besides simple stuff like exploring new topics I am interested in, and building learning assistants and personal tooling, and eliminating technical chores.

At least for myself personally: Opus 5 Ultra spreading out hundreds of subagents on specific tasks can gobble tokens like mad. Recently I did a custom OCR pipeline in a day and some Revit automation, extremely large datasets, but I definitely spent good money to make it happen so fast.

I almost certainly wasted tokens, but right now things are subsidized, so it works.

> Maybe a dumb question, but what are you doing/seeing others do that uses that many tokens? I find myself pressing the weekly caps on the $20/month plan

I don’t run into many issue with my personal subscription plans. However, at work while companies like Anthropic offer “Enterprise” plans, you still get billed at API rates which are quite high. The subscription plans are an incredible deal and subsidize these tokens, but these plans aren’t offered to large organizations.

The retail account is about 200 to 300 dollars of api equivalent. Large companies disallow retail.

Ah! That may explain the entirety of my disconnect.

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