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Comment by bicepjai | Hacker News Reader

I had the opposite experience. Claude models and its harness feel like they are set to eat tokens for everything, especially if it’s ultracode effort. I have seen it spawn 6 agents and eat my 4-hour quota right in front of me. Codex is on point and follows instructions well even with max effort. I like my analogy of Claude being garrulous and Codex being laconic. If I see more limit hits in same sitting session, I have to rearrange my workflows. my experiments with qwen and deepseek have been good, cant wait to try glm and other models.

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Just before I canceled my 20x Max sub I had a day where I had ~15% of my weekly I was trying to burn. I set it on ultracode and because I had set the max agents 32 for another project and forgot, the five research agents ended up spinning up a total of 26 subagents and burned through the remainder of my weekly in the span of 20 minutes before I noticed and shut it down.

“No, not like THAT!”

How can you burn through your weekly budget in 20 minutes? You'd hit your 5 hour budget way before that, right?

The five hour budget is about 15% of the weekly on Max 20x. I had about 15% left.

Ah sorry, I read your earlier comment as you being at 15% of your weekly (so the prompt consuming 85%).

Claude did the same thing to me the other day. I ran out of my 5 hr limit, and it went into my $100 credit they had given me. Multiple parallel agents. It ate it in no time flat.

When I checked, all that credit was gone, I still wasn't into the next 5 hours, and all the agents had failed, returning nothing.

I didn't even get anything for burning all that credit. If I had paid for it, I'd be very, very pissed.

Similar experience here. I had raised my cap to $20 because they had given me promo credit. The credit expired without me using it and I didn’t notice.

One fine day I was like, oh my weekly quota resets soon, I will kick off an expensive bug hunt. It launched parallel things and burned $10 in like a moment.

It’s scary. I turned off extra usage after that.

Here is an excerpt from the system prompt for UltraCode (Same for Fable,Opus,Sonnet):

"Ultracode. When a system-reminder confirms ultracode is on, that opt-in is standing: author and run a workflow for every substantive task by default. The goal is the most exhaustive, correct answer you can produce — token cost is not a constraint."

Requesting ultracode is basically asking for maximum token usage. If you want to limit consumption, use medium or high.

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