[HN Gopher] Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code with...
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Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling
users
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-07-17 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| jablongo wrote:
| Id like to hear about the tools and use cases that lead people to
| hit these limits. How many sub-agents are they spawning? How are
| they monitoring them?
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I'm not on the pro plan, but on $20/mo, I asked Claude some 20
| questions on architecture yesterday and it hit my limit.
|
| This is going to be happening with every AI service. They are
| all burning cash and need to dumb it down somehow. Whether
| that's running worse models or rate limiting.
| rancar2 wrote:
| There was a batchmode pulled from the documentation after the
| first few days of the Claude Code release. Many of have been
| trying to be respectful with a stable 5 agent call but some
| people have pushed those limits much higher as it wasn't being
| technically throttle until last week.
| WJW wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons strikes again...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I've seen prompts telling it to spawn an agent to review every
| change it makes... and they're not monitoring anything
| TrueDuality wrote:
| One with only manual interactions and regular context resets. I
| have a couple of commands I'll use regularly that have 200-500
| words in them but it's almost exclusively me riding that
| console raw.
|
| I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and
| I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours,
| that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are
| about every four hours.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Ha was just talking about this coming down the pipeline with
| folks days ago (in so many words)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44565481
| Aurornis wrote:
| I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a
| toy side project.
|
| I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't
| using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for
| sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I
| never did.
|
| To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and
| manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed
| like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't
| have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting
| $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it
| every single day.
|
| My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a
| while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up
| because it's starting to overwhelm their capacity.
|
| I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to
| hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I hit the limits within an hour with just one request in CC.
| Not even using opus. It'll chug away but eventually switch to
| the nearing limit message. It's really quite ridiculous and not
| a good way to upsell to the higher plans without definitive
| usage numbers.
| cladopa wrote:
| Thinking is extremely inefficient compared with the usual query
| in Chat.
|
| If you think a lot, you can spend hundreds of dollars easily.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Worth noting that a lot of these limits are changing very
| rapidly (weekly if not daily) and also depend on time of day,
| location, account age, etc.
| buremba wrote:
| They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we
| see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent.
|
| I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the
| spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no
| idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing
| returned by the API doesn't make any sense.
| roxolotl wrote:
| A coworker of mine claimed they've been burning $1k a week this
| month. Pretty wild it's only costing the company $200 a month.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Crikey. Now I get the business model:
|
| I hire someone for say PS5K/mo. They then spend $200/mo or is
| it a $1000/wk on Claude or whatevs.
|
| Profit!
| dfsegoat wrote:
| Can you clarify which tooling you are using? Is it cursor-
| stats?
| iwontberude wrote:
| Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already
| knows what they are doing. It's not that hard to write
| boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to
| Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra
| headaches. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going
| to be so painful.
| Sevii wrote:
| I've spent far too much of my life writing boilerplate and API
| integrations. Let Claude do it.
| axpy906 wrote:
| I agree. It's a lot faster to tell it what I want and work on
| something else in the meantime. You end up ready code diffs
| more than writing code but it saves time.
| serf wrote:
| >Claude Code is not worth the time sink
|
| there are like 15~ total pages of documentation.
|
| There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for
| the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder
| which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5
| 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..'
| , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that
| trigger that route.
|
| Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant
| feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and
| /help will list every command.
|
| The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's
| a fairly straightforward system, too.
|
| That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a
| few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for
| someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment
| itself.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah, Claude Code was by far the quickest/easiest for me to
| get set up. The longest part was just getting my API key
| Implicated wrote:
| Comments like this remind me that there's a whole host of
| people out there who have _no idea_ what these tools are
| capable of doing to ones productivity or skill set in general.
|
| > It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm
| auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue,
| Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches.
|
| Uh, no. To start - yea, boilerplate is easy. But like a sibling
| comment to this one said - it's also tedious and annoying, let
| the LLM do it. Beyond that, though, is that if you apply some
| curiosity and that "anyone that already knows what they are
| doing" level prior knowledge you can use these tools to _learn_
| a great deal.
|
| You might think your way of doing things is perfect, and the
| only way to do them - but I'm more of the mindset that there's
| a lot of ways to skins most of these cats. I'm always open to
| better ways to do things - patterns or approaches I know
| nothing about that might just be _perfect_ for what I'm trying
| to do. And given that I do, in general, know what I'm asking it
| to do, I'm able to judge whether it's approach is any good.
| Sometimes it's not, no big deal. Sometimes it opens my mind to
| something I wasn't aware of, or didn't understand or know would
| apply to the given scenario. Sometimes it leads me into rabbit
| holes of "omg, that means I could do this ... over there" and
| it turns into a whole ass refactor.
|
| Claude code has broadened my capabilities, professionally,
| tremendously. The way it makes available "try it out and see
| how it works" in terms of trying multiple
| approaches/libraries/databases/patterns/languages and how those
| have many times led me to learning something new - honestly,
| priceless.
|
| I can see how these tools would scare the 9-5 sit in the office
| and bang out boilerplate stuff, or to those who are building
| things that have never been done before (but even then, there's
| caveats, IMO, to how effective it would/could be in these
| cases)... but to people writing software or building things
| (software or otherwise) because they enjoy it or because
| they're financial or professional lives depend on what they're
| building - absolutely astonishing to me anyone who isn't
| embracing these tools with open arms.
|
| With all that said. I keep the MCP servers limited to only if I
| need it in that session and generally if I'm needing an MCP
| server in an on-going basis I'm better off building a tool or
| custom documentation around that thing. And idk about all that
| agent stuff - I got lucky and held out for Claude Code, dabbled
| a bit with others and they're leagues behind. If I need an
| agent I'ma just tap on CC, for now.
|
| Context and the ability to express what you want in a way that
| a human would understand is all you need. If you screw either
| of those up, you're gonna have a bad time.
| jmartrican wrote:
| I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet.
| But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the
| weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in
| store.
|
| I suspected that something like this might happen, where the
| demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I
| still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be
| forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are
| breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning
| models because I find I get more work done and the quality is
| good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long.
| Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token
| reducing step (and maybe this already exists).
| blibble wrote:
| the day of COGS reckoning for the "AI" industry is approaching
| fast
| apwell23 wrote:
| oh yea looks like everyone and their grandma is hitting claude
| code
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/3572
|
| Inside info is they are using their servers to prioritize
| training for sonnet 4.5 to launch at the same time as xAI
| dedicated coding model. xAI coding logic is very close to sonnet
| 4 and has anthropic scrambling. xAI sucks at making designs but
| codes really well.
| 38 wrote:
| Claude is absolute trash. I am on the paid plan and repeatedly
| hit the limits. and their support is essentially non existing,
| even for paid accounts
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| > One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been
| impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came
| into effect.
|
| Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.
| dude250711 wrote:
| He did not pass the vibe check.
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is what really makes me sceptical of these tools. I've tried
| Claude Code and it does save some time even if I find the process
| boring and unappealing. But as much as I hate typing, my keyboard
| is mine and isn't just going to disappear one day, have its price
| hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines. I would hate to get
| used to these tools then find I don't have them any more. I'm all
| for cutting down on typing but I'll wait until I can run things
| entirely locally.
| bigiain wrote:
| > my keyboard is mine and isn't just going to disappear one
| day, have its price hiked or refuse to work after 1000 lines.
|
| I dunno, from my company or boss's perspective, there are
| definitely days where I've seriously considered just
| disappearing, demanding a raise, or refusing to work after the
| 3rd meeting or 17th Jira ticket. And I've seen cow orkers and
| friends do all three of those over my career.
|
| (Perhaps LLMs are closer to replacing human developers that
| anyone has realized yet?)
| MisterSandman wrote:
| I guess the argument has time goes on AI will get cheaper and
| more efficient.
|
| ...but idk how true that, I think it's pretty clear that these
| companies are using the Uber model to attract customers, and
| the fact that they're already increasing prices or throttling
| is kind of insane.
| khurs wrote:
| All you people who were happy to pay $100 and $200 a month have
| ruined it for the rest of us!!
| rob wrote:
| I don't think CLI/terminal-based approaches are going to win out
| in the long run compared to visual IDEs like Cursor but I think
| Anthropic has something good with Claude Code and I've been
| loving it lately (after using only Cursor for a while.) Wouldn't
| be surprised if they end up purchasing Cursor after squeezing
| them out via pricing and then merging Cursor + Claude Code so you
| have the best of both worlds under one name.
| ladon86 wrote:
| I think it was just an outage that unfortunately returned 429
| errors instead of something else.
| sneilan1 wrote:
| So far I've had 3-4 Claude code instances constantly working 8-12
| hours a day every day. I use it like a stick shift though. When I
| need a big plan doc, switch to recommended model between opus and
| sonnet. And for coding, use sonnet. Sometimes I hit the opus
| limit but I simply switch to sonnet for the day and watch it more
| closely.
| mpeg wrote:
| Honest question: what do you do with them? I would be so
| fascinated to see a video of this kind of workflow... I feel
| like I use LLMs as much as I can while still being productive
| (because the code they generate has a lot of slop) and still
| barely use the agentic CLIs, mostly just tab completion through
| windsurf, and Claude for specific questions by steering the
| context manually pasting the relevant stuff
| sneilan1 wrote:
| I focus more on reading code & prompting claude to write code
| for me at a high level. I also experiment a lot. I don't
| write code anymore by hand except in very rare cases. I ask
| claude for questions about the code to build understanding. I
| have it produce documentation, which is then consumed into
| other prompts. Often, claude code will need several minutes
| on a task so I start another task. My coding throughput on a
| day to day basis is now the equivalent of about 2-3 people.
|
| I also use gemini to try out trading ideas. For example, the
| other day I had gemini process google's latest quarterly
| report to create a market value given the total sum of all
| it's businesses. It valued google at $215. Then I bought long
| call options on google. Literally vibe day trading.
|
| I use chat gpt sora to experiment with art. I've always been
| fascinated with frank lloyd wright and o4 has gotten good
| enough to not munge the squares around in the coonley
| playhouse image so that's been a lot of fun to mess with.
|
| I use cheaper models & rag to automate categorizing of my
| transactions in Tiller. Claude code does the devops/python
| scripting to set up anything google cloud related so I can
| connect directly to my budget spreadsheet in google sheets.
| Then I use llama via openrouter + a complex RAG system to
| analyze my historical credit card data & come up with
| accurate categorizations for new transactions.
|
| This is only scratching the surface. I now use claude for
| devops, frontend, backend, fixing issues with embedder models
| in huggingface candle. The list is endless.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| Is it really worth it to use opus vs. sonnet? sonnet is pretty
| good on its own.
| Ataraxic wrote:
| I need to see a video of what people are doing to hit the max
| limits regularly.
|
| I find sonnet really useful for coding but I never even hit basic
| limits. at $20/mo. Writing specs, coming up with documentation,
| doing wrote tasks for which many examples exist in the database.
| Iterate on particular services etc.
|
| Are these max users having it write the whole codebase w/
| rewrites? Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find
| incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have
| it do a whole big round trip?
| martinald wrote:
| I'm not sure this is "intentional" per se or just massively
| overloaded servers because of unexpected demand growth and they
| are cutting rate limits until they can scale up more. This may
| become permanent/worse if the demand keeps outstripping their
| ability to scale.
|
| I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times
| to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a
| significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth
| they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they
| have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at
| their door to throw more cash at them.
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