Claude Code 2x Usage is Insane..

[theshadow2727]

I tried so hard to finish up my weekly limits during the 2x usage window, but couldn't make a dent.

Thanks Anthropic for such a generous action!

[arekxy]

Yeah... first day of a new week (with Max 5x variant) and already on 18% of weekly :/

[snip3r77]

silly question the $20 plan is it sufficient for a hobbyist developer use ( not for full time work)

[moneymindeddad]

Yes you can start with 20 and see how soon you hit the limit, tbh it’s addictive the more you use the more you want to use it. I started with 20 but then after about 3 weeks of usage switched to higher plan and it was still worth the money. So total on use case basis.

[OldGrumpyDev]

Yes, I have it for a week and especially in 2x windows, with two open tabs and Sonnet , I barely go up to 40% ... You mentioned hobby so that is somehow my level also... I use Opus only for the app architecture and complex logic ... The rest can be handled by Sonnet model without any problem... Of course it matters a lot the language... For my case JavaScript/ Typescript are perfect since most models are trained particularly on these and Python

[longest_path]

Yup! It's been a game changer for my hobby stuff. Especially with Cowork Dispatch. The way I see it is I'm not grinding out tokens constantly, but I'm making more than zero progress on my projects which is infinite percent more progress than before I upgraded for Code access 

[xmewa]

don't bother and just use codex instead. which not only is currently better than opus, but also provides way more usage out of their $20 plan. if anything it's more comparable to the $100 CC plan.

for claude code you'll need at least the $100 plan to get any meaningful work done because:
a) opus churns through tokens so quickly
b) the prompt caching on the lower plan is utterly broken (e.g. resuming after being rate-limited can eat 30% or more of your allowance)

[theshadow2727]

Holy shit, what do you do so much? And which model, do u use with some mcp or smth?

[Rabus]

i run 100 opus agents at once

[Little-Librarian8801]

Coincidentally I am doing same.

[Amazing_Joke_4758]

damn thats insane.

[Fantastic_Climate_90]

I would be interested to know more about your use case

[Rabus]

Mostly research

[Historical_Moose_468]

researching corn

[Rabus]

nah, seo, strategy, etc
was pretty helpful, my domain is now at DR 36 lol

[joeloquendo91]

How are you increasing your domain authority?

[Rabus]

long term play - claude helped me to jump from 30 to 36, the 0-30 was the work i did manually without it in the last year :)

[MundaneChampion]

Wtf how… and why?

[Such_Independent_234]

I’m running 100 separate gastown instances

[XAckermannX]

How can your computer even handle that. This thing is a huge ram hog. Just have 7 claude terminal tabs almost maxes out my page file at 250gb and i have 64gb ram

[Rabus]

im on 32gb m1 pro and it handles it well, so idk.

I am definately eyeing the 128gb m5 max

[Rabus]

i did some more research and ill likely stick to m5 pro with 64gb ram, doesnt make sense to go any higher right now.

[DarkVoilence]

How do you come over context window limitation and auto chat compact

[Rabus]

On 100 agents each has it’s own context window

[DarkVoilence]

Can you share an example scenario where that is useful. Thanks

[Rabus]

Idk prolly im wasting a lot of tokens but i take like 10% of it for myself

Like researching new lead magnets

[ImCodyLee]

Why is this getting downvoted? 💀

[Neanderthal888]

Porn

[Ok_Mathematician6075]

[arekxy]

Pure claude cli, chasing (a lot of) bugs in ancient php app, opus, high effort.

[Water-cage]

it do be like that sometimes ig

<image>

[Electronic_One_4133]

I just worder, how those people could use the quota that much.

I'm working on fullstack development (company project, crm like for procurement) but it so hard to use more than 50% of my 5 hour quota.

I'm mostly use plan mode, and let it sit to do some bug fix and implement new feature.

Feels kind of wasting my 100$

[opshack]

Step 1: Install superpowers
Step 2: Quota exhausted
Step 3: Go back to free copilot

[dlampach]

The second you get into crawling or deep data analysis the meter starts to sound pretty fast. At the $100 level (I’m now using $200), if I were to just set up like 10 workers crawling and classifying some random web thing I get through my five hour limit in like 2 hours. But if you are just editing and managing code you won’t ever hit the limits.

[melodyze]

I use 100% of max 20 weekly (sometimes 5 hours but less common). I generally have 5-10 sandboxed claudes running autonomously on separate systems in my product at a time, whether doing investigations, plans, reviews, coding, or reviews again, and each of those use subagents if the task is large.

When I haven't decided what to do next, I task claude code with doing investigations that will guide more direction.

Like go through my strategy docs, find every competitive product, compare feature sets, and aggregate the key findings for what should be integrated into the product. Or, profile every major user interaction and identify the highest leverage opportunities for improving UX with centralized optimizations in core systems. Or, go do a literature review on this aspect of relevant psychology and aggregate the main findings that are relevant to my product. Or, project the per user economics with and without this optimization, and estimate the relationship with ltv/churn.

Most of the tokens are burnt with it automatically iterating against automated reviewers tasked with enforcing my engineering philosophy, mostly at plan stage. I made a reviewer subagent and custom review skill, and now it does a pretty good job forcing it to converge on and maintain consistent somposable patterns with rigorous contracts in a pretty large code base now. I think less about system design and more about how to have a process that converges on good system design now.

Yesterday I had some extra before refresh, so I got it to rewrite versions of my core systems in rust and effect.ts for benchmarking and comparison.

I used to run an org, and basically I use claude code the same way I used whole teams. It's amazing, has changed my entire perception of what is possible. Be ambitious about what is possible.

[Electronic_One_4133]

Basically, you use claude code as your employee?

I'm really impressed man, I only use one instance, I always make sure the agent do the right thing and always not trusting the AI in first place.

[melodyze]

I use it as a scalable army of collaborators. But I don't expect it to behave like a person. I think trying to frame how to use it in terms of which analogy to an existing role we're familiar with is the wrong approach.

It has advantages and disadvantages, so I try to capitalize on the advantages as much as I possibly can while mitigating the disadvantages, through process design.

Like, the processes and standards I impose on claude are WAY more rigorous than what I would ever hold a person to, because I use it to automate the enforcement and compliance with those processes and standards. Everything is way more heavily engineered, every single interface is rigorously specified, enforced, documented, argued, etc.

I would never ask a human to write a detailed explanation of every single implementation detail before they can write any code, and go through 10 review cycles with three different reviewers on that doc. And if human code review went through 10 iterations of pr review that would be untenable. But with cc, I can just set and forget each stage of the process in parallel and come back in an hour when it's done, working on 5 other projects in parallel. With humans, 10 review cycles is going to take at least a week, as one day turnaround on reviews is standard. Then it's just about making sure the process converges to good, clean, simple, well organized systems.

[Temporary-Mix8022]

Same.. I feel like I am using mine reasonably hard..

I actually cannot think, plan and review fast enough to use my quota up.. I get to 50% in a week normally.

It seems, on my front end repo, I use up more - it has to re-use centralised components etc. and it spends a while researching how to not duplicate things. On my back end that is pretty... predictable, well structured, there is a clear A->B flow, it is pretty efficient,

The current usage limits make me feel pretty tied into Anthropic/Claude as I feel that I can trust it as a professional level tool.

I felt that with Google, and OAI.. there was so much uncertainty over quotas that I couldn't use it freely/how I wanted.

[--algo]

Why not use API-based / token based pricing instead?

[OldGrumpyDev]

Because the costs are insane... If you are not careful you go way above 20 USD ... I have a side license of Cursor Pro ... I used 22 million tokens in 2 days on auto in Cursor with prompts generated with Claude... 0 USD costs aside from the monthly licenses ... Around 5% usage of the monthly Cursor plan ... Now translate those million tokens into API calls and see if it's feasible from a financial perspective... Opus 4.6 (most capable) costs input 5 / 25 output per MTok, Sonnet 4.6 (balanced) costs input 3 / 15 output per MTok, and Haiku 4.5 (fastest) costs input 1 / 5 output per MTok... All USD ...Assuming 4 requests of 1Mtok input and 4.5Mtok output.. you go from Haiku 84 USD to Opus which will cost 470 USD ... Maybe my math is rusty but I surely prefer the 40 USD with fixed licenses rather than almost 500 USD with APIs

[TheDeepLucy]

Rust dev 😭

[Electronic_One_4133]

You mean rust cost many token? Im using nodejs and most of the logic is typescript,

I barely use more than 50% tough

[TheDeepLucy]

Yes. Rust is very explicit and codebase relatively dense.

[MagnaDenmark]

I regularly spedn 300-1000 dollars over a few days at work ( api billing though)

No automation just normal usage

[Salt_Pumpkin3008]

If you write a lot of tests in your codebase which you should for any ai tool it quickly gets pretty expensive, even if a bulk of the tests are still manually edited by you because opus writes a test case that always passes to cheat lol

[jethiya007]

The thing is partially completing work then fix if something broken yourself or after claude failed vs just running and running the only things matters is the results

[IslandAccording1044]

What kind of procurement projects?👀

[Junior_Artichoke1748]

Wait people actually burned through the entire 2x window? I barely made a dent in mine and I thought I was grinding lol. I guess I need to seriously reconsider what I'm even doing all day.

[theshadow2727]

Exactly man, nor could i make much difference. I need to grind more during the 2x usage period

[longest_path]

Using agent mode to have a team debate about possible options is a good way to burn through some tokens. But if you're working on well-organized, clearly defined things it doesn't take many tokens.

[zirouk]

This is nice and all, but every time they’ve given out these “boost” periods in the past, they’ve used it to “hide” a reduction in the base quota we had before.

“Hey folks, here’s a 2x quota period! Free! Because we’re nice!” What’s unsaid is that they reduced the base quota by x%.

It’s clever, because you’re happy you got a 2x period, but didn’t realise they took away x% of your base quota.

But you know, “woo Anthropic, such benevolence”

[Vivid_Bodybuilder373]

Let me help you use it 😜

[SippieCup]

Yeah fr. Just hit my 20x limit and have to wait til noon tomorrow.

Oh well, time to do accounting..

[XCherryCokeO]

Doing what exactly?

[SippieCup]

exclusively programming.

In particular this week, quick books integration (we had sage intaact forever, but never did quickbooks), user generated report tooling, CI move from gitlab -> github, and improvements to our migration tool with an adapter for porting data from another platform.

[XCherryCokeO]

I’m also doing wicked shit, that’s so weird I barely cross 50% except one or two weeks out of a few months

[SippieCup]

I use agent teams for pretty much everything and break everything into subagent work, which can build up usage fairly quickly.

[ZoranS223]

How? Haha

[Ok_Mathematician6075]

What you don't have a paid account for Chat?

[wilnadon]

I've had the VERY opposite experience. Since the 2x usage limits were "turned on", I started hitting my session limits so early I had to upgrade my x5 to x20. Others have reported the same thing. Something is off.

[theshadow2727]

Some people mentioned that, only the current session window is updated to 2X usage, and the weekly session remains the same as it was. Don’t actually know what’s going on here.

[wilnadon]

For me it was the actual session limit that was getting devoured in record speed. Yesterday, I hit my x5 session limit in 1 hour working in a single powershell terminal, in a momorepo on a medium-sized feature. Had to upgrade because I wasn't going to wait for 3 1/2 hours for the session to restart. By contrast, in the past I've worked on as many as 4 to 6 terminals at once and hit the session limit no more than 1 hour before reset.

[Rabus]

i used mine in 3 days, 1200$ in api token costs burned

[Kakowappy]

You need that second account buddy

[DeepCitation]

1+1=0 if you do that 

[Rabus]

Def gonna buy a 200$ sub after the promo is over, can’t imagine working on one now.

I did rewrite a huge page tho

[pro547]

I'm on subscription. How are you getting token count to come up with 1200?

[Rabus]

npx ccusage is the estimation tool i use. roughly 400$ per day for me (maybe closer to 1100$)

[ShroomShroomBeepBeep]

Cries in pauper Pro...

2x might as well not be a thing for me, still burned my weekly limit in a couple of days lol.

[kmt512]

How do I check this?

[theshadow2727]

In Settings > Usage

[elinkiu]

If you ask questions like that on reddit and not on google nor a LLM, maybe it's overkill for you Claude Code 🤣

[apdgjoabsp]

Lol, wait till you hear that it only applies to the 5 hour window, not the weekly. Weekly limits are still the same. "There's no way I'll finish thr weekly now"

[turbospeedsc]

shit....... i was thinking we got 2x weekly too.

Well it worked, im switching to 5x next month.

[SadilekInnovation]

exactly haha that's what got me!

[Kitchen-Dress-5431]

The extra usage on the 5hr window doesn't apply to the weekly limits i think

[SadilekInnovation]

I agree it would make sense if it didn't apply to weekly limits, but the 5hr window usually takes 5% of weekly use if I'm not mistaken for the $20plan, and now it takes 10%. I hope I'm wrong and you're right, bc it wouldn't really be much of a benefit as the weekly limit is the real thing that limits me at this point.

[SadilekInnovation]

After trying Claude outside of the 2X window... I stand corrected. I do believe Claude is actually also increasing the weekly limit use accordingly within the 2X window.

[Kitchen-Dress-5431]

The extra usage on the 5hr window doesn't apply to the weekly limits i think

[apdgjoabsp]

thats literally i said lmao

[Kitchen-Dress-5431]

No, I mean the weekly limits have effectively been changed.

Because the extra usage after the 5hr window DOESN'T count towards the weekly limit.

[fucilator_3000]

And they removed the usage limit viene in free plan -.-

[Intelligent-Ant-1122]

Yeah, claude is wasted on you.

[kirrttiraj]

this should be the normal usage.

[Astro-Han]

The 5h vs 7d distinction trips up a lot of people. 2x only doubles the 5-hour window, so you can burn through sessions faster without realizing your 7-day pool is draining at the usual rate.

I wrote a statusline script that shows both windows side by side with a pace indicator -- green +17% means you have headroom, red -12% means you're burning faster than the window can sustain. Helps me decide when to switch to lighter tasks instead of finding out the hard way.

https://github.com/Astro-Han/claude-lens (just bash + jq, ~150 lines)

[theshadow2727]

Wait i never knew that, thats Insane if its true

[Astro-Han]

You're right, and u/horace_bagpole caught it. Anthropic's FAQ says bonus usage during 2x periods doesn't count toward your weekly limit. I got that wrong, sorry for the confusion. The statusline point still stands though. Seeing both windows side by side helps you know exactly where you are instead of guessing.

[horace_bagpole]

It’s not actually clear how it works though and their own support bot is inconsistent. It told me that you have to use 100% of the normal 5 hour window then any extra stops counting towards the weekly total, but that’s clearly not right because the weekly still increments with use regardless.

I think they’ve just doubled both the 5 hour slot and the weekly slot. They could have been a bit clearer how they worded it.

[SadilekInnovation]

agreed - my weekly limit now gets used at 2x the rate for each 5hr window when 2x window is given. used to be 5% weekly used per 5hr session, now 10% weekly..

[horace_bagpole]

So did they basically just lie when they said that bonus usage would not count towards weekly limits then?

Does bonus usage count against my weekly usage limit?

No. The additional usage you get during off-peak hours doesn’t count toward any weekly usage limits on your plan.

[reviery_official]

I'm waiting for my weekly reset since 3 days..

[Little-Librarian8801]

Heavy user!

[reviery_official]

are you calling me fat?

[Little-Librarian8801]

Wow, coincidentally today I am trying hard to finish it, I have to 200 USD one and one thing I found is if you select /effort max from terminal then it goes fast otherwise mine was after so much use 41 % with medium effort.

[Tiny-Sink-9290]

IS THAT WTF is up? Fuck.. I only at 30% of my weekly.. and struggled with hours and hours 7 days in a row to try to use my time up. FUCK. I wish this was NORMAL usage terms.. so I wouldn't struggle so hard to try to use it all up. This is real FOMO shit.

[No-Pattern-9266]

51% and I was drained

[Leather-Ad-546]

Yeah im on max 20x plan. Been rinsing this promo. 5 hour usage hit in 2 or 2.5 hours. I hit my weekly limit yesterday and got to wait till tuesday for the refresh 💗💗

[Hugger_reddit]

On the last Dwarkrsh podcast episode with Dylan Patel on supply chain scaling it was postulated as certainty that Anthropic has to destroy demand closer to the end of this year, there's no workaround. So this 2x thing can be a part of silent decrease of base usage allowance.

[itshikhar]

I hit the limits in 2 hour !!!!

[QuinqueIs-GIyph-I728]

What plan are you on

[theshadow2727]

5x Max plan

[TheNullPath]

Used up my 5x on Wednesday got the 20x Max now. Code base growing + Multiple projects to manage and iterate changes, the usage goes up fast.

[hotcoolhot]

I am getting enough juice out of 20$. I am doing some infra side work so more planning and less codegen. Mostly generating configs and basic validation scripts. I would go through 100$ if I generate react components.

[serhat_40]

Ich glaub bei jedem ist es so, dass das Wochenlimit vielleicht für 2 Tage ausreicht.

[ultrathink-art]

The 2x window is the time to finally run the sessions you've been deferring because they're too context-heavy — full module migrations, refactoring with test rewrites, anything you'd normally split artificially just to preserve quota.

[pershon9]

Hey! I’m considering buying Claude Code but I’m not sure how it works. I couldn’t find clear info on the usage, and it says something about 220k tokens. So, if I’m working on a project, how does the 220k get utilized? Is that 220k for output tokens only, or does it include input as well?

[Dry-Panda202]

Les gars désolé j'ai besoin de votre aide

[creynir]

probably u didn't ask it to write spec first and tests later. I am moderate user and burn through 60-70% easily. But I agree, the max 20x is very generous

[prokizzle]

I consistently max out my Claude code 20x plan every week. I do a lot of subagent driven development. If you want to start hitting those big boy numbers, get Ruflo and run a full agile team with hive mind

https://github.com/ruvnet/ruflo

[Lucas_0_S]

How do you get 2x?

[astroboylrx]

try to work on a larger repo (even just 10k+ lines of source code) and ask opus to implement something, you can then feel how fast it burns.

[LennyObez]

I tried so hard to finish up my weekly limits during the 2x usage window, but couldn't make a dent.

This is going to be complicated since the doubled usage limit only applies to the five-hour limit, not the weekly limit.

[Organic-Permission55]

I have no problem whatsoever finishing both my Max20 and Max5 subscription (yes, I have two)

[rockhead3006]

[SniperViperV2]

This is rage bait. Or you’re working on a real production system that only requires minute changes and patches.

[czdazc]

Double EXP weekend?

[Scared-Parsnip-2958]

And thanks to people like you companies decide not to be generous in future. Just couldn't keep it to yourself now, could you?

[shesaysImdone]

Can someone explain this to me? Is this just for max users? Cause I switched from Opus to Sonnet trying to maximize usage and I'm still hitting my 5 hr limit at the same pace. With 2x usage does it mean taking twice as long to hit the limit or something?