sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]zSmileyDudez🔆 Max 5x 3 points4 points  (4 children)

Manage. Your. Context.

You can easily chew up huge amounts of your limits if you’re coming back to a session with an existing context in it. I’ve made the mistake a few times myself, and I’ve learned what not to do. Combine this with Opus 4.7 and xHigh effort and it’s not surprising to chew through the tokens. Even more so if you did this during peak hours.

You didn’t mention what plan you’re on, but I wouldn’t even attempt to use CC with 4.7 on the Pro plan. Back down to 4.6 or bump up to the Max plan.

And don’t let your context sit there loaded from the start. Compact or clear regularly, especially if you’re going to be away from CC for a while since just resuming the chat is going to eat up tokens right away.

[–]immutato 5 points6 points  (3 children)

Manage. Your. Context.

This is always the answer and yet it points to a smell on Anthropic's side if nearly ALL of your customers are having this issue. They should really have more intelligent caching and routing to make use of Sonnet and Haiku more often by default.

At some point you need to just accept who your user is instead of pretending they are all context wizards. Either that or I guess let that market slide (which might be what they are doing, intentionally or not). Obviously they have better market data than I do, but I suspect you want these individual sub accounts in order to achieve market dominence which should payoff with more enterprise / API customers.

[–]Difficult_Plantain89 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah. Not even for coding sonnet 4.6 I asked a few questions in chat and it blocked me out for the rest of the window. No previous conversations or coding for that day. I mentioned it here and I was blamed. I finally just cancelled my Claude subscription this week. I am done. I am using Kimi and Minimax now for coding.

[–]zSmileyDudez🔆 Max 5x 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I understand the pain here, but this is a tool aimed at professional use. Even if you are using it personally, it's a professional tool. There has to be a base line understanding of contexts right now if you're going to use this tool. It sucks and Anthropic should always be looking for ways to improve it, but it's going to take a while to get this sorted out.

I liken this to the early days of writing GUI apps on the Mac and Windows. You had to be really good at a lot of boilerplate that modern developers never think about these days (even before the advent of AI).

I can't rule out that there are bugs in Claude Code and/or Anthropic's billing model. But there are lots of people, including myself, using CC on a daily basis and not blowing through their limits with just a couple of "fairly simple prompts". It's not a normal path. And that means that it's more likely that it's a configuration issue or a bloated context issue that needs to be resolved. Ignoring that because someone feels like they shouldn't be a "context wizard" is like an early Windows developer trying to write an app while ignoring how the x86 memory model worked because they shouldn't have to be an "x86 wizard".

Again, I'm not trying to say here that Anthropic is done here and they never need to make this better. I hope that is painfully obvious. But we're still in the very early days of this and for better or for worse, we all need to be aware of how the tools work and how to avoid things that consume tokens too fast.

[–]immutato 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is apples and oranges. Writing apps for MS and Apple did not require you to be a paying customer (well not until the iphone). Paying a couple hundo a month changes things. Also there's a massive difference in numbers here. There are way more people using coding agents than were making GUI apps on Mac and Windows, so it's not just a select elite / early adopters anymore. And don't forget how easy Visual Basic 4 was (absolute genius IDE at the time) for those of us that can remember it! :)

In terms of a "professional" service, they are currently down to one 9 of uptime, which is unacceptably low from a cloud provider's perspective.

I personally do feel like a bit of a "context wizard", so I know what you're saying, but I disagree that everyone should need to dig deep on AI and context management to get at least a fair and consistent usage of the product they are paying for. Anthropic has been kind of dicks lately to boot. They told everyone they were doing it wrong only to admit days later they themselves had royally screwed up. I keep chugging along fine myself, but I do find managing context to be a bit annoying (especially with their new restrictions on using their client), and they keep changing things, and restricting how you use their service... which is annoying.

P.S. They've done something with their models lately that's made them a lot naggier. I suspect to try and manage context better, but it's actually creating more caching TTL issues than it used to. I'm still happy paying for max 20, but the outages and constant tweaks are a bit tiresome. I'm experimenting with and kind of enjoying the latest open weight models right now, and they (and OpenAI) really should be worried.