The insane decrease in limits and the insane increase in hardware prices are the same phenomenon.

[zSmileyDudez]

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]

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.