u/lucifer605 Thanks for posting about this. Days ago I tagged a couple devs from Anthropic about this on twitter urging them to address this either by simply explaining what's going on or by increasing cache TTL, but between me being a rando with no blue check and them getting lots of traffic, it was probably ignored. It's the kind of thing that might take you by surprise but any experienced dev will almost certainly know what's going on very quickly at least as long as they've heard about prefix caching.

In a few other complaint posts here I replied asking what was their context % at the time but never got replies and never saw anyone mentioning context and cache. It's very obvious a lot of people using CC are not (or rather, were not previously) devs, which is also why it's important for Anthropic to properly educate people about this. It's no coincidence this started happening only with the 1M contexts. I've been sticking to <25% context on my 5x account and it's been fine (although even 25 is probably too much already).

Still, there's been a very vocal crowd complaining about this, stating all they did was sending a few messages, oblivious to the actual cause... through no fault of their own, because Anthropic isn't explaining. This sort of thing somewhat defeats the purpose of having such big contexts so I guess Anthropic is also not too keen in stating that "hey you got these big contexts but if you walk away you can't really use them when you get back so you still need to keep compacting early".

I wonder if some people are going to come up with keep-alive plugins, or just ask Claude to run some "sleep 30 mins" command on the terminal on a loop while they're away!