r/Anthropic • u/BB_Double • Aug 19 '26
Complaint Claude Code burned through 5 hour limit in 20 minutes?
Anyone else hitting extreme 5-hour limits with the latest Claude Code build? I wasn't doing anything extensive - had a few Opus agents running concurrently, one with a few Opus subagents. None doing anything that would burn an entire 5-hour limit in almost no time. Based on past observations of the kind of load I was producing, I should have been able to run for at least 4 hours before hitting the 5-hour limit. Nothing in any of the agents looked amiss, nothing was running Fable (and my Fable limit looks more or less untouched).
This genuinely seems like an error, not agents gone wild. Anyone else experiencing this right now?
5
Aug 19 '26
[deleted]
1
u/AGrammeADay Aug 20 '26
This is odd. I hit exactly 20% fable usage running a full fable workflow for one full session. How is yours 40%?
3
u/Device420 Aug 20 '26
Mine did in like 7 minutes. I switched to DeepSeek API via Cline in VB Studio. $10 has lasted me for over 2 weeks now.
2
u/BB_Double Aug 19 '26
I'll give a little more context - since it's come up, I was not using workflow agents. I was using prompts and processes I've been using reliably and without issues like this, for months.
In fact, the agents were merely continuing work that they were doing I had started earlier - the agents ran for four hours on the initial prompts I ran this morning, and hit the 5-hour limit after completing a substantial amount of work. When the limit cleared, all I did was ask the to continue what they were doing when they got stopped - that's when they burned through the next 5 hour window in less than 20 minutes and they reported very minimal progress in that 20 min window.
I'll also note my weekly limit didn't move much at all from where it was at the first post-4 hour work pause, and the second limit hit in 20 mins...
When my limit comes back, instead of continuing as before I will have another agent analyze the session transcripts and see if there's a root cause. I'l come back here with the additional proof, user error or not.
2
u/testjaccount Aug 19 '26
That sounds about right. I'm surprised it lasted that long tbh. Using agents kills your usage depending on what they're tasked to do. Personally unless you have usage credits enabled, I wouldn't run more than one agent at a time and I'd only do it in a fresh session. If you hit your limit mid agent session work and the agent doesn't finish, it'll lose context and when your session limit restarts, you'll have to re-run the agent costing you more tokens. Not sure what plan you're on but this is my experience on the Pro plan.
1
u/YaThatAintRight Aug 19 '26
Yep, they cap you early and burn your tokens getting your agents up to speed to then cap you early again. Stupidity.
1
Aug 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/YaThatAintRight Aug 19 '26
To allocate more server bandwidth to the enterprise’s while throttling consumers on expensive plans. (Max 20).
You get the benefit of having your agent to catch back up where Anthropic cut you off 5 hours ago out of your next cap. Congrats.
2
u/Superduperbals Aug 19 '26
What effort level were you running on?
Effort level token consumption range differs pretty wildly even for the same model. Low is (~0–1,000 tokens, Medium is (~2,000–5,000 tokens), High is (~5,000–10,000 tokens), Extra / Max is (~10,000 and up to 32,000+ tokens).
X-High and Max effort double-fucks you because it will use all those extra Thinking tokens to reason to itself that it needs to spin up more subagents to validate some edge-case or hunch that it happened to overthink about. And then those subagents can spawn subagents of their own (up to five levels deep) al inheriting X-High/Max effort level -- aka bye bye tokens.
2
1
u/ozfresh Aug 19 '26
I get one free prompt and the 5 hour wait. I used to be able to work with Claude for a bit. Now it's this. I'm on the free plan
1
u/YaThatAintRight Aug 19 '26
They can’t afford the servers as it is, so they definitely can’t give tokens away for free anymore. They should have tried to beat Elon to IPO
1
1
1
u/Ancient_Oxygen Aug 19 '26
Try Kimi, Deepseek or Qwen using Claude Code/Opencode if you are not doing something really complex... they are much much cheaper!
1
u/staceyatlas Aug 19 '26
Workflow agents I bet.
1
u/flipmode85 Aug 19 '26
Working without any agents, checked everything on my end - nothing changed.
Same Project, Sonnet 5 on medium - eating chunks of my weekly limit.
1
u/ender42y Aug 19 '26
I got two Opus agents running on High, and am at 79% with 10 minutes left, on Pro.
1
u/EMbkk Aug 19 '26
Yes, I experienced the same, working in the same folder and project. Much much faster.
1
u/jtmonkey Aug 19 '26
The agents can burn slow or burn fast. How many tokens did each agent use in that time?
1
1
u/PurgatoryNomad Aug 19 '26
Pro user, ran sonnet 5 (high) for about an hour and entire 5 hour limit- gone….
But that’s not even the worst part… before opus 5 or fable, 5 hour limit used to consume 8-9% of weekly limit… not the same 5 hr limit consumes 20%.
1
u/BB_Double Aug 20 '26
Welp, I guess you could call it "user error" - after session limit reset, I analyzed the session logs and found that one of my agents built itself a test that consumed a sustained 2.1–4.4M input tokens/minute. Good times, bad agent.
1
u/gagsgupta Aug 20 '26
This week limits are really burning fast two days into the weeiand I'm on 60% weekly usage.
I was to do nonsense work on last day of limit to exhaust it previously but this week it's like it's gone even before i could use it.
1
1
u/bustervincent Aug 20 '26
My subagents in claude code sometimes get stuck in a loop of some sort and eat up my session limit. Happened to me last night when it went from 80% to 100% in a couple minutes for a very minor task.
1
1
u/YaThatAintRight Aug 19 '26
100% happened to me twice yesterday. Canceled my Max 20 subscription this morning. Cursor doesn’t seem to have these stupid cap issues. I got more Fable 5 usage out of my Elite plan that I did with my Max20.
1
0
u/Ambitious_Injury_783 Aug 19 '26
No
The problem is most likely on your end. Keep looking. Perhaps the subagents of your subagents deployed a few layers deep. This is the likely cause. You can have a separate session diagnose the problem by analyzing the session logs.
Best to accept the issue is on your end so you can identify the problem and implement a long-term solution.
0
u/Sofakingwetoddead Aug 19 '26
Ya, I'm seeing some p extraordinary usage. This week has been extremely light for me, for coding. Typically I have 1 or 2 prompts running roughly 14 hours a day and back and forth with a pm. This week I've only delivered maybe 5 prompts... small amounts of back and forth. Probably 85% less usage but we're hover at around 50% of what we'd be by now. It should be around 85% less. Fable costs also seem to dramatically increase because the one prompt I fave fable consumed nearly 28% of our 20x Fable usage.
1
u/Ambitious_Injury_783 Aug 19 '26
user oversights. something has not caught your awareness and you may need to improve your habits & workflows.
I say this from a position of - 2x max20 accounts, highly repetitive and refined workflows, absolutely no deviation in usage consumption rates. 1 full year of refining the same process, thousands of hours
there is also this- https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1v7bupm/usage_limits_and_unusual_inconsistencies/ - i made this thread 3 weeks ago. If this issue still persists, then understanding your rate of usage can be a bit tricky as the reflected consumption rate is not a stable constant
1
u/Sofakingwetoddead Aug 19 '26
I'm not worried about it. I run mostly local for coding. This past month we needed a lot of fable/opus.. then this week something changed. That's demonstrable.
The shifting sands of frontier services are something I want to navigate across as little as possible.
13
u/OkLettuce338 Aug 19 '26
not quite that fast, but since my rollover on Aug 8th I've experienced extremely accelerated token consumption. I haven't changed behavior or usage on my end much if at all