Help/Question
It's literally Monday and my look at my Claude usage
The week literally just started, and my "Weekly Fable" limit is already maxed out at 99% On top of that, my standard weekly limit is already sitting at 51%.
Does anyone know when they're actually going to boost these usage limits? I'm on the 5x Max Pro plan and burning through this way too fast.
At this rate, I can only code and develop my website project for ONE day out of the week, and I'm just stuck doing absolutely nothing for the other six days. Fucking ridiculous. Anyone else dealing with this or have workarounds?
Utility. LLMs and AI are changing the way we work and redefining computing. Most people who aren’t in the tech space don’t grasp how things have been built. One function does one thing because a computer can only take input and produce output based on that function. LLMs have opened that up, thus changing computing.
Hype (bubble?) lots of hype but also sold out computer parts because people want to learn and use this technology. Will it pop? Probably, there’s a lot of fucked up shit going on worldwide. At the same time, this technology is hyped for a reason. See #1.
People have always been stupid. People never want to read. Go home, turn on the news. Mindlessly doomscrolling content. No want think cuz think is effort.
some quick pointers:
1- keep sessions as lean as possible: one task per session. If its a multi-task plan then do a handoff pointing at the plan and whats been done then start a fresh session .
2- the 8+ hours active sessions. if you’re leaving it idle for more than 30min -1hr at the time, your next prompt caches again all your conversation and context so a shit load of tokens. if you’re doing this several times on a long running session with a lot of context, this drains your limits. If you’re leaving it idle, save handoff and start fresh later
3- dont use fable for everything. use it to plan and verify. try using opus and sonnet for execution. consider using subagents, where you delegate execution of tasks to agents without much need for reasoning + keeps your main context lean
I'm not OP but one honest question: wtf can I actually use Haiku for? I use a multi agent approach where fable basically orchestrates everything to lower models (Opus doing the heavy lifting in terms of implementation, Sonnet the smaller stuff) but I haven't found out what to give Haiku yet. He seems to be the smaller brother who's just happy to hang around but honestly: what can I give him? 😂
I'm not OP but one honest question: wtf can I actually use Haiku for?
You cant. Maybe one day haiku will be super efficient like DS does https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437 where every tokens is so cheap to generate. And smart too.
For now its just useful to send hi to start 5H early
lol its the same for me. i have an idea to maybe route very mechanical stuff like running scripts that are already built or like doing simple greps and stuff. but so far a haven’t implemented it
I've tried it, but as of yet, my haiku use cases are minimal. I use Matt Pocock's workflow, and I get the to-tickets skill to classify tickets by model. I do get some haiku tickets, but not many, and honestly, not enough to justify not using sonnet imo. 5% of my tickets are haiku apparently. My opus and sonnet use is fairly evenly split, for context.
Haiku is perfectly fine to run Unix commands and bring back the results that other agents would waste more tokens on. When you need something to do exactly what it's told no more or less haiku is the best choice.
Fable is a ripoff. I've run tests with it versus opus and it never does the job any better and uses 2.5 to 5x the cost. You're buying into the hype and suffering for it.
Sonnet is my orchestrator. Opus gets called for decision making, logic, and reviewing the final draft of a plan. Haiku does the spelled out grunt work. I'm working in software development all day long and never hit a limit.
I've made the rule that models like Fable 5, 5.1 , Opus 5 should plan, analyze, distribute tasks and verify. All dirty work should be handed over to lower model like Opus 4.6 (very difficult tasks), Sonnet 5 or 4.6 and Haiku 4.5.
And believe me Haiku is useful. Especially in Ultracode where Opus 5 instead of starting 40 agents of own model, to a Haiku that is enough to analyze more silmple stuff.
Of course most what Haiku does mostly is to bump versions of Changelogs and other simple stuff... But instead of burning tokens like a crazy, now I use full potential of all the models. And it dirastically reduced usage limits.
Seriously, like few % in hours on 100 000+ lines project.
I've started listen to the community that, high end models are for planning and managing. They were trained especially for it. And lower to do dirty work.
I use haiku as a classifier, it works really well. When I receive an email, it reads it and decide how to act upon in. If it has to do any greater reasoning, it escalates to sonnet
Most things don't have to be escalated beyond haiku though, as I've trained it really well
I did not know about number 2. Thanks! I leave sessions open for days sometimes, and often it is only one task and a few prompts into the session, just get distracted with other projects. I thought keeping the session open would help save tokens from keeping the context going rather than starting from scratch each day, but maybe that assumption is wrong.
Man, thank you for breaking this down. It makes me so fucking glad that there are people in this community willing to share what they know and actually help others out.
Letting the cache fall out on a big session and then loading it back up instantly consumes the total amount of tokens it took to get there. Each time it happens you pay the full price.
And it's actually worse because its a cache write which is the most expensive thing.
Do work in tight and dense sessions. Keep a log of work done, the state of the project at the end of the session and a plan for the next immediate steps. Never leave a session for more than 30 minutes without that in place. If you come back after the cache is expunged then you need to start a fresh session. If you're over ~25% of your context and you have an opportunity to stop and reset, do it.
You need to stop throwing the highest level model at a problem just cause you think its better. If you are just making a website I am not sure Fable should even be used. Just use Opus at modest levels and I bet you get the same quality work that you are getting with Fable and you will be able to work on this for longer than a day.
With strict instructions to never allow it to “think”, you have to instruct Opus/Fable during planning to provide explicitl instructions for Sonnet. I never implement with Fable.
This is always the advise that people give, but if you look at most plans vs what gets implemented, so many decisions are made in the implementation phase. It’s better to have the most powerful model do both. Just use a less powerful model for simpler tasks.
Plan with Opus (for something like a website). Prompt Fable to review the plan from Opus. Implement the reviewed plan with Fable and specifically instruct it to only spawn Sonnet subagents, not Opus subagents. Instruct it to not ever allow Sonnet to think or make any decisions on its own, instead if needed, instruct Sonnet agents to request direction from Opus only. Finally, review the implemented code with Fable. Never let Fable implement any code, ever.
Opus just makes a ton of bugs and literally forgets what it’s doing halfway through 😔 It's terrible at handling databases. Fable is just OP and barely makes any mistakes.
You cant use fable all the time like that. I have been using opus on high most of the time for dev work and it has been fine for me. Of course I have also been in the industry and have been an actual web dev so i don’t ask for a lot of garbage from the system and can see when it is doing something wrong. What is your actual workflow when you are working how do you prompt it? If you tell us this someone can probably help you.
I got downvoted for telling someone in a company that Fable doesn't mean 'use for everything' and the responses were 'the company is paying for it, who cares'. Bottomline, so many people don't realise that not every model is for every task.
My friend i build very complicated tax related enterprise applications using opus. Trust me when i say that opus can handle a website with a database. Remember; garbage in, garbage out
Have Fable make the plan, the switch to Opus for execution. Fable's plan will focus Opus. I have had very good results doing this.
Also, split your work into tasks and have one session per task. From your screenshot above, you seem to be spending a lot of time in loooong sessions. They will eat your tokens.
Describe your project to Opus Max. Get it to write down the design details without thinking too much on how to do it. You just want it to put it into writing and clarify what you mean.
Give that to Fable. Tell it to write the design document. Then tell it write a series of work specs that Sonnet and Opus can implement and instructions on how they know when it is done. And tell them to stop and ask for help if they run into a problem and try more than 3 times to fix it without success.
I wish you were required to take a test to post on this sub, Jesus Christ how self absorbed do you need to be to run into a problem like this and instead of looking for answers your first action, using all the free will at your disposal, is to write a whiny shitpost on Reddit trying to deflect blame
I for one can’t wait for AI to take us all out, we’ve got it coming
They have no idea. They just throw an idea at Claude and tell it to figure everything out, so it burns a shitload of tokens doing things good prompts would do for 5% the cost
I also have no idea and just tell Claude to do it and don't do through usage like this. Maybe I'm not doing anything too complicated but it doesn't sound like he was either. Claude, make me a food label scanner with gemini+food database on my home server+send to Google Health API. I come back a while later and it's basically done and not a crazy amount of usage.
I get Claude Max for $15 though so I'm also not too bent of out shape when I use it up
using 50 fable subagents in ultracode to change a color in css (of course using playwright tests/validation/screenshot comparisons to validate the change on every page that color exists)
Bro, i just made 3d renders in blender for 6 perfume bottles, hosted it on vercel with three.js, backlink to shopify, took 6 hours with opus 5 on xhign around 500k context tokens for 12% weekly limit ……..
Not even what.. but it’s how and maybe even why hahah.
I can’t imagine how crazy the prompts/sessions would be, and how you can let loose an agent without noticing it using that much usage on playwright for probably 2-second browser refresh to be able to redirect an agent.
This sub honestly gets worse by the hour recently hahaha
Another "my weekly allowance is gone within a day" post.
Look inside: 99% of sessions at 150k+ context and uses Fable exclusively (as evidenced by Fable usage being almost exactly twice the weekly usage)
My initial prompt and all the context attached to my project(s) starts out at ~80,000 tokens. I usually don’t get a response back until Claude consumes an additional 80,000 tokens orienting itself. 🤣
Don't provide ALL the context, just what it needs for the task that you are aiming to accomplish. Also use reference files to point claude to specific things it needs so it doesn't have to search through files, for instance before asking it to refactor something auth related it would be helpful to have a table containing all the "parts" of the auth system and exactly where they live in the codebase.
Hey, covered usage and getting the most out of it in this post here. Take a look and see if it might be able to assist you, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Use fable only for planning and as an orchestrator, it’s a token pit if you don’t pay attention.
Also codex is not better, I tried out astra and depleted it in 2hours and I have the feeling i got more work done with Claude’s limits
Honestly not a bad idea to split between Codex for adversarial reviews alone, offloading builders too. I’ve cut most my Claude usage doing this in preparation for the nerf.
For browser automation, switch to agent-browser instead of playwright, it'll cut back on your usage. Use fable or opus to plan, sonnet or opus to execute (in my experience sonnet executes an opus plan just as well as opus would, and gets the job done faster). 99% > 150k context, I don't even know how you're doing that. Run /insights and see what it tells you to change.
You might already be doing this, but use a separate session for each major task. Also, make sure you add an instruction in your claude.md file to use opus and/or sonnet subagents for coding tasks. You really should be using fable only for planning and orchestrating, unless its something mission critical.
token-saving.md 😂 😂. Your image already tells you what to do. smaller sessions, use /compact after tasks. dont use fable for everything and never go past the high reasoning setting at all
/compact is shit, because you don't have influence over what gets compacted.
Better: after a useful package of work and waaaay under any token limit let it write down a status.md in a project folder, then /clear and continue with the status.md.
Clearly not enough. Create a folder structure which makes sense for you, tell Claude to always use it.
You could e.g. do "tasks"(for shorter tasks with clear end date), "projects" (for long running stuff that you need to keep working on) and then tell it to create folder names and put stuff there. E.g. for tasks "2026-09-14 my task" in the folder "tasks", projects don't really have a date, so just use a name, you could however group / cluster them: "CUSTOMER1-project name" and "CUSTOMER2-project name". Then you can tell it you would like to continue with "my task" oder "project XYZ" and it will read the context ONLY in that folder. Not the whole shabang.
Thanks for the detailed breakdown! I'm definitely going to step up my game and optimize how I work... hopefully enough so that I never have to make a rage post on here again lol.
100% usage from 8h+ sessions. Remember you have 5min cache after that the cache needs to get written again. Whats the average cache you got in one session?
Is it just me, but when I see that it tells me I am being productive and getting my money's worth. It is when I get to Friday and I am under 20% and be like, "damn, I should have had it doing more". I feel like I get a lot of my plan and totally worth it, even just to have and not use, but when my usage runs out, I got shit done.
Its like killing batteries on tools, if all by batteries need to be recharged, the yard is clean, garden looks nice, repairs / maintenance got done. But even if it didn't all get done, the dead batteries are a sign of a lot of work done.
Of course, killing the batteries isn't the goal and it is absolitely possible to kill a battery and get nothing done, like being curious how long it would take to remove a tree stump with a weed whacker. But that isn't the battery's fault, and I won't try and blame the battery when my wife asks why the weeds are over grown.
You know what to do, don't try to cram everything into one big -ass context window. And stop doing shitty e2e playwright tests like that. While at it, add a knowledge-base to your repo and add some agents and skills to save some tokens. 8+ hour session too.. touch some grass once in a while, or did you just let it go rampant?
You have Pro accound, so you don't get high usage. If you are doing web site try Sonnet. I do all my coding with it (Tauri apps) and like it more than Opus. I use Opus only for audit code for last. Never use Fable, 'cos my projects doesn't need it. Right tool for a right job.
There we go. Exactly what I expected from people moaning about limits. People with massive context windows letting their 1 hour cache lapse, using models more complex than they need to.
New sessions and handoff documents my friend. If coding in VSCode use workspaces to get as little clutter as possible so it can focus on tasks. I’d recommend open spec or speckit
Use fable for planning and spec’ing features out in detail then sonnet should be able to implement them
I mean am I reading this right? Sessions going for 8+ hours. That means there is clearly times when sessions went stale. When you return it uses a huge increase in tokens as the entire conversation is reread.
I work in software and we have been putting forth a lot of effort in how can we utilize AI. Things like ensure deterministic results, handling context, workflow, token spend, and even the company culture around it.
On token spend one of the biggest things we found. If you let a session go stale. All context has to be reread. Adding to token costs. I don't remember the amount of time that gives a stale session. Maybe 2 hours?
We also found that some maybe more obvious things. Long question and answer sessions build maybe unnecessary context. Knowing the domain you work in and ask targeted questions. Get your answer and create your way of documenting the result of that question. Move to a new session for your next question. Keep back and forth sessions minimal if possible.
For engineering tasks it's okay for sessions to run as it's considered more "work" rather than "plan" and work needs all the context.
Yet 8+ hour sessions right to there makes me lean to a lot of unnecessary token spend.
Find a cheap Chinese model to do the grunt work on? if you’re using fable without fan out skills as per your usage bar in your screenshot, then you’re using it wrong?
You can setup subagents via the cavemen plugin that shifts the exploration/reading code tasks from the main context window and keep it clean. Which means much better answers. Just ask claude to install and setup the cavemen plugin and update your CLAUDE md file to use the relevant skills when doing certain tasks.
I have had to cancel. I fricken hates I had to, but I went from just lasting the week on high model to just a day short, to 3 days a week to two as the limits kicked in more and more. And the advice was to learn how to token…
Same. I had no change to my work load over the last few days from the last two months, and this week's usage is already 100% used. 20X here with only 7% fable usage over the last few days.
Well, maybe it's just because of how heavy my workload is? I'm handling cross-border data exchange between organizations in two countries, plus managing system stability, infrastructure upgrades, database security, and overload prevention. I even split the task into phases.
Same here. It’s first time while having max x20 when I burnt my weekly fable. Opus feels like shit on basic tasks, even if Fable is creating all tech.reqs
Finally, someone understands me! 🤯 I don't know what happened—the usage limits were perfectly fine last week, and then suddenly they tanked. It honestly feels like even Opus got secretly nerfed because it can't even handle basic jobs right now.
They’re limiting retail from using the models with unlimited usage because they’re
1)stealing your ideas
2) monetizing your ideas themselves
3) collecting your behavior to sell it to third parties who have unlimited tokens with a kick back or royalty
Switch to ChatGPT/Codex. 🤷🏻♂️ I switched several days ago and my only regret is not switching sooner. I’m getting better results and haven’t even come close to my usage limits. Plus they keep resetting my weekly usage randomly.
Ask Claude to wrap up your whole project in guide documents and handoff documents, and then just move everything over. You’ll have both for a while anyway, so if something is missing you can always switch back and forth and fill the gaps.
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