If Claude usage limits are this important to your life, it seems a little smarter to just bite the Claude Max bullet. Isn't an ordinary sleep schedule easily worth $180/month difference?
mattwiese · 3h ago
It sure is, but this has been a fun experiment because I want to sail solo in the future.
If I can't vibe code while sleep deprived, I sure as heck won't be able to react to an AIS alert and change course in the middle of the night!
schaefer · 3h ago
Do you know that big’s backyard ultra exists? Even more ways to get your sleep deprived fun.
astral_drama · 3h ago
You do your best and let the sea take of the rest.
Anyhow, vibe coding is pretty low stakes compared to the joys and terrors you'll find out at sea.
Bon voyage!
serf · 3h ago
counterpoint :
I had a max x20 account for the past three months and hit limits just about every period that fell within working hours.
I finally cancelled it two days ago due to overspending-guilt/token-grinding guilt, and they shorted me my last day due to an error on their side regarding time zones.
It's really so dependent on your workloads. Conversations around token expenditure are wildly different from individual to individual,and workload to workload.
Dealing with codebases that require contextual reading due to a lack of training corpus (R/Go/Common Lisp, among others..) EAT context and tokens for breakfast.
mareko · 3h ago
I'm impressed by your determination.
A while back, I had a big paper deadline a week away and knew I didn’t have enough time to finish without sacrificing sleep.
Rather than cutting my sleep short, I decided to stick with 7–8 hours of rest and instead lengthen my wake window. I worked out a schedule that gave me six nights of sleep across seven days. It meant waking up at stranger and stranger times as the week went on, and getting some odd looks from my roommates when I emerged from my room. But in the end, it was totally worth it. I was waking up well-rested and ready to tackle those extra-long days.
The effort paid off 100%. Not only did I make the deadline, but my paper was accepted as well. A year later, that same paper helped me get into my PhD program of choice.
It’s funny how these short bursts of intense effort can sometimes have such a big impact.
Best of luck with your side hustle!
versteegen · 2h ago
I'm surprised to hear that that schedule worked well. Even if you woke feeling well-rested, what did you feel like towards the end of the day, at your normal/previous sleep time?
Personally in that situation I would (and do) get plenty of sleep every night and then skip the final night. I find the fatigue from a lot of lost sleep normally doesn't hit me in full until the second day after, and the final-day panic is enough to counteract the lack of sleep.
mckn1ght · 56m ago
I’ve tried this because I’ve long thought my circadian cycle is just a bit longer than average, where I just don’t feel tired until late at night, and traveling westward feels great because I can take an extra long day. Waking up early on a regular schedule is hard for me generally, like, I can do it but I feel braindead. Eastward jet lag of 3-6 hours is awful if I have to do stuff in the mornings.
So I tried a complete “cycle” of 28 hour days until I realigned with the normal day. Which happens to be the same thing GP did. LCM(24, 28) = 168 which is 7 days with 6 cycles. Roughly 19 hours waking and 9 hours sleeping. I did let myself sleep longer instead of holding to 7-8 hours like GP.
It definitely felt weird because my wife wasn’t on the schedule, but I didn’t feel super sleep deprived. I’m sure with multiple complete cycles you’d see more adverse effects, so it’s probably best to only do this very sparingly. Maybe napping during the wake period could alleviate issues.
TheCowboy · 1h ago
Why isn't simply getting another Claude account an option that you've tried before damaging your brain with low quality sleep?
Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?
I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.
dalemhurley · 47m ago
You know Cursor is giving away unlimited GPT-5 this week?
You could just work 24x7 and Vibe code yourself to a trillion dollars.
In all seriousness, you need to rest properly, you will be more productive and make less mistakes and have less rework.
Finally, if you are using Claude to get your "React component to hydrate correctly", you are not being very efficient in using AI as a coding agent.
I experimented with polyphasic sleep for a few months. It was really interesting to experience time as more continuous, not broken up into days.
I gave it up because I found it wasn't very fault tolerant. If I missed a bedtime even by just a few hours, or ate before trying to sleep, I was in a bad state for a day or two until I could get back on track.
mattwiese · 3h ago
> I gave it up because I found it wasn't very fault tolerant. If I missed a bedtime even by just a few hours, or ate before trying to sleep, I was in a bad state for a day or two until I could get back on track.
That's what terrifies me about polyphasic sleep at sea. I had a few "cheat" days while attempting this, but of course the safety of myself and others didn't depend on if I hit snooze 5 times in an hour. Claude just got lonely for a bit.
It's really an interesting technique and I hope to find and talk with sailors who've done it. Thanks for sharing your experience.
__MatrixMan__ · 3h ago
On the bright side, those others would have good reason not to give you reasons to deviate from the plan.
It was usually social pressure that did me in. People want to meet for coffee or drinks or food at a time when it wasn't well aligned with my nap schedule, and I started making compromises...
I suppose something that engages you for hours could appear unscheduled while sailing, but it seems like most sources of such things could be mitigated with adequate planning, and they're unlikely to involve coffee or beer or birthday cake.
hattmall · 2h ago
>I suppose something that engages you for hours could appear unscheduled while sailing
I would say, generally speaking, that comprises the bulk of the time. Most likely you will spend more time in unscheduled multi-hour long tasks than anything else over the course of an extended trip.
000ooo000 · 2h ago
You have it backwards
*Optimising My Claude Usage Around Their Usage Limits
Your sleep regime here is in no way optimal
judge123 · 3h ago
LOL, this is the most brilliant, unhinged productivity hack I've seen all year. What's next? Moving to a different time zone to get more GPT-5 credits? I'm taking notes.
Duanemclemore · 3h ago
Ah yes, polyphasic sleep. Like the classic Seinfeld episode [0].
Inspired by this, a buddy of mine tried "DaVinci Sleep" at our residential high school, and lasted a week before he crashed for 20 hours and went back to a normal schedule.
Apropos of nothing, he's now a very well regarded academic - in an unrelated field.
To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available.
"To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available." - Duanemclemore
Interesting take, not the mind set I went into reading the article but the one I wish I had...
ltbarcly3 · 3h ago
Literally the first thing I thought when I read how claude counts usage is "I need to set up a cron job to do one claude request before I wake up, so my work day is split in half on the 7 hour bucket times. So probably 5AM, my tokens reset at 12, then reset again at 7.
plusfour · 3h ago
have some self respect.
rightrighton87 · 25m ago
These are the type of people I'm up against at job interviews FML
dlcarrier · 3h ago
Spend a few hundred on a GPU, run Cline locally, and get a good nights rest.
cookiengineer · 3h ago
You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this:
Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But maybe in a year you'll come back and remember this comment.
schmookeeg · 1h ago
> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
cookiengineer · 59m ago
> I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
That is a sign of addiction, not a sign of balance.
The issues I have with this "crunching it" mentality now (post-burnouts) is that even with some time off afterwards you'll pay the price with physical health.
Just the heart issues alone that you'll get because of the absurd and constant stress levels are now for me an indicator that it's not worth it.
A company doesn't give a damn about you. They are not your family. The first sign of risk they'll ditch you. Devs need to see work as what it is: it's a contract with mutual expectations.
And my recommendation is to self-reflect more on the health part, because we (including me) tend to rationalize that it's worth working more for the sake of building something or for the interesting research parts, or for learning experience or whatever we make up to justify it.
You can do that still with basic income. We just can't because society is fucked up, and research and development isn't paid enough to make a living and a healthy life. I also think that huge parts of the open source community that I identify myself with on a moral level are pretty hypocritical, considering that only the top notch famous "leaders" make enough to have a good balanced life. The 99%+ majority doesn't make enough to even rent a flat, and that's the absurd part of our society. I still can't fathom how the richest companies have money laying around on their bank accounts, and were built on the shoulders of unpaid open source contributors that got nothing in return.
That is something I really don't understand because it's honestly really messed up if you think about it.
schmookeeg · 21m ago
Thank you for expounding, but man, I have so many "wait, what? who?" reactions to that narrative.
I'm addicted to coding, not work. I know this because I've tried other jobs, even in late career, and they sucked in comparison and brought me no joy.
"The company" is mine, so yeah, probably it doesn't care about me, but it's definitely not dropping me without consent. :)
48, soon 49, heart still going. Not even sure what that's referring to. I don't feel stressed in these crunches, I feel excited! I build cool shit! They pay me to build cool shit! They pay me way too much to build cool shit!
I guess I don't know what I would balance that excitement with. I have cool hobbies too, and those have their place, but... I just don't resonate with your take and view on the industry.
IF someone hated coding, creating, or the tech industry itself -- then I could squint and get behind your balance suggestions. For them. :)
Thanks for sharing the perspective though. If nothing else, you're fanning my gratitude flame.
teaearlgraycold · 2h ago
I’d say generally yes, working yourself too hard for some bullshit SaaS isn’t worth it. But there are bigger problems out there. You might still be expending your health but it could be worth it enough for others to justify the effort.
sneak · 2h ago
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.
It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.
It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.
A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.
Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.
> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.
It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
mereck · 1h ago
> It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
sneak · 1h ago
I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
cookiengineer · 1h ago
> I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.
Question to you:
Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?
If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?
komali2 · 1h ago
> People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.
I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.
I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!
You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.
Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.
max-m · 3h ago
At this point I can't even tell reality from satire anymore.
mattwiese · 3h ago
At the risk of derailing the thread, your comment is a poignant reminder of Baudrillard's simulacra & simulation.
Also, not satire... although written with a healthy dose of token-in-cheek :]
encom · 2h ago
I wish I could have a HN front page without AI (or "$foo rewrite in Rust"). I'm not an anti-AI luddite, but it's just way too much at this point. Surely there are other interesting hackery topics we could talk about.
petesergeant · 1h ago
Ironically this would be pretty easy to train an AI to do with Greasemonkey
sneak · 1h ago
HN is available as RSS and you or I could vibe code up a filtering proxy in ten minutes, and you could use that in your feed reader. It’s easier to solve the problem than to complain about it.
Add another 2 minutes and you could have the list of keywords to filter as a configurable url parameter, so you can amend it easily when the next technology you want to hate comes along.
BallsInIt · 2h ago
Flag them all and hope more do the same.
sitkack · 1h ago
What an amazingly selfish behavior. Just hide them. What you are doing is censoring hn in support of whatever you want the hive mind to discuss as opposed to finding your tribes hyperplane.
Please colonize somewhere else.
BigJono · 2h ago
The thread before with someone flogging off their educational book they wrote "with Claude in an afternoon", as if anyone would benefit from investing days or weeks of learning effort into consuming something the author couldn't be fucked spending even a single day on, that one was well crafted satire, right?
...right?
senectus1 · 1h ago
perhaps you need to improve your sleep routine
/s
seriously tho.. yeah I'm a skeptical bastard in every aspect of my life these days. its exhausting.
tehnub · 3h ago
Not sure if it's full on satire, slightly outrageous ideas expressed in fanciful language for the fun of it, or the writing of a true believer. Fun read, good luck with the stealth B2B!
mattwiese · 3h ago
Definitely written tongue-in-cheek, but I did do this and it did "work" lol. Cheers!
acedTrex · 3h ago
This is satire right? It has to be
MangoToupe · 3h ago
You could just try and sleep.
rgmerk · 3h ago
Um…is this satire?
PlunderBunny · 3h ago
My thoughts exactly.
unwise-exe · 1h ago
The writing style would seem to suggest that the lack of sleep has been having more effects than reported.
If I can't vibe code while sleep deprived, I sure as heck won't be able to react to an AIS alert and change course in the middle of the night!
Anyhow, vibe coding is pretty low stakes compared to the joys and terrors you'll find out at sea.
Bon voyage!
I had a max x20 account for the past three months and hit limits just about every period that fell within working hours.
I finally cancelled it two days ago due to overspending-guilt/token-grinding guilt, and they shorted me my last day due to an error on their side regarding time zones.
It's really so dependent on your workloads. Conversations around token expenditure are wildly different from individual to individual,and workload to workload.
Dealing with codebases that require contextual reading due to a lack of training corpus (R/Go/Common Lisp, among others..) EAT context and tokens for breakfast.
A while back, I had a big paper deadline a week away and knew I didn’t have enough time to finish without sacrificing sleep.
Rather than cutting my sleep short, I decided to stick with 7–8 hours of rest and instead lengthen my wake window. I worked out a schedule that gave me six nights of sleep across seven days. It meant waking up at stranger and stranger times as the week went on, and getting some odd looks from my roommates when I emerged from my room. But in the end, it was totally worth it. I was waking up well-rested and ready to tackle those extra-long days.
The effort paid off 100%. Not only did I make the deadline, but my paper was accepted as well. A year later, that same paper helped me get into my PhD program of choice.
It’s funny how these short bursts of intense effort can sometimes have such a big impact.
Best of luck with your side hustle!
Personally in that situation I would (and do) get plenty of sleep every night and then skip the final night. I find the fatigue from a lot of lost sleep normally doesn't hit me in full until the second day after, and the final-day panic is enough to counteract the lack of sleep.
So I tried a complete “cycle” of 28 hour days until I realigned with the normal day. Which happens to be the same thing GP did. LCM(24, 28) = 168 which is 7 days with 6 cycles. Roughly 19 hours waking and 9 hours sleeping. I did let myself sleep longer instead of holding to 7-8 hours like GP.
It definitely felt weird because my wife wasn’t on the schedule, but I didn’t feel super sleep deprived. I’m sure with multiple complete cycles you’d see more adverse effects, so it’s probably best to only do this very sparingly. Maybe napping during the wake period could alleviate issues.
Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?
I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.
You could just work 24x7 and Vibe code yourself to a trillion dollars.
In all seriousness, you need to rest properly, you will be more productive and make less mistakes and have less rework.
Finally, if you are using Claude to get your "React component to hydrate correctly", you are not being very efficient in using AI as a coding agent.
I wrote a post about using Full.CX MCP that will build complete features for you with test etc. https://dalehurley.com/posts/fullcxmcp
I gave it up because I found it wasn't very fault tolerant. If I missed a bedtime even by just a few hours, or ate before trying to sleep, I was in a bad state for a day or two until I could get back on track.
That's what terrifies me about polyphasic sleep at sea. I had a few "cheat" days while attempting this, but of course the safety of myself and others didn't depend on if I hit snooze 5 times in an hour. Claude just got lonely for a bit.
It's really an interesting technique and I hope to find and talk with sailors who've done it. Thanks for sharing your experience.
It was usually social pressure that did me in. People want to meet for coffee or drinks or food at a time when it wasn't well aligned with my nap schedule, and I started making compromises...
I suppose something that engages you for hours could appear unscheduled while sailing, but it seems like most sources of such things could be mitigated with adequate planning, and they're unlikely to involve coffee or beer or birthday cake.
I would say, generally speaking, that comprises the bulk of the time. Most likely you will spend more time in unscheduled multi-hour long tasks than anything else over the course of an extended trip.
*Optimising My Claude Usage Around Their Usage Limits
Your sleep regime here is in no way optimal
Inspired by this, a buddy of mine tried "DaVinci Sleep" at our residential high school, and lasted a week before he crashed for 20 hours and went back to a normal schedule.
Apropos of nothing, he's now a very well regarded academic - in an unrelated field.
To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friar%27s_Club
Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But maybe in a year you'll come back and remember this comment.
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
That is a sign of addiction, not a sign of balance.
The issues I have with this "crunching it" mentality now (post-burnouts) is that even with some time off afterwards you'll pay the price with physical health.
Just the heart issues alone that you'll get because of the absurd and constant stress levels are now for me an indicator that it's not worth it.
A company doesn't give a damn about you. They are not your family. The first sign of risk they'll ditch you. Devs need to see work as what it is: it's a contract with mutual expectations.
And my recommendation is to self-reflect more on the health part, because we (including me) tend to rationalize that it's worth working more for the sake of building something or for the interesting research parts, or for learning experience or whatever we make up to justify it.
You can do that still with basic income. We just can't because society is fucked up, and research and development isn't paid enough to make a living and a healthy life. I also think that huge parts of the open source community that I identify myself with on a moral level are pretty hypocritical, considering that only the top notch famous "leaders" make enough to have a good balanced life. The 99%+ majority doesn't make enough to even rent a flat, and that's the absurd part of our society. I still can't fathom how the richest companies have money laying around on their bank accounts, and were built on the shoulders of unpaid open source contributors that got nothing in return.
That is something I really don't understand because it's honestly really messed up if you think about it.
I'm addicted to coding, not work. I know this because I've tried other jobs, even in late career, and they sucked in comparison and brought me no joy.
"The company" is mine, so yeah, probably it doesn't care about me, but it's definitely not dropping me without consent. :)
48, soon 49, heart still going. Not even sure what that's referring to. I don't feel stressed in these crunches, I feel excited! I build cool shit! They pay me to build cool shit! They pay me way too much to build cool shit!
I guess I don't know what I would balance that excitement with. I have cool hobbies too, and those have their place, but... I just don't resonate with your take and view on the industry.
IF someone hated coding, creating, or the tech industry itself -- then I could squint and get behind your balance suggestions. For them. :)
Thanks for sharing the perspective though. If nothing else, you're fanning my gratitude flame.
It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.
It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.
A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.
Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.
> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.
It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.
Question to you:
Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?
If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?
I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.
I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!
You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.
Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.
Also, not satire... although written with a healthy dose of token-in-cheek :]
Add another 2 minutes and you could have the list of keywords to filter as a configurable url parameter, so you can amend it easily when the next technology you want to hate comes along.
Please colonize somewhere else.
...right?
/s
seriously tho.. yeah I'm a skeptical bastard in every aspect of my life these days. its exhausting.