Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

I'm surprised, but know I shouldn't be, that we're at this point already.

Are they really ready to burn money for 8 years?

Currently it's much more important to manage context, split tasks, retry when needed, not getting stuck in an infinite loop, expose the right tools (but not too many), ...

Think beyond just saying "do this one thing".

If you think a lot, you can spend hundreds of dollars easily.

This is my experience: at some point the AI isn't converging to a final solution and it's time to finish the rest by hand.

One day my very first prompt in the morning was blocked. Super strange.

I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.

Also there's likely only so much fixed compute available, and it might be getting re allcoated for other uses behind the scene from time to time as more compute arrives.

I'm only on the $100 Max plan and stick to the Sonnet model and I'll run into the hard usage limits after about three hours, that's been down to about two hours recently. The resets are about every four hours.

This is going to be happening with every AI service. They are all burning cash and need to dumb it down somehow. Whether that's running worse models or rate limiting.

I dunno, from my company or boss's perspective, there are definitely days where I've seriously considered just disappearing, demanding a raise, or refusing to work after the 3rd meeting or 17th Jira ticket. And I've seen cow orkers and friends do all three of those over my career.

(Perhaps LLMs are closer to replacing human developers that anyone has realized yet?)

…but idk how true that, I think it’s pretty clear that these companies are using the Uber model to attract customers, and the fact that they’re already increasing prices or throttling is kind of insane.

there are like 15~ total pages of documentation.

There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route.

Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command.

The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too.

That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.

> It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches.

Uh, no. To start - yea, boilerplate is easy. But like a sibling comment to this one said - it's also tedious and annoying, let the LLM do it. Beyond that, though, is that if you apply some curiosity and that "anyone that already knows what they are doing" level prior knowledge you can use these tools to _learn_ a great deal.

You might think your way of doing things is perfect, and the only way to do them - but I'm more of the mindset that there's a lot of ways to skins most of these cats. I'm always open to better ways to do things - patterns or approaches I know nothing about that might just be _perfect_ for what I'm trying to do. And given that I do, in general, know what I'm asking it to do, I'm able to judge whether it's approach is any good. Sometimes it's not, no big deal. Sometimes it opens my mind to something I wasn't aware of, or didn't understand or know would apply to the given scenario. Sometimes it leads me into rabbit holes of "omg, that means I could do this ... over there" and it turns into a whole ass refactor.

Claude code has broadened my capabilities, professionally, tremendously. The way it makes available "try it out and see how it works" in terms of trying multiple approaches/libraries/databases/patterns/languages and how those have many times led me to learning something new - honestly, priceless.

I can see how these tools would scare the 9-5 sit in the office and bang out boilerplate stuff, or to those who are building things that have never been done before (but even then, there's caveats, IMO, to how effective it would/could be in these cases)... but to people writing software or building things (software or otherwise) because they enjoy it or because they're financial or professional lives depend on what they're building - absolutely astonishing to me anyone who isn't embracing these tools with open arms.

With all that said. I keep the MCP servers limited to only if I need it in that session and generally if I'm needing an MCP server in an on-going basis I'm better off building a tool or custom documentation around that thing. And idk about all that agent stuff - I got lucky and held out for Claude Code, dabbled a bit with others and they're leagues behind. If I need an agent I'ma just tap on CC, for now.

Context and the ability to express what you want in a way that a human would understand is all you need. If you screw either of those up, you're gonna have a bad time.