Hi all,

No layoff talk brewing at my company. Yet.

But I’m definitely at the point where the model is so good, I crush anything that is assigned to me in 1-2 hours. I’m having a hard time filling an 8 hour workday.

All tech debt : gone. I solved it.

I ask for more work: “we’re still gathering requirements.”

I’m worried that it is only a matter of time before senior leadership notices that there isn’t enough work to feed the amount of devs we have.

I feel like Opus 5.5 was another inflection point. Previously, I had to build sophisticated orchestration, baby sit models, and curate context. And that took a lot of my time. This model needs very little of that.

Maybe it is just me, but definitely feels like I'm hitting my limits a lot faster.

And I'm on the 20X plan. Never was an issue until past 48 hours.

New Claude Code UI update. What do you guys think?

Hi, I'm from Korea and my english is not good, so I write this with translator help. sorry if some sentence is weird.I'm making Spearhead alone. It's WW2 eastern front RTS in Unity, and you can press H and ride any tank and drive it yourself. Almost all code is written by Claude Code. I started end of May and now it's about 400k lines C#. Honestly I can't read all of it, so my job is play the build and tell Claude what is wrong.

How I use it: I send many complaints at once with screenshots. Main session find where the problem is and give each one to sub agent. Each agent can edit only its own files so they don't break each other. After that it compile everything and make checklist image on my desktop, then I test.

Today example. The tank riders (desant) jump off pose was strange, so I put 2 old photos of soviet soldiers jumping from T-34 on my desktop and said "look this, they must jump like this or they get hurt". It fixed the seat position on the tank and made the jump pose from the photos. What I learned is memory file with rules is more important than good prompt (like never commit if I don't say, and compile ok is not fixed). Also 1 agent for 1 group of files, before this agents broke each other work a lot. And don't send message to agent while it's working, it get lost often.

voice, music and some store art is AI placeholder now, 3D models are bought assets. steam page in comment.

I noticed that the last three days I am way more likely to hit my session limits, and my weekly limit is getting eaten quicker too.

This could very easily be my behaviour, ie I think I am trusting the model more so letting it do bigger tasks in fewer steps, but I wanted ask if anyone else noticed the same thing this week.

I recently taught a buddy of mine to use claude code, and he’s starting out on the $20/mo.

After months of using fable for 4-10 hours a day here’s what I noticed.

1) It’s still opus. It’s hard to describe but the feeling when talking to it is still a generation behind Fable. It gets hung up on small things and keeps bringing it up if you dont answer. It’s less likely to preempt solutions. It’s more verbose. And overall it just reminds me of the slog of developing with opus 4.7-4.8

2) It’s still very capable and you can definitely get it to do very complex and long horizon tasks, much closer to fable than the 4.x generations. (I had it help me get a website up and running using firebase+github+vercel + setting up DNS)

3) If anthropic charged $500 for fable i’d still pay for it. The frictionlessness of fable and it’s ability to be in lock step with you as you develop bigger and better products/integrations/modalities is simply unbeatable.

Has anyone gone from fable to full time opus and been happy with the “downgrade”. After my buddy saw what opus could do he was astonished that there could be a model that was worth $80/mo more.

been hitting limits less since i changed a few habits, sharing in case it helps someone:

1. ask it to read files in line ranges, not the whole file. a big read stays in the context for the rest of the session and you pay for it every turn
2. send wide searches / research to a subagent. only the conclusion comes back to the main thread instead of 20 file dumps
3. put these as rules in CLAUDE.md, otherwise it slowly goes back to old habits
4. start a fresh session for a new task instead of dragging a long one along
5. when a session gets long, ask it to summarize the state into a file and continue from there

anything else that worked for you?

I ran a workflow that is not at all new to me. It's been tried and true.

Claude Code, Opus 5.5 high effort as main agent, Sonnet 5 (5.5 not yet available in company gateway) subagents for most tasks, sometimes Opus subagents for debugging delegation. Got my `promptCacheTtl` (main session's cache lifetime) set to 1h, subagents at 5m. Skills and instruction files to represent team coding practices, codebase actions, and such.

Needed to find bugs within an app developed by another team. Came up with a plan up front on what mattered most to our team as far as the app's priorities, then set my Claude Code to go on its bug hunt accordingly, and asked it to verify practicality of findings by reproducing them at runtime so that these findings weren't extremely unlikely hypotheticals.

I've done this before, no big deal. And the results were good as expected.

Only problem was, as I was tracking my credit usage (company uses single credit unit that translates to different model token amount, because we have a company gateway to access different models through one API key), I found that it was WAAY higher than expected; like maybe 5-10x higher than normal.

And... the token gatekeeper came knocking on my door...

This person came in, high and mighty, claiming my context size for prompts was excessive (turned out some of the subagents were going up to 800k in size as time went on for some of the more difficult bug reproductions), and this was driving heavy cost. Said it should hardly ever be more than 200k. I was like okay, I don't necessarily disagree, but some of the bugs were tricky and took more context to figure out, it happens, most of them were quick in-and-out at much less.

Then they drop the bomb that the LLM gateway we were using occasionally doesn't uphold CACHE reads/writes... It's been "broken recently."

I'm like well... I think I've found my problem.

Dude goes "caching or not, that's pennies on the dollar; context size is context size."

I was like that's way off. Yes, context size matters, but I could have ~5-10x the context size and it cost the same if caching worked right. Dude didn't buy it.

Now I've set my Claude Code autocompact size to 300k to appease the gatekeeper (which I don't necessarily agree with) but am I wrong here in saying caching being broken is a BIG DEAL???

I really feel like this is kinda more complicated than it needs to be. I loved it before where you finally could select model effort with the slider, see usage and context (with the stacked bar graph showing what is messages, mcp etc) in one go/ area. I feel like this is a step back.

Is there a way to customise it to go back or is that something only anthropic can do?

Almost got the hat trick!

Been a good boy all week, rationing my tokens carefully, clearing and compacting with care, and ended up 2 hours away from reset time with like 60% weekly and 45% Fable usage....

So f*ck it, Fable on Max, do a full audit of the control panel, look for bugs, vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and suggest improvements... And 30 mins later we're here, "with room to spare", sure :D

I remember watching an anthropic video where they said that things like todo lists weren't necessary anymore but for some reason they are back?

I'm using Fable as a reviewer. It spawns Opus agents if needed. I get a reset every wednesday at 9 PM. I'm on Max Plan 20x. Never had an issue with running out. For the past two weeks I've been working on two projects, using mostly the same workflow. Always had plenty in the tank with Fable. After the latest reset it's been eating my usage like crazy. I'm already on 25%. Has anyone noticed something similar?

I am loving that handoffs can happen when context gets full and you just click a button and claude spins up a nested session under main session - saves so much time rather than manual handoffs i was doing before. Claude even suggests when to move it to new session

apologies if this has always been there and I just discovered it but I am pretty sure this a new feature on the desktop release

I can confirm that the issue seems to have been resolved today. However, we've already burned through a significant portion of our weekly quota because of it.

Personally, I have four days left until my quota resets, with only 30% remaining. Most people in the original thread reported similar usage issues, although there were some differences from one user to another.

Even if usage is back to normal now, the damage has already been done. Those of us who experienced unusually high usage are still left with depleted quotas for the rest of the week.

Anthropic shouldn't just fix the issue and leave it at that. Given the impact on users, I think they should make another gesture to compensate those affected.

Original discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1x64hj9/comment/pgx8ai2/

given codex / tibo is handing out resets like no tomorrow claude needs to give us a banked reset this week.. please!

3 weeks ago (after the usage correction) I posted that 4 five hour sessions consumed 100% of my weekly Fable use (20x).

Now 2 five hour session consumes 100% of my weekly Fable.

Have I missed communication regarding a change in usage?

I ran a task overnight, using ONLY opus 5.5 max (I have not used Fable in a while). However, here is the usage.

Anyone has similar experience or has any idea why Fable is used? Thanks.

You ask for an exploded view of a real thing (a lock, a Rubik's cube, WinRAR, React). The agent looks up the numbers and tags each one SPEC / MEASURED / DERIVED / ESTIMATED with its source. A gate script compares the model with what is published, and if it disagrees, nothing renders.

Examples of what the gate checks: a pin tumbler lock must put all five splits on the shear line with the right key; Enigma must reproduce the published test vector (AAAAA becomes BDZGO); a model of React's rules must predict the 1 of 8 DOM nodes the real React 18.3.1 touches.

The part that worked for me as a skill author: a gate the agent cannot argue with, and testing the skill with fresh sessions that know nothing about it, then fixing everything they tripped over.

Output is a 30 s film with sound, an interactive viewer and an STL/GLB. Built with Claude Code (three.js in a headless browser + ffmpeg).

Limits: films need a GPU, I have not tried macOS, and the gate checks the model against the published number, not against reality.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/DiegoLopez0208/mechanism

Films and viewers: https://diegolopez0208.github.io/mechanism/

Install: /plugin install mechanism --marketplace DiegoLopez0208/mechanism

Which object should it model next?

The difference is so striking, my context usage suddenly hits 80%+ on a single prompt (20x plan), tasks are taking at least 2x longer than they did before AND producing far more mistakes.

Several mistakes it already made months back, which I set up rules to prevent from happening again, are now happening again for the first time since I made those rules.

This is the worst state I've ever seen Claude code in since I started using it. Curious if anyone else is experiencing the same to determine how wide spread this is.

Not sure if this is happening to anyone else and not sure if its coincidence .... I finally was able to have enough to do that I used my free reset this week. Ever since then, under a normal workflow, my sessions are lasting about half as long as they were.

I'm using CC in VS Code and always update the extension.

I went through the claude code docs this morning instead of the changelog and found a few things about why long sessions eat your limit that I hadnt seen posted anywhere.

the main one.. your prompt cache lives for an hour on a subscription while youre inside your plan usage. the moment you go past that limit and start drawing on usage credits, the main conversation drops to a five minute ttl. same session, same work, the gap you can leave before a cold reprocess just got 12x shorter. on an api key or a cloud provider its five minutes by default from the start.

everything that isnt your main conversation already gets five minutes regardless. subagents and workflows and compaction and session titles. so a subagent you come back to after ten minutes reprocesses from scratch even on a max plan tbh.

the fix is prob one setting. promptCacheTtl set to 1h, or the CLAUDE_CODE_PROMPT_CACHE_TTL env var. subagentPromptCacheTtl covers the rest. needs v2.1.242 or newer. api key users can set it too.

two other things I didnt know. switching models mid session reads your entire history with zero cache hits. if you run opusplan then every toggle in and out of plan mode counts as a model switch, so bouncing between planning and building rebuilds the cache each time. agent teams also run roughly 7x the tokens of a normal session when teammates sit in plan mode, which the docs state as a plain number.

run /usage and look for the Prompt cache (main) line if you want your own hit rate. needs v2.1.251. on v2.1.260 and up it also names the likely cause of your last miss.

hope this helps.

I use Claude Code Sonnet 5.5 with Haiku 5.5 subagents

I use Codex Sol 6.1 with Luna 6 subagents.

I constantly hit the 5 hour limit with Codex.

I haven't hitted the limits even once with Claude.

The rumors are no longer rumors, Claude gives much more value. And I personally found the results much better than in Codex.