For work, unlimited usage via Bedrock.

Yes I’d like to get more usage out of my personal sub, but at 20/mo no complains

Now idk if it’s just me or anything else changed, but, in the last 4/5 days, the quality of the output of Opus 4.6 with max effort has been ON ANOTHER LEVEL. ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! It seems to reason deeper, verifies the work with tests more often, and I even think that it compacted the conversations more effectively and often. Somehow even the quality of the English “text” in the output felt definitely superior. More crisp, using diagrams and analogies to explain things in a way that it completely blew me away. I can’t explain it but this was absolutely real for me.

I’d say that I can measure it quite accurately because I’ve kept my harness and scope of tasks and way of prompting exactly the same, so something TRULY shifted.

I wish I could get some empirical evidence of this from others or a confirmation from Boris…. But ISTG these last few days felt absolutely incredible.

Again, I agree with you and the service should be at least reliable but to be completely fair, if I had to bet, the amount of usage people get for 100/mo is probably only balanced out by the corporate/entreprise customers paying their bill to Anthropic via API usage.

If we look at it through this lens, this limits are not surprising at all, except maybe on how generous they are/were. It’s pretty obvious that they want to force people to pay as they go….

The ecosystem is evolving super quickly so, our own experiences and workflows must keep adapting with it to experiment, find limitations and arrive at the "tightest possible scope" that still allows you to get things done, because it is possible.

Another example: pre-paid monthly subscription aggregates usage towards web and Claude Code, for eg. So if you're checking for holiday itineraries over your lunch break, then decide to sit down and ask a team of agents to refactor a giant codebase with hundreds or thousands of files, context will be exhuasted quickly, etc, etc.

I see this "context economy" as a new way of managing your "mental models": every token counts, and every token must bear its weight for the task at hand, otherwise, I'm "wasting budget". I am also still learning how to operate in this new way of doing things, and, while there have been genuine issues with Claude Code, not every single issue that people encounter is an upstream problem.

If your limits stay "the same", but you then use Opus 4.6, your quota will be exhausted much faster, it's just how it works.

Note that some features are simply NOT made for these Pro, Max, Max 5x or whatever pre-paid plans. I'm pretty sure this is by design and not an accident or a bug: If you have 6/7 MCP servers configured or if you want to use this new feature of "Agent Teams", you will exhaust your entire quota before ANY work is even done. This is not a bug. Each agent has its own context window and tools and they all count separately.

MCP servers, when active, add A LOT of context to your sessions before you even use them, etc, etc.

It feels to me that people want to have their cake and eat it too, but, that would NOT be a sustainable business model. You can not complain about the tools if you can't understand them in-depth.

I want to state that I don't think Anthropic are fully aware of the ramifications that ANY small change in ANY of their models might have, because their entire ecosystem is a bit messy atm, but, I'm certain they're aware that if people dont like it, they will cancel the subscription and flock to a competitor very quickly, since there's no real moat anymore. So, it's in their own interest to keep things minimally usable even on the "cheaper plans".

I have seen people with 5-10 "active MCP servers" that they "wanted to try out" then they forget about it and wonder why their context is always full... Cmon... that's almost bad faith.

I don't fully defend Anthropic as they've had several issues with degraded model quality after releasing "the latest model", and CLI usability that cost me real money and real tokens, so, there's a lot of room for improvement, but, to claim that quota gets exhausted after 1h it points out to either some forgotten MCP servers, skills or giant files being accidentally read in, or some sort of mis-use which these limits were put in place to prevent exactly.

There's a very thin line between: quota is exhuasted on a regular, normal session after 1h and I think there's a bug versus I had 3-4 MCP servers active that I am not using at all but forgot to disable and my CLAUDE.md file is 1000 lines...

The design becoming obvious. Being able to remove that extra if statement after clarifying requirements with a customer face to face.

A design pattern fitting a scenario like a glove, etc, etc.

You need REAL experience that only comes with time and effort. Years or decades, different businesses, different companies, etc.

But once you have crossed that chasm and that rite of passage, using LLMs becomes a true multiplier and my experience quite fun.

Using them blindly or without experience is a very different thing I can imagine.

I am extremely excited about that! Coding in itself as the act of manually typing things? Absolutely not

I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.

I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.

I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.

I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.

When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.

The goal was to have something that I have full control over and which allows me to stay motivated for keeping up with a running schedule! This has been a great success so far and I’m now on week 10 of following a plan for a trail run I’ll be doing in May and it has been awesome! It’s all Opus 4.6 and my own experiences with running!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296143

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

C'mon let's be real here, there's either "testing AI skills" versus "using AI agents like you would on the daily".

The signal got from leetcode is already dubious to assert profeciency and it's mostly used as a filter for "Are you willing to cram useless knowledge and write code under pressure to get the job?" just like system design is. You won't be doing any system design for "scale" anywhere in any big tech because you have architects for that nor do you need to "know" anything, it's mostly gatekeeping but the truth is, LLMs democratized both leetcode and system design anyway. Anyone with the right prompting skills can now get to an output that's good for 99% of the cases and the other 1% are reserved for architecs/staff engineers to "design" for you.

The crux of the matter is, companies do not want to shift how they approach interviews for the new era because we have collectively believed that the current process is good enough as-is. Again, I'd argue this is questionable given how sometimes these services break with every new product launch or "under load" (where YO SYSTEM DESIGN SKILLZ AT).

For personal use, where I have a Pro subscription and adventure into exploring all the other features/products they have... I mean, the experience outside of Claude Code and the terminal has been... bad.