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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a toy side project.

I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I never did.

To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it every single day.

My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up because it’s starting to overwhelm their capacity.

I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.

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Worth noting that a lot of these limits are changing very rapidly (weekly if not daily) and also depend on time of day, location, account age, etc.

I hit the limits within an hour with just one request in CC. Not even using opus. It’ll chug away but eventually switch to the nearing limit message. It’s really quite ridiculous and not a good way to upsell to the higher plans without definitive usage numbers.

Use `npx ccusage` if you're interested in how much it would have costed if you paid by API usage.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ccusage

There's a lot you can do in terms of efficient token usage in the context of Claude Code, I wouldn't be surprised if they soon launch a Claude Code-specific model.

In my experiments, it would be enormously wasteful in token usage, doing things like re-reading all Python scripts in the current folder just to make sure all comments were up-to-date, or it re-read an R script to make sure all brackets were closed correctly. Surely that's where a good chunk of the waste comes from?

Thinking is extremely inefficient compared with the usual query in Chat.

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

It’s also silly to fork out for anything but the monthly plan. The tech is moving so fast that in 4 months something else is going to be on top.

If you aren't hitting the limits you aren't writing great prompts. I can write a prompt and have it go off and work for about an hour and hit the limit. You can have it launch sub-agents, parallelize work and autonomously operate for long periods of time.

Think beyond just saying "do this one thing".

That clears up a lot for me. I don't think I've ever had it take for than a couple of minutes. If it takes more than a minute I usually freak out and press stop

How is that a great prompt having it run for an hour without your input? Sounds like it’s just generating wasteful output.

It can be fixing unit tests and stuff for quite a while, but I usually find it cheats the goal when unattended.

Who said it was writing code for an hour? Solving complex problems by problem solving, writing SQL, querying data, analyzing data. formulating plans.

What do you do for hours?

If all you're thinking about is code output, you're thinking too small.

You should really read this.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4

It was given a task and it solved a problem by operating for 7 hours straight.

I have not tested Claude Code but that's impressive because other agents get stuck long before that.

Takes proper prompt crafting but Claude Code is really impressive.

With 7 hour tasks it might become worthwhile to invest in a RAM-based local solution with DeepSeek Coder? I've heard that you can run it with 300-700GB. With such long tasks, Claude may run out of usage, right? So queueing it up on a local server may make sense? Always looking for an excuse to do things in-house, but it has to make sense :)

Are there some good examples/wiki/knowledge base on how to do this? I'll read 2 competing theories on the same day so I'm kinda confused.

I've used CC a lot and to great effect, but it never runs more than 10 mins (Opus). Completely independent for 60 min, sounds impressive. Can you share some insights on this? Really curious; I can also share recents prompts of mine.

"You are an expert software engineer

Your key objective is to fix a bug in the XYAZ class. Use a team of experts as sub-agents to complete the analysis, debugging and triage work for you. Delegate to them, you are the manager and orchestrator of this work.

As you delegate work, review and approve/reject their work as needed. Continue to refine until you are confident you have found a simple and robust fix"

Wow! I will try that. Really cool. Never tried the mythical sub-agent feature, not sure if it was really a thing due to the sparse docs. The "You are an expert software engineer" really helps? Probably good idea to mention "simple" because Claude sometimes settles for an overengineered solution.

> The "You are an expert software engineer" really helps?

Anecdata, but it weirdly helped me. Seemed BS for me until I tried.

Maybe because good code is contextual? Sample codes to explain concepts may be simpler than a production ready code. The model may have the capability to do both but can't properly disguished the correct thing to do.

I don't know.

Maybe it's not the "expert", but "software engineer" part that works? Essentially it's given a role. This constrains it a bit; e.g. it's not going to question the overall plan. Maybe this helps it take a subordinate position rather than an advisor or teacher. Which may help when there is a clear objective with clear boundaries laid out? Anyway, I will try myself and simply observe it if makes a difference.

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