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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this a few times lately, but this past weekend I built a website for a friend's birthday, and it took me several hours and many queries to get through my regular paid plan. I just use default settings (Sonnet 4.6, medium effort, thinking on).

I'm guessing Opus eats up usage much, much faster. I don't know what's going on, since a lot of people are hitting limits and I don't seem to be.

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Update: Maybe the difference is that I think I was just using the vscode extension at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586176

I go back and forth between vscode and claude in the terminal, but that day I think I did vscode.

what they changed was peak vs off-peak usage metering.

using it on the weekend gets you more use than during weekdays 9-5 in US eastern time.

Technically, this was Friday morning, so I think I was still in peak hours.

I'm surprised it's during east coast working hours and not west coast.

the speculation i read was that it's trading hours, and they're getting a lot of load from the finance industry

I waited until off peak hours to use Opus 4.6 to do some research. One prompt consumed 100% of my 5h limit and 15% of my weekly usage. Even off peak it's still insane. Opus didn't even manage to finish what it was doing.

Even with Opus I don’t usually hit limits on the standard plan. But I am not doing professional work at the moment and I actually alternate between using the LLM and reading/writing code the old fashioned way. I can see how you’d blow through the quota quickly if you try to use LLMs as universal problem solvers.

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