New Claude Code programmatic usage restrictions
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At least we've got clarity now? But a lot of my value comes from "claude -p" usage, either scheduled tasks while I'm asleep, or responding to incoming emails / voicetexts. Even the email replies will barely fit in $100/month. I'm not going to pay $1000 / month, so I guess it really is time for me to look at the competition and move my programmatic usage to them.
Man, I love the Claude models, and the whole idea of constitutional AI. We built a lot of tools & infrastructure together, but kept a lot of logs as well. I'll be really sad if I mostly have to move on now.
You need an AI for that?
When I'm away from my computer and out walking, I'll often think of a task for Claude, or I might bounce an idea back and forth with Claude via voice messages. I wrote a small Go program to watch my email and launch Claude via "claude -p" when it sees an email from myself addressed to it.
Claude also has a different "character" when collaborating over email, it feels more like a colleague. Hard to describe, but email almost feels like a better interaction UI than the chat window.
I had been starting to train Claude to see how it might go on customer service (eg maybe it could reply to my customers while I'm asleep), but at current Anthropic API costs I think that might still be too expensive.
(I could be wrong!)
I'm not using the regular email connection methods, I don't want to give Anthropic complete access to my email account. I do a ton of deterministic checks first from a Go program that actually checks each email, to avoid lethal trifecta attacks. The model technically has no access to email at all. I only give a prompt with the necessary info, and access to a custom MCP reply tool that can only email me.
Basically I'd want Cowork within my external loop, and Anthropic wants to own the loop instead. (Unless I've missed a way to do it.)
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EDIT: Also, to the person who just tried to lethal trifecta me - nice try, but you just demonstrated all the exact reasons Cowork / claude-code needs to be within the external loop of a deterministic program. This is why you don't just dump external input straight into context, or give the model direct access to everything. We're going to see a lot more of this, not just as more people use agents, but as more hosted webmail systems decide they need to add their own homebrew AI models into everyone's systems. And seriously, German servers really need to start tightening up their security.
Could you write a bit of local code (you said Go?) to dump the email you want acted on to a local file, then schedule Claude to check that file periodically?
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/#ai-...
https://simonwillison.net/tags/lethal-trifecta/
EDIT: As for scheduling, Claude Desktop / Cowork only allows scheduling a task to run once an hour. That doesn't allow immediate responses to email or voicemail. Leaving my previous reply below though.
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I can put emails in a text file easily for Claude to read, but scheduling 60 Claudes a minute to open a file that is usually empty... that's the kind of usage Anthropic is cracking down on. Claude doesn't enjoy spinning up with nothing to do either.
If I could set a 1 - 5 minute schedule in Claude Desktop, and create a hook tool that runs on SessionStart to checks the email, and can cancel the session before it starts if there's no email to react to, that might work. But I'd rather have my tiny email daemon in the background with 0% CPU and tiny RAM usage, than the Claude Desktop behemoth constantly at 3% CPU idle and eating up 500MB RAM unnecessarily. But still, thanks for the idea, it might save me money in June!
Do you need to respond to email that quickly? What if you only had the agent run every half hour?
As for scheduling, it looks like Claude Desktop only allows scheduling a "routine" to occur once per hour, and it randomly selects when during that hour to execute (to smooth out Anthropic's compute). I think once an hour is too slow for what I'm after. I don't need to check email every minute, but sometimes that rapid response is useful if there's work I need done urgently by my agent. The "every minute" check is also useful for another workflow I have, where I can send "voicetexts" to my agent while I'm out walking. I have a vibe-coded Android app that records my message (which might be rambling on about some idea I have) then transcribes it & emails it to my agent. When the agent sees the terrible stream-of-thought transcription, it knows I'm out walking, so it will reply with a spoken MP3 instead, so I can listen while I keep walking. Claude's voice mode doesn't work for me, it doesn't have access to my tools, limits you to Sonnet models, and it wants you to speak in short sentences or paragraphs. Sometimes I just want to think all of my thoughts out loud, have the agent synthesize them more coherently, and comeback to me with push-back on my ideas or suggest additional implementation ideas.
Now that most people will have forgotten about this thread - if it helps, if you have AI questions you think I could help with, my contact details should be in my profile. I find HN is quite negative about AI, and it can be hard to find the people who are enthusiastic and trying to use AI for good and to make the world better. I have a hunch many of those people are "going dark" and avoiding public conversations - there's too much negative energy in return, and that drained energy is better used when directed at productive work. If people aren't already convinced about where AI is pointing, maybe they're just happier not participating. But that does seem to create a split where public spaces are for anti-AI conversations, and the enthusiasm for doing good with AI has gone somewhat underground.
I think that this is much better than the previous situation with total lack of clarity on what is allowed and what isn't.
Maybe something similar can be done with tmux still, I'm definitely going to explore it
I use on-device STT with Claude Code's built-in remote control feature to do what you do without needing claude -p, but I guess I don't use it for large enough quantities of text where on-device STT quality becomes a big issue.
The STT on Gboard is very solid, so if that covers your use case you're good!
I'm hoping local llms start rapidly improving even more though.
- The AI gives human prompts to copy-paste into Claude Code
- Human copy prompts into Claude Code
- The AI reads output from Claude Code
Which is interesting, since you'd also think that programmers would be their primary customers.
They are now changing it to be:
You get $20/$100/$200 of "credit" that can be used for claude -p. Problem is, once you are out of that it is the normal API rates (outrageously expensive).
codex W