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Comment by NezArk | Hacker News Reader

You can. Anthropic documents it: the Agent SDK and claude -p work signed in with your Claude plan and draw from your normal subscription limits. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

We build a desktop app on top of the SDK, so I've spent a lot of time on that page.

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Not true any more, read the note at the top of that page. They give you API credits but it's limited.

…have you read that note? Specifically the last half?

The wording is ambiguous but empirically when I last ran claude -p as part of a job it drew from my $200 API credit.

Not for me, it uses subscription quota.

Interesting could be a bug on my end. I'll look and see if it's a problem with how I set up my sandboxes, or something related to the precedence when both are available in the environment. With all the back and forth on their messaging at the time I took it as a cue to remove the Claude Code dependency from my workflow and start using other providers' models more.

I can confirm that the priority is alwys given to credentials, as they themselves state in the documentation they updated yesterday: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau... Essentially, in the -p option, if an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is present, it is always used instead of the login; see here https://code.claude.com/docs/en/authentication#authenticatio..., so I would suggest you check your environment variables

That was almost certainly my problem. If there was a warning about this I could have missed it.

Weirdly I know for sure there was an article behind that first link earlier today but now it's showing no body, just the update boxes. The second doc link is quite clear though.

Can confirm it draws from my subscription

Anthropic employees clarified in HN comment threads that the API credits are in addition to the existing behavior and not a replacement. Other harnesses can still call the Claude Code CLI and use the subscription quota that way.

Tbh I think Thariq or one of the others passively hinted/suggested but didn't come out and make a categorical statement. I've seen anecdotal evidence of folks getting those extra data messages in various "not using the official harness" scenarios, but there's way more people like you who are not having issues.

I just checked, the docs now say this:

"the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits"

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

They need to stop clarifying on HN and X and MiGente / MySpace / Angelfire and whatever else and update their damn docs, I am not taking a risk on my account because of he said she said.

I just checked, the docs now say this:

"the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits"

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

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