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Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why
- seki285 1mo ago[flagged]
- SomeonesAccount 1mo agoThat is a very common title format for HN, and has been for a while. It wasn't just since AI has evolved—it has always been a load bearing part of HN 100% Human written slop
- KinetiNode 1mo agoHuman written slop?
- SomeonesAccount 1mo agoI wrote that slop comment
- sdcfgy 1mo agoAt least it's not rewriting stuff in Rust.
- zuuna 1mo agoGenuinely of the best reasons to build a tool tho? "I had a problem X, so I did nothing and kept complaining (without LLM)" would be pretty tiring to me personally
- jghn 1mo agoThe problem is that anyone can type "I have this problem, plz fix" into Claude Code. What unique insight or skill did they bring to the process? That's the interesting part. Otherwise it's just a small part of a huge sea of people's individual attempts to solve the same problems that everyone else is solving by themselves.
- hetspookjee 1mo agoThese kinds of trivial CLI vibes tools save an evening and some tokens. And sometimes it’s also not something you think of, or done with better or worse taste than your own. I think it’s nice
- remus 1mo agoIndeed. Pre-LLM this kind of thing was a little interesting because you'd need to put a little thought and effort in whereas now it's a one-shot thing straight from an LLM. Don't be a slop proxy, as the saying goes.
- jasonlotito 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- jsrozner 1mo agoHi Claude, please build a tool for analyzing Claude token usage and then deploy it to github. If you're going to fully vibe code a repo, maybe we should get the build artifacts (i.e., the claude session).
- jasonlotito 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > If you're going to fully vibe code a repo, I'm not the OP.
- spookymutation 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > If you're going to fully vibe code a repo, > I'm not the OP. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/you https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/you "In spoken English and informal written English, you is sometimes used to refer to people in general." If you are going to repeatedly point out technicalities of a flagged post, please get your ducks in order first.
- DarmokTanagra 1mo agoI didn't know it was still possible to develop software after your ai quota runs out.
- francisofascii 1mo agoYou wait until the month resets.
- dakolli 1mo agoWhy not juat write the code. Its not that much faster to produce good code with AI. I spend nearly identical amoubts of time reviewing AI code as it would take to write. Im honestly not convinced there is all that much of a productivity boost, maybe 20% faster.
- francisofascii 1mo agoI was mostly joking, but to answer your question, the productivity boost entirely depends on your concern for code quality. Sometimes is it faster to just write the code than to try to explain in the prompt what to do. But if you don't care or don't need to understand what it is creating, you can get a ton of functionality fast.
- arealaccount 1mo agoYou’re joking but from the readme > Is it safe to start a big refactor now, or should I wait for my window to clear?
- weego 1mo agoIs this the new 10x engineer hammock meme? No one is vesting anymore they just burned their quarterly token quote in 10 days.
- aaronbrethorst 1mo agoDarmok and Jalad, after their quota ran out.
- stas4000 1mo ago[flagged]
- underlines 1mo agoYou can't ask Claude if your quota ran out. You have to wait for the reset...
- chews 1mo agofor claude, it's response headers contain available usage, you can get it there. My deepseek harness plugin auto stops asking things when I am at 80% to allow inflight prompts to finish.
- jasonjmcghee 1mo agoI care more about your experience. I'd read the blog post of the story behind this.
- lbrito 1mo agoHow on Earth does one use 1.1B tokens in a week?
- hetspookjee 1mo agoWith cache reads and writes and a couple of long running session without /clear or /compact it can get there rather fast
- what-the-grump 1mo agoCan do that in a day...
- Sohcahtoa82 1mo agoBy doing ALL your work in a single chat. The context window explodes. I typically do one context per feature.
- _zoltan_ 1mo agolast 7 days I've used ~4.8B tokens. most of that was during a 2 day span when codex was using one of my harnesses to iterate over a codebase to improve performance of some parts of it - fully automated.
- sigseg1v 1mo agoTake a 2 million line of code repo and ask it to convert from programming language A to B and statically verify every logic flow with an AST for each lang, and then get it to write a test harness that hits 100% code coverage, screenshots every major state and compares screenshots for each state between the old and new. Request it uses an agent team with up to 20 agents. You will use that in a few hours easily.
- nonameiguess 1mo ago23 em-dashes in the span of a single README. I gotta hand it to Anthropic. They seriously managed to find a completely legal way to sell crack to crack addicts using other crack addicts as their unpaid sales force.
- KinetiNode 1mo ago[flagged]
- dang 1mo agoCan you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
- KinetiNode 1mo agoonly one of my post/reply is flagged other than this one tho?? Also yea i admit i used AI here , sorry for that
- luciandan 1mo agoPretty cool tool! Congrats! Not sure if I'm missing something but this tells you where your tokens went, breakdown per day/tool. So the "why" is still a question left for the user to answer. Can be something like "Because I was missing a good CLAUDE.md file so it had to explore the whole repo before doing any work" or anything else. Just my take.
- ryandrake 1mo agoI made an "amateur hour" error with Codex. Given Anthropic's recent reliability problems I thought I'd take a little time to try Codex with their $20/mo plan. So I downloaded it and gave it a whirl, not realizing that the default model was gpt-5.6-sol. Well after just an hour or two, I blew through my entire week's quota. Whoops! It would be cool if these harnesses could all graphically display your quota usage on the screen at all times.
- jdthedisciple 1mo agoYou can enable showing the quota usage (and much more) in codex via /statusline
- freepiai 1mo agoI think there is a setting for that! AS a soft shill I'm building www.freepi.ai which is free ai inference in a Pi harness, and I'm going to take that suggestion and add it!
- vladigtr 1mo ago[flagged]
- Zak 1mo agoThe only time I've ever managed to burn through a quota that fast (on the cheap plan) was with an open-ended request to check a codebase for any defects or deficiencies. It dispatched five Fable subagents.
- sva_ 1mo agoIn 95% of cases it is because you had a large context for which the cache expired.
- bearjaws 1mo agoThe amount of people I see running around at 800k context and wondering why they are burning through tokens is always surprising.
- brookst 1mo agoYep, even with cache hits that like submitting uncached 80k-token prompts over and over. My Claude.md + framework stuff has it tell me when it recommends /clear before the next prompt (and write itself handoff notes) and I rarely see >100k context size even on large work.
- enraged_camel 1mo agoYeah. I like the way Claude Design handles this: if you come back to a chat after the cache expires, the chat UI shows a message like "start a new chat to save 300k tokens" or whatever. It's pretty nice if you're working in multiple design sessions and are quota-constrained. Surprised they haven't brought the same UX to CC.
- ElFitz 1mo agoI have that in CC when I resume a session. Suggests either starting from a summary, a new conversation, or keep going.
- defied 1mo agoI’ve been using headroom to save on token usage and it’s pretty effective.
- jdthedisciple 1mo agothis kind of stats feature should be shipped by default with every harness imvho
- hungryhobbit 1mo agoI just used Claude to write a plug-in which changed the bottom of the CLI to say: ( ) Usage: 34% (resets in 2h 47m) Context: 56% [Opus 4.6] auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle) That way if my usage starts shooting up, it's very easy to notice (and the color of "( )", which is a circle that I couldn't paste here, changes when it gets high, ensuring I don't miss it). I coupled that with a hook that watches for usage spiking (basically when I've been talking too long or did something to add a ton of context, so suddenly every turn sends a ton of context back, using up a ton of usage). Between the two I haven't hit usage caps in weeks.
- Tadpole9181 1mo agoThis is actually a built-in Claude Code feature: `/statusline` will ask how you want it to look and set it up for you.
- marak830 1mo agoA) Oh nice! that's cool B) Warning everyone, it slowly eats tokens - If you're like me and on the pro plan, perhaps not a good idea to have its (albeit slow) drain on the tokens.
- chorsestudios 1mo agoI didn't think statusline ate tokens, is this true?
- Tadpole9181 1mo agoNo, when you run it Claude just writes a bash script used to generate the status line. Not sure what they're talking about.
- marak830 1mo agoI set it up and saw the token notifier down the bottom slowly ticking up. I'll try again and report back, perhaps I misread something? I was surprised something like thst (which I assumed was an API call) was trickling token usage.
- skeledrew 1mo agoI've been recording every statusline output for months now so I can easily get answers to questions like this whenever I wish.
- securecloudgrou 1mo ago[dead]
- LuD1161 1mo agoI just checked the repo. Nice work A suggestion: 1. Adding which repo/project was where my most tokens were consumed. I checked the image in the repo README, didn't see that graph.
- gverrilla 1mo agoHaving a good statusline is key! I use https://github.com/lpsgverrilla/lps-statusline https://github.com/lpsgverrilla/lps-statusline
- sachinneravath 1mo agoFull story if anyone is interested - https://www.kelviq.com/blog/claude-code-usage-limits-where-tokens-go/ https://www.kelviq.com/blog/claude-code-usage-limits-where-t...
- thot_experiment 1mo agoI genuinely don't even understand how people run out of tokens with the basic subscription. I had Claude write an entire app that has completely replaced Adobe Illustrator for my specific usecases (mostly inking sketches, and embellishing generated SVGs). It does everything exactly the way I want and has much better ergonomics (blender hotkeys ftw) and the whole thing took me like 700k tokens over the course of a couple days. Do people just let Opus ultra extra max thinking run amok on their whole codebase with a single context? I don't even think I could even design sensible features faster, I'm the limiting factor here, the robot pretty much oneshots everything I ask for.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- PhilippGille 1mo agoToken usage is generally lower in greenfield projects.
- thot_experiment 1mo agoSure I get that, but the part where the robot has to read the repo and figure stuff out can be done by a weak model for near-free with no thinking. The delta isn't that big.
- dSebastien 1mo agoI created a custom status line to see/track everything I need: https://github.com/dsebastien/claude-epic-status-line https://github.com/dsebastien/claude-epic-status-line That avoids surprises
- lr1970 1mo ago> npx skills add kelviq/tare -g -y --copy --agent claude-code tare is a Python project. Why distribute it with npm rather than PyPI? Weird
- heliskyr2 1mo ago[flagged]
- munch-o-man 1mo agohow in god's name did you blow your quota in 10 minutes?!?! Are you just queuing up a dozen agents at once to have a "team", putting them all on highest effort, and then letting them run hog wild without having you review each change it wants to make and accept it first? I must be using claude wrong....I never run out of quota. I'm genuinely curious what you are doing that would eat your quota that fast because that sounds legitimately insane.
- tigerhuliu 1mo ago[dead]
- vancekai 29d ago[dead]
- xbyxy2000 22d ago[flagged]