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by lkbm 79 days ago
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.

3 comments

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.

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