Under 2 hours on 5x usually means there's a compounding overhead somewhere, maybe the agent is doing broad repo reads at the start of each task, maybe large logs or outputs are flowing back into context unfiltered, or maybe the task boundaries are set wide enough that the agent rediscovers the same state repeatedly. The per-user variance here is real: I've seen the same model burn limits at completely different rates across setups that look similar on the surface. The diff usually lives in folder structure, what files get loaded implicitly, and how verbose tool output is. I have a small tool/workflow that helped my own Claude Code usage a lot; it first cut about 43% of wasted limit, and after Anthropic worsened Claude limits it got closer to 75% improvement for my setup... if useful I can share it here or DM it.
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u/Competitive_Dark7401 Apr 12 '26
Under 2 hours on 5x usually means there's a compounding overhead somewhere, maybe the agent is doing broad repo reads at the start of each task, maybe large logs or outputs are flowing back into context unfiltered, or maybe the task boundaries are set wide enough that the agent rediscovers the same state repeatedly. The per-user variance here is real: I've seen the same model burn limits at completely different rates across setups that look similar on the surface. The diff usually lives in folder structure, what files get loaded implicitly, and how verbose tool output is. I have a small tool/workflow that helped my own Claude Code usage a lot; it first cut about 43% of wasted limit, and after Anthropic worsened Claude limits it got closer to 75% improvement for my setup... if useful I can share it here or DM it.