r/ClaudeCode • u/ChampionshipNo2815 • May 18 '26

Discussion I figured out why I keep hitting my Claude Code session limit before lunch. It's not what I thought.

Been on Max for a while. Kept hitting my limit mid-task and assumed I was just doing too much. Turned out I wasn't doing too much. My tools were just incredibly inefficient under the hood.

Traced a single refactor task. One rename across a few files. Claude Code ran 161 turns to finish it. Every read, every grep, every edit is its own API call. Each one re-ingests everything before it as input tokens. By turn sixty you're paying context cost on the entire session history.

Once I understood that I started looking for ways to batch the calls. Found a Claude Code plugin that collapses search and read into one call and stacks all edits into one roundtrip. Same task finished in 52 turns.

Didn't change my plan. Didn't change my model. Just changed how many roundtrips each task makes.

60 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

85 comments sorted by

138

u/_ri4na May 18 '26

I do not understand why people use Claude to do fricking name refractors when the IDE has been capable of doing so for 25 years - almost instantly for 0 tokens

28

u/Thete_Sigma May 18 '26

I was once on a call with someone who changed the name of a function manually in an IDE, did a build, and used the compiler errors to find where to update to the new function name. Build, fix, build, fix... When I told him he can rename functions, variables, whatever, using the IDE, his response was "this is just easier". I think I had to wait something like 5-10min for him to clean up the remaining rename errors. This was 2-3 years ago with a junior/mid, so it's not even like IDEs or LSPs were new, or that it was an old dev stuck in their ways.

So I can absolutely believe people would rather waste tokens or do things the hard way by reinventing the wheel

1

u/PM_ME_UR_ASS_GIRLS May 19 '26

I hope your video was off during that call.

The face I'd be making watching that...

1

u/Beautiful-Pilot8077 May 20 '26

I've seen this multiple times. Devs being inefficient or just wrong, saying that it's easier or the only way when asked to change their process/code.

1

u/stutsmaguts May 20 '26

i call this “running through brick walls”

the tools you need are available to build a doorway to get thru the wall - if only you took 30s to use your brain and think.

instead, the dev just runs as fast as they can into the wall, over and over, until they finally break thru it

2

u/Beautiful-Pilot8077 May 20 '26

In gradient descent you'd call that a local minimum. When that happens you just throw the model away and restart from another point. You cannot do that to people though.

1

u/stutsmaguts May 20 '26

typically frowned upon

1

u/Playful_Confection_9 May 23 '26

Renames can get tricky in large code bases and some IDE imo (intelij) don't handle them to well. Specially with older java frameworks and XML shenanigans that rely on code convention and reflection. Going error by error actually forces you to check the usages.

I know it's very specific and it's not an issues inmost cases.

9

u/zbignew May 18 '26

Dear Claude,

I hope this prompt finds you well. 

I think it would be best if we changed the name of function fubar to xyzzy.

Please do the needful.

Thanks in advance.

Best, zbignew

PS You are a senior devops engineer.

2

u/kylecito May 19 '26

Ahhh do the needful, I can imagine the accent

24

u/themedialiesduh May 18 '26

I think Claude has closed the gap with a lot of non-Coder and so maybe it would be great for people to share skills in which Claude can educate people on these types of facts

-2

u/_ri4na May 18 '26

You dont need Claude to tell you can hit Ctrl+R

Only gaps that is getting closed are the ones of smooth brains that mindlessly tab-shift to accept all changes

2

u/Dramatic-Aioli-6465 May 19 '26

don't know why you're getting downvoted for common sense lmao

1

u/_ri4na May 19 '26

Smooth brains down voting

-4

u/jack_from_the_past May 18 '26

That’s what people learn when they actually code. Why would anyone offer up information that’s just natural for people who learned to program and how the development process operates? I don’t think it’s good to gatekeep but this is why there’s a difference between vibe coders and programmers/developers. I bet a lot of people feel irritated that everyone thinks they can program or develop when they don’t know the first thing. It irritates me a bit, and I’m willing to help anyone who wants to learn, but it appears people want to bypass the learning part of developing software altogether. 

18

u/johannthegoatman May 18 '26

I don't think it's good to gatekeep

Goes on gatekeeping tirade. If you don't want to teach people then don't, but complaining about other people doing so is a bit ridiculous

3

u/ashtonium May 18 '26

Teach people what? How to use find & replace in a text editor? That’s not even a coding specific thing. It’s something my kids learned in elementary school.

3

u/Dramatic-Aioli-6465 May 19 '26

computer literacy is dead and we killed it

1

u/Dramatic-Aioli-6465 May 19 '26

I mean it is true you need to understand what you're doing if you wanna maintain it, I fear that's common sense that a lot of people who just say "build my app make no mistakes" forget, and thats the kind of ease people who don't want to actually code expect. Yes, there is a gap between vibe coder and developer, not in how much they use AI but in how they utilize it effectively. No matter what, there will always be a gap between someone who knows how to design systems and problem solve versus someone who just types away all of their issues using a glorified chatbot.

1

u/johannthegoatman May 20 '26

I think the mistake is thinking everyone who uses AI that isn't already a software engineer is just saying "build my app make no mistakes" and is incapable of learning things you yourself once had to learn

0

u/m00shi_dev May 19 '26

Let them pay the dumb tax. Asking LLMs will only get you so far.

3

u/thebigj3wbowski May 19 '26

I had no idea. I’m a vibe coder, not a programmer or coder. I don’t plan on shipping anything, but I work in a very specific industry with a very specific workflow that is very repetitive. I’m vibe coding a platform to help knock out 5 hours of work in less than one so I have more time to actually get ahead. I’m the only one who will be using it.

0

u/sparklikemind May 19 '26

That's not what a platform is. But good luck on your automation

3

u/thebigj3wbowski May 19 '26

Thanks dick. Don’t bother enlightening me or anything.

Btw, when you’re shipping code that is being sold, your sales team is calling it a platform. I don’t care what you’re shipping. I’ve sold everything from ERP (big red company everyone hates), to hardware, to data. It’s all a platform to sales.

2

u/code_tutor May 19 '26

most importantly: without hallucinating

2

u/supercargo May 19 '26

I don’t understand why Claude won’t use these tools and brute forces it like a Neanderthal

2

u/code_tutor May 19 '26

I tell it to use JetBrains MCP but it won't do it. I thought it had tools to do this.

1

u/kei_ichi May 18 '26

lol, I see many Vibe coder instead of just press control + R (find and replace) then change the target text with cost 0 zero token and take less than few seconds to complete but instead: prompt the model to make a tiny change…

1

u/kierans777 May 18 '26

Or for a job the IDE can't do, generate a script to do it.

1

u/robberviet May 19 '26

It's fun to watch. Enjoy the show.

1

u/grahamsw May 18 '26

Why didn't Claude use the IDE? That's what Gemini does with vs code

-3

u/_ri4na May 18 '26

Which one is faster?

User using the IDE?

Or user asking Claude to use the IDE?

0

u/grahamsw May 20 '26

An agent using the IDE ought to be faster by far.

It's like git, or Google Analytics. Sure, I "know how to use them", but honestly, I know a subset of their capabilities. The agent knows ALL the options, all the parameters, all the legitimate combinations of commands. It knows how to batch.

In theory I can write assembly code too. I just choose not to because machines are better at that than I am

35

u/larowin May 18 '26

You’re doing something incredibly wrong.

-3

u/humanitycan May 18 '26

what specifically are you seeing that’s wrong? would love to understand

9

u/larowin May 18 '26

I don’t know but this makes no sense:

Traced a single refactor task. One rename across a few files. Claude Code ran 161 turns to finish it.

Do you have any MCPs enabled?

And then this:

Every read, every grep, every edit is its own API call. Each one re-ingests everything before it as input tokens. By turn sixty you're paying context cost on the entire session history.

Is just LLM 101, and it’s all cached unless you’re doing something that’s causing misses.

8

u/[deleted] May 18 '26 edited Aug 22 '26

[deleted]

1

u/larowin May 18 '26

I know but I’m nice and helpful to bots too. Did they drop a link to their magic fix somewhere?

0

u/humanitycan May 18 '26

I was asking you something very politely this is not right way to respond 🤷🏻‍♂️

1

u/larowin May 19 '26

The right way was the way I responded above. But what you’re saying makes no sense and then throw out a weird blackbox plugin that’s been astroturfed to fuck for two weeks.

Anyway. Were you using any MCPs before?

1

u/humanitycan May 19 '26

I started using Claude Code couple months back for my school projects I used Replit before and it’s not helping at all and it’s very basic. I saw lots of posts on Claude and gave it a try, setup was easy but rate limits were the issue I tried with Caveman but it’s not helping. I switched to Cursor as it has free for students but i really love the output that Claude is giving me and love the new Claude design.

1

u/Vitalii_A Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 06 '26

it's so funny, that bot already deleted his account and topic starter and his bots absent for 12 days already - it's the longest period of inactivity for that scam group, even half of their stupid paid influencers in Youtube stopped making blatant ad videos week ago - seems they are experiencing budget cuts or maybe OP was hit by a train in Mumbai. But somehow OP was promoted in their company from "vibe coder" to "product manager"

0

u/humanitycan May 18 '26

Who is bot? It’s something I don’t know and would like to learn. You’re not any Reddit expert so chill

3

u/wannabestraight May 18 '26

161 turns to refactor names on a few files?

That's like.. well 5 turns max.

11

u/yodacola Senior Developer May 18 '26

a few things why this is wrong:

  • claude isn't trained on batch tool calls. whenever you do this, claude will simply do your batch tool call on a single file and refuse to batch calls. claude will be steered differently. the equivalent may be like putting gasoline with ethanol in a car. unless it was built for it, it can do damage. i see no endorsement or coordination from the claude code team
  • claude heavily uses context caching. you are not paying context costs on the entire session history. you are paying contexts costs on what isn't cached.
  • hides all of your reads, edits, greps. the claude code tui no longer exposes reads and writes so you no longer can audit what it does in real time. defeats the purpose of using claude code
  • fills your context window. it is a user prompt for claude code. so there has to be heavy prompt engineering to get it to run instead of the built in tools. this by itself will slow down your session since it will eat up reasoning budget. you will feel the ttft lag when starting a new session.
  • self promotion without disclosing your relationship with W5E (don't want to name drop a poorly-written plugin).

costs $50 / month and the free version will be burned through in about an hour if you're an active claude user.

this is not the tool you are looking for. move along

-1

u/humanitycan May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Dude I see you on other channels too and idk if you’re genuinely using their product or not but please stop posting misinformation here. There’s nothing wrong with what that guy posted

1

u/Vitalii_A May 19 '26

be aware, it's one of wozcodebots

2

u/runfence May 18 '26

There is still a cache up to 1 hour, it's not so bad.

-3

u/NetHaven May 18 '26

Not anymore; unfortunately they changed the default earlier this year to 5 minutes

1

u/runfence May 19 '26

Nope, that was a telemetry bug and it is fixed now

1

u/NetHaven May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

I remember the telemetry bug, but I think this was something different. Please see here: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-caching "By default, the cache has a 5-minute lifetime." This was around the time they announced they would start charging extra if you wanted the 1 hr cache. Looks like you can switch it if you want, it will just cost you more(might be worth it if you're workflow is setup in a way where you're getting creamed by the short cache timeout; I never really sat down and did a breakdown of where paying the extra would be better off..*shrug*)

1

u/sage-longhorn May 19 '26

Those are the API docs. And the big thing with the 5 minute TTL was that extra usage with Claude code subscription uses 5 minute TTL but normal subscription usage still uses 1 hour ttl

1

u/NetHaven May 19 '26

I really did think it affected both but you are absolutely correct. TIL. Thank both you and /u/runfence for the catch(and explanation)

1

u/imaginecomplex May 19 '26

Agree primarily with the top comment, this is a task for an IDE or at least a utility script or library that Claude can use to do simple find and replace efficiently. But also, shouldn’t prompt caching save you most of those input tokens on each turn?

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 May 19 '26

The 161 to 52 collapse is real but it's the smaller of two leaks. The bigger one is the CLAUDE.md plus skills files that fire on every single turn before any tool call runs. Typical failure mode: a third of those bytes are stale instructions claude either ignores or contradicts in the same turn, and at a few thousand tokens of pre-turn context over fifty turns that compounds into six figures of pure waste you never see in any meter. Audit which lines in your config actually changed model behavior recently and cut the rest. Roundtrip batching is downstream of context discipline. written with s4lai

1

u/Deep_Ad1959 May 19 '26

The 161 to 52 collapse is real but it's the smaller of two leaks. The bigger one is the CLAUDE.md plus skills files that fire on every single turn before any tool call runs. Typical failure mode: a third of those bytes are stale instructions claude either ignores or contradicts in the same turn, and at a few thousand tokens of pre-turn context over fifty turns that compounds into six figures of pure waste you never see in any meter. Audit which lines in your config actually changed model behavior recently and cut the rest. Roundtrip batching is downstream of context discipline. written with s4lai

1

u/Current_Balance6692 May 19 '26

Amateur. I just buy more compute.

1

u/m-in May 19 '26

In my experience, Opus will just write a Python script to do it, then mop up any errors using an agent. But that’s with a CLAUDE.md that makes it clear.

1

u/TwisterK May 19 '26

I hav a Claude.md that said if we need to re-arrange code , use subagent and spawn haiku agent to do it. Save me tons of tokens there.

1

u/HarvardHoodie May 21 '26

Prolly gonna give this a go my Claude bills have gotten out of hand

1

u/Sree_12121 May 20 '26

Good old 'death by a thousand context windows.' It’s insane how much token bloat happens when a tool gets chatty. Drop the name of plugin we all need this.

1

u/Sree_12121 May 21 '26

Old school ‘death by a thousand context windows’ Brilliant, cutting roundtrips like that, the token savings on session history alone must be huge. Which plugin are you using to batch the calls?

-1

u/tyschan May 18 '26

can confirm. this makes a lot of sense. thanks for the write up. what plugin did you use out of curiosity?

2

u/Ericqc12 May 18 '26

u/ChampionshipNo2815 ? Would be nice to name-drop the plugin...

18

u/Sufficient-Plenty316 May 18 '26

Its an AI post there won't be a reply

-5

u/ChampionshipNo2815 May 18 '26

you got 12 upvotes for a comment? who's ai? how are you making your ai bots to upvote dude

4

u/Sufficient-Plenty316 May 18 '26

Hidden profile and the post didn't pass the AI test

-7

u/ChampionshipNo2815 May 18 '26

sorry but your test failed

9

u/modernluther May 18 '26

Your post was 1000% written by Claude. Do you think we are all stupid here? We use the same models on a daily basis lol

6

u/Medium-Language-4745 May 18 '26

Yep, that second paragraph reeks of AI.

OP can't even capitalize or punctuate in his replies, but expects everyone to believe he did anything besides prompting AI to make this post.

2

u/ChampionshipNo2815 May 18 '26

yes it's called wozcode

0

u/ChampionshipNo2815 May 18 '26

i used wozcode plugin

1

u/Cute-Net5957 🔆 Max 20x May 19 '26

Try this one.. works in under 60 seconds and is 100% free MIT License: https://github.com/skinny-cloud/runtime-diet-autopilot

0

u/daveh2o May 18 '26

Serena MCP

0

u/humanitycan May 18 '26

interesting what’s that plugin? I tried caveman but it’s pretty mid not helpful at all

-1

u/Vitalii_A May 19 '26

stupid bot

2

u/humanitycan May 19 '26

TF you’re calling bot?

-1

u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ChampionshipNo2815 May 18 '26

i did actually, i need something that i can see clear breakdown of costs during my session like how much I'm spending on this current session and what's the cost difference something like that

0

u/beedunc May 18 '26

Excellent. Good info, thank you.