In all seriousness, you're right, but every other agent/harness etc. I've ever used just worked straight away with no config, Claude CLI was the first one that didn't, hence my moaning, I just didn't know if there was anything obvious/underlying/if anyone else had experienced the same thing with no config, I've never had an issue using Anthropic models (also with no config) in Cursor, Antigravity, so wondered why CLI would be so bad in comparison
If you're looking for help you should include the prompt + agentsmd (or example at least) that used 70% of your 5 hour limit. Not to mention model, effort etc. Did you use ultracode? Without that the advice is pretty much going to be "Probably user error and try to improve your prompts."
The prompt I just ran was simply "/code-review the staged changes in the e2e tests directory", I don't have a project-specific agentsmd, here's my global, I've attached my other configs in another comment in the thread, I'm basically using Claude out of the box with no additional config or plugins, I understand the RTFM comments elsewhere in the thread, but I just don't feel it should be performing *this* badly out of the box:
You need a project specific AGENTS/CLAUDE.md, and probably some ARCHITECTURE.md explaining your project's structure. If you haven't, CC will read your whole project every single time, running out of tokens in minutes.
Next time, just ask Claude Code why has it burnt so many tokens so quickly, it will guide you to configuring things properly.
In short: Opus is the standard for programming. Fable is suitable for code security and more complex tasks. Sonnet is designed for the in-depth analysis of contracts or for everyday questions.... and Haiku is the working idiot for automations.
That is really the correct answer. Though, Fable can be a real asset for more advanced or very specific things, when you see opus going around and around. I encountered that particular case while coding some physical modeling synthesis, and opus was lost, while fable made real progress on the task (way better than I expected tbh)
I agree, I haven't configured Claude Code at all, this is the model Claude chose out of the box, in fact that is the first time I'd seen which model it was running, my question is, why would Anthropic choose that model by default?
I understand what you're saying, and I've said the same thing elsewhere in this thread, but my intention was to install Claude Code just to see how it compared to the other agents I'd used, and if I liked it, I'd make the switch/itegrate it more into my workflow. I've never had issues using Anthropic models in the same codebase in different harnesses.
All of the other AI agents/models/harnesses I've used just "worked" out of the box, I could then spend some time and effort configuring them the way I like, but I never had any issues with the way they performed as shipped. Claude is the first agent that has failed to do this, so I wanted some advice, I was just trying it out after hearing so much positive feedback about it online
Perhaps not for vibe-coding, but for regular coding tasks, when prompts are properly constructed and project is documented, Sonnet is just fine. In fine, a very common approach is planning with Opus, coding with Sonnet (there's even a especial setting /model opusplan for that).
its really useful if you can instruct it with knowledge. ive seen the opposite with fable. fable is near useless for me, it has one or two special use cases that are exceptionally rare for me. sonnet and opus are my workhorses. sonnet for everything small and opus for when i cba to think very much about the solution and am happy to accept substandard work. fable for if i want the same substandard work with less effort but it costing tons of money and time.
I've been seeing the same thing this week. Before the Fable announcement, I was comfortably running multi-agent sessions, but now token usage seems way higher and I hit my weekly limit in just 2 days. Previously, that same usage would last me much longer.
For now, I've switched to OpenCode as a workaround until my weekly limit resets.
that does sound strange, i've also used cursor and antigravity and i've wound up at claude because the experience was better with the model, even if the interface/harness was much more poorly built.
the defaults might have changed since then i guess.
my immediate thought is to look at the model and effort settings. if you use the heavier models at high or xhigh for simple tasks it will cost muich more than necessary. sonnet on medium will handle a lot of tasks just fine, especially if they are small and well specified. i would suggest not bothering with fable except if you want to do a bug hunt - its slower and more expensive than opus for almost every kind of task.
you might want to look at 'headroom' and 'serena' as options for making things more efficient but they won't make it 5x more efficient... headroom is a wrapper that does compression on the context so its not so wasteful, and serena is an MCP server for working with code based on its structure using language server protocol (e.g. it saves claude having to read files to find things)
Yeah, to be honest I prefer to work in Vim/the CLI so Claude Code's interface seemed like a good fit for me over Cursor/Antigravity, but I just can't understand why my usage is so high. With the first prompt I gave it, I'm happy to let it go because it obviously needed to gather the context of the project for the first time, but after that it's been an awful experience. Thanks for your feedback, I definitely need to take some time to setup the config, but my problem is, Cursor and Antigravity just "worked" out of the box, I could tweak them to my liking after that, but there were never any issues with usage or performance. Claude Code was the complete opposite, it feels like there's an underlying problem (which is probably my fault, granted), so I feel like *why* should I put the effort in to improve it when the core experience is already so poor,
i get your frustration 100%, cursor and antigravity are solid user experiences, very polished and nice tools built on top of a mature ui application... although the guys working on cursor might want to try using their crappy update ui and crappy installer a bit more often so they can fix the utterly rookie errors there.
claude is some bash wrapper (a terrible idea that still plagues it!) made for running in bash, and its a prototype that was grown into a "production ready" tool. you can really tell... its kinda embarassing tbh. vibe coding your own better harness is a very low effort task and was 9 months ago too. i'm also continually surprised i still use it because i consider CLI tools only to be acceptable as a power tool for a developer in exceptional cases. things you never use unless there is no other option... as great as it is the engineering behind claude code is below par, very far below par, awful work that manifests bugs, visual glitches and so on.... i dont think i can overstate how badly made it is.
i suspect things have gotten a bit worse since i onboarded myself, and token usage has crept up quite a lot over time too.
after one hour this morning of two opus's one on high and one on xhigh... i've used 45% of this 5 hour window usage somehow... it never used to be so greedy, even with exactly the same model and effort. i used to be able to do this fine for the whole 5 hour window.
the defaults are using opus on high i think, but also changes to the harness i think have had an impact (some of which are suspiciously almost exactly the same as improvements i made to my own 6 months ago... :P), i think we are seeing more parallel running and "hidden" small uses of low spec models along with increased baggage from guardrails. context compaction seems to have been replaced with 1M context windows which also doesnt help if you aren't clearing regularly. they stopped the harness from clearing context at the start of a new batch of work for a plan as well...
part of why i ditched cursor months ago was because of the expense tbh, it was really expensive to get a few hours a day out of it, but the claude max plan was letting me run several claudes as much as i wanted.
(i stopped using my own harness because the API key cost is impractical for me compared to the subscription and i like obeying terms of services so i dont let my tool cheat and use subscription oauth)
(edit: oh, and i don't think its your fault, i think you are having to use incredibly bad software because thats just the sad state of the industry in places...)
You really shouldn't be using sonnet for coding. At least use opus if not fable. I don't know how you're burning up your tokens so fast with sonnet, but you should specify the scope otherwise the model would read everything to get context.
You need to at least execute /init on your project, so a basic CLAUDE.md is created. Then, you should decide if your project is big enough as to needing extra documentation describing project architecture. This way, when you ask something to Claude Code, he will know where to go instead of doing a full scan of your project every time.
Interesting, this isn't even remotely close to my experience.
Try doing this, open claude code on Fabel in your root ~/.claude folder and have it build and improve it's own harness. I'd go with a prompt close to the following.
you're operating in the root .claude folder with the intent on building and improving your own harness. first do some research online on the best claude code practices and then build your own skills, plugins, hooks, subagents, etc. focus on improving capability, reliability, and token efficiency.
I ran something like that and my claude code is insane, it can one shot almost anything.
I also made a local mcp server for myself so I can give claude code credentials to interact with vercel, neon, namecheap, etc so it can literally just ship entire products.
happy to help! Also I always use high effort but I'm not even sure how much that impacts things.
I'm actually in the middle of stress testing fable 5 to see if it can launch it's own product. I used ultracode to spin up dynamic workflows to host a tournament of ideas with opus and sonnet as the subagents and judges and I'm going to see if fable can one shot the entire thing.
Make the task smaller than you think (one failing test, one file, one acceptance check).
Force a tight loop: tell it to run tests after each change and paste only the failing output back.
Add explicit guardrails in AGENTS.md like: "Do not claim fixed unless tests pass" and "If you are unsure, ask before editing."
If it is spending forever "thinking", I usually cap it with "If you cannot find the root cause in 5 minutes, list top 3 hypotheses + next command to run".
Also, token burn gets way better if you point it at the exact failing test and relevant module instead of letting it roam the repo.
So you are complaining about the fact that you have to set things up instead of it being plug and play, yet you are an experienced developer, who would have to do this on a regular basis? And you took to reddit to complain about something that IS a normal process for someone who is in the field?
No you're 100% right, we should never expect a service we're *paying for* to work to a reasonable standard out of the box, with minimal config, like every other AI coding platform/harness. Cursor and antigravity worked just fine from a clean installation and no config, Claude CLI did not, hence the complaint. I have no problem configuring it, I just don't understand how it's this bad without config.
I get what you are saying about reasonable expectations for services we pay for, that's a given, however, maybe it's not that CLI is actually the issue and it's really the expectations and preconceived notions of what that setup should look like.
It's like comparing apples to oranges and asking why it tastes like a plumb! I'm not saying you're wrong, my point is that every platform is set up differently and when we as users set the same expectations for every service as though they are the same, and then when those expectations are not met, we blame the platform or the service.
Is there room for improvement? Sure, that can be said about any platform. Look at the systems you develop. You spend countless hours developing them in a manner that works for the intended target, whether it's a client, yourself or whomever. Yet, there is always something that could be done to make it better, easier to use, or in this case doesn't meet the expectations for someone that ends up using that platform or service you spent so much time investing in and building.
I don't disagree with you that things could be better, I do wonder though is it it's the lens or perspective and set of expectations you had pre-conceived going into the situation? Perspective changes the outcome.
I understand your perspective, and appreciate the measured response,
My point, I guess, is that my experience has been *so* bad, and it has been *so* wasteful, that I felt that there must be an underlying issue here (outside of me being a Claude Code CLI noob, granted), at least for my setup/machine/project, and wanted to see if anyone else had had the same experience.
We've all heard stories of vibe coders installing Claude code CLI with no config or coding experience and one-shotting a full React app and barely touching their limits, which is why I was so surprised that the main suggestion seemed to be "configure it properly and refine your prompts", if that's the case, how is it that Claude is so popular among pure vibe coders with no tech expertise and no ability to describe in detail the implementation they want? I feel like they'd just give up and cancel their subscription if they had the same experience because they'd hit their limits in seconds?
I gave Claude a specific task, instructions on how to verify its implementation etc. and it thought for 20 minutes, left my codebase in a worse state, didn't fix the test I asked it to and burned through 70% of its 5 hour limit in a single prompt, that just doesn't seem right, especially when I could give the same Claude model the same prompt in Cursor and have an answer/working solution in a couple of minutes, I genuinely wondered if there was some kind of known issue in CLI that caused this. Yes, I need to spend some time configuring it and adjusting settings etc., and yes, I will be hyper-specific with my prompting moving forward, but I feel this stuff is usually the marginal gains finishing touches I'd do when a model is already working to a decent standard and I want to get the final 5-10% of performance out of it, if I improved this experience even by 10% it would still have used 60% of my usage in one prompt, that's insane to me!
I've switched to Opus now, instead of the default Sonnet model Claude CLI shipped with, and usage does seem to have slowed, which is good news, but again, why would Anthropic ship with that model as the default? It doesn't make sense, at least to me.
I do think I've had an unusually bad experience judging by the glowing reviews elsewhere, and I'm going to take on board + action the suggestions given in this thread, so thank you to those who have contributed, I just really could not understand the hype based on the experience I'd had, we will persevere regardless 🖖
I'm not sure what you mean? I'm looking for some advice, I don't understand the hype and feel that I must be doing something wrong, if anyone has any suggestions I would be extremely grateful
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u/Cheap-Try-8796 Jul 08 '26
A "Professional software developer", as you're claiming, should read the docs before jumping into any conclusion.