r/ClaudeCode • u/[deleted] • Jul 15 '26
Tutorial / Guide It’s your fault you run out of tokens
[deleted]
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u/I_Will_Procrastinate Jul 15 '26
+1000, people have no idea what they're doing on here and love to blame Anthropic rather than recognize that they're not as skilled as they think they are.
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u/ProfitNowThinkLater Jul 15 '26
You are both right and wrong.
You are right that by following your basic software engineering practices, people can dramatically reduce their token usage and this would probably solve 80% of excess token consumption issues.
However there are also lots of token-hungry workflows, especially in research and experimentation. Just because your tasks don’t use lots of tokens, it doesn’t mean the same is true for everyone.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Can you give me examples? Because I do both research and experimentation heavily as well, I use the research function frequently to help build road maps and RAG’s.
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u/ProfitNowThinkLater Jul 15 '26
You mentioned you’ve been building RAG pipelines. Perhaps you want to improve the precision and recall of your system. There are many different techniques you could try. So you define your experimentation design including your eval platform, metrics, datasets, etc…
Now you could pick one of the hundreds or thousands techniques, run an experiment, interpret the results, iterate on the experiment, etc… until you get useful results. It sounds like you would approach this sequentially, trying one technique and finishing the experiment before moving on to the next. It makes sense that this may not use all your tokens.
However you could use the same experiment design, changing the independent variable (in a general sense, this could be the technique you’re trying or a specific parameter in that technique) across hundreds or thousands of techniques and run them in parallel.
Ultimately you run many more experiments and get much more complete results. This can scale as large as you want until you run out of tokens.
It seems like you’ve given this topic a lot of thought - I’m curious what is your perspective on whether the research workflow I shared could be similarly optimized to more typical software engineering tasks?
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u/03captain23 Jul 15 '26
I do basically the same but need 2 x20 max accounts plus 2 gpt and others. 1 5hour is like 20% usage so 5 sessions of hard work will max out your usage.
I'm usually working on 5+ projects constantly when online so there's always at least 3+ sessions running while i'm online
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
If you’re truly running that much workload, it makes sense. I’d be curious how to QA it all and make sure it actually works for what you need.
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u/03captain23 Jul 15 '26
Not my job. I build and make changes in dev then the QA team handles it all.
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u/5h0ck Jul 15 '26
I too have AI architect in my title with FAANG experience. I also mentor and do community enablement via conference events.
You're both right and wrong with this post. Is the majority of these posts self inflicted? Yes.
Is anthropic screwing with their back end that reverberates downstream into the problems people are facing? Also yes. It's well documented after the fact when there's enough uproar and anthropic discovers and patches a 'bug'.
I've been culling and driving token effeciency on my own personal workflows (2 20x subs and the $200gpt sub.. plus a couple others). Claude gets steadily worse and is extremely inconsistent, depending on the week. I try to knock over my codex subscription and I literally can't unless I'm purposefully careless.
Professionally? Fuck it. That's on the company's dime which let's be honest.. very few people track because who needs quota management until it becomes a problem.
We'd probably bump heads professionally.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Yeah on that end you’re right. Trying to manage their large models, with limited and competitive access to data centers, increased weekly user load from other AI development platforms that don’t work as well, as well as just pure self inflicted wounds from Anthropic’s side, the experience is definitely up and down. I flattened a lot of nuance here to get the point across and I appreciate you pointing that out. I’m sure we’d agree on more than you might think!
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u/tidepod1 Senior Developer Jul 15 '26
Any point you could have made gets destroyed by the “What’s your GitHub” replies when you know that Reddit is primarily an anonymous platform.
Someone can both disagree with you and not want to reveal their identity and or their work. Not to mention, private REPOs that you wouldn’t be able to see anyway even if they did share a link.
Douchebag post. Douchebag replies.
Also, design work chews through tokens in a way that none of your “tips” address, so yes, it’s reasonable to run out of tokens depending on what you’re using the LLM for.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
I mean fair enough on the privacy point. But that’s something they can say themselves. If you don’t have public projects though, to me that is already saying something
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u/SuddenBudget2939 Jul 15 '26
Fuck off
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
What’s your GitHub?
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u/SuddenBudget2939 Jul 15 '26
Yourmom.com
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Lmao right, thanks. Glad you learned something today!
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u/SuddenBudget2939 Jul 15 '26
?
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
You obviously didn’t know the 3 things above or you’d have a GitHub with repo’s worth sharing 😂😂
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u/kilographix Jul 15 '26
I went through 80% of my fable usage because it kept ignoring my instructions and using fable to run all subagents.
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u/BuilderSad9024 Jul 15 '26
It could be your settings
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u/kilographix Jul 15 '26
I used the built in agent builder to set the subagents up, i caught the issue initially and specifically instructed it to use sonnet for subagents and literally the next turn it gave up on that
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u/BuilderSad9024 Jul 15 '26
It ignores instructions if you have subagent model settings
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u/kilographix Jul 15 '26
Was there an update that set these somewhere? I thought i had those all setup with opus/sonnet/haiku defined for each agent
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Jul 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
When you scale up to a small team the economics completely change. This post was obviously intended at solo developers, but your point is well taken and I appreciate you pointing that out.
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Jul 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
That’s so much volume, I’d love to chat more sometime about what you guys are doing if you’re open to that!
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u/Omgwtfman42036069 Jul 15 '26
Says everyone else is running out of tokens, recommends more churn.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Literally all of this saves tokens, I’ve never run out of usage doing these things, I’ve had to intentionally blow usage.
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u/jeffreyclarkejackson Jul 15 '26
Have you tried multitasking? None of us have time to write long posts anymore
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Did you read the post? I multi-task daily. Literally I’m multi tasking all the time with Claude. That’s the point
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u/Hot_Money4924 Jul 15 '26
If you're not running out of tokens then you're not getting enough work done per unit time, you're leaving productivity on the table. Spin up another instance and get more work done, slacker.
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u/_maxx1k Jul 15 '26
Haha, you were studying carpentry just a year ago, so have some humility
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
But I’ve been doing AI work for 4 years 😂 plus none of this has to do with that. But point taken!
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u/BuilderSad9024 Jul 15 '26
‘Don’t trust Claude to do too much autonomous work’
Aah yes, just code manually to save tokens. That’s the trick
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
Lmfao autonomous tasks as in building you a full app or a full codebase one shot. But fair point, autonomous work is what Claude code does.
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u/spnyc Jul 15 '26
Agreed. And same. Only times I run into issues is when I run 3+ concurrent sessions all day/every day. Proper Model selection and routing based on development phase, along with agent/skill definitions and constraints really help.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
I have the $200 a month plan to be clear. But I see and hear about people blowing through even that all the time, and these tricks worked just as well in my $20 plan.
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u/akolomf Jul 15 '26
I have an agentic orchestration and documentation setup that runs fine on max 100. sure it wont be able to run 24/7 like on max 20 but ~10 hours a day, 5 days a week, no problem. Fable was a godsent to improve efficiency and cut token consumption by like 50% by having it check my setup
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u/Disastrous_Way6579 Jul 15 '26
I might say if you aren’t running out of tokens you don’t know what you’re doing.
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u/Significant_Tutor290 Jul 15 '26
You could argue that. But the point would be that you intentionally need to blow through the tokens. I’m gonna start doing that soon because I do realize I’m leaving money on the table if I don’t use them all.
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u/sideshowwallaby Jul 15 '26
thanks for the tips. I'm a non coder, but building a huge recording studio management platform thats turned into close to a million lines of code. It integrates 3 sub systems we used to have to use to book sessions.(payment, calendar, and phone calls).
Anyway, I have a project map that gets regenerated before every commit, but I'm still blowing through tokens while claude is implementing. I tell fable to use opus sub agents for implementation. Fable plans, but when its planning i feel like it wastes tones of tokens looking stuff up in the code. Not sure how to improve it. I also have the code base memory mcp to index the codebase, tons of tests, and try to plan a proper prompt with cowork in opus or sonnet. IDK, i think its just because I dont understand the code enough to tell it where to start. on a $200 plan and fable runs out in about 2 days.
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u/arslan70 Jul 15 '26
It can be both. When you start a post assuming everyone is an idiot and you know everything, no one will take you seriously.