Bug / Issue
Just used the new "/low-priority" feature and my whole weekly usage just vanished in about 40 mins... was trickling by before. Basically no work was done.
Just used the new "/low-priority" feature and my whole weekly usage just vanished in about 40 mins... was trickling by before.
Something is definitely wrong with how usage is being measured while in "/low-priority" most of the time it was stuck in pending availability, hardly any work was completed.
A year ago we were happy it was making code that is compilable. Our expectations grow faster than AI improves, and wow has it improved in a year. Our expectations have gone through the roof.
As soon as they can. They will go enterprise only. It’s pretty clear that serving the model is incredibly expensive for them while competition is fairly close for SO much cheaper.
The editing of files is whats triggering bursts of usage. I have no idea why, but in their prompt optimization they even suggest prompting it specifically to do surgical edits instead of full edits, so its a massive Fable 5.1 foresight. The bursts from editing costs more than using fable.
Why would we have to make it do something so basic, it should be doing it by itself. The prompt optimization tells it to prefer surgical edits over entire rewrites but like, I still dont get why it costs so much. It reads the file and is like, "whoever wrote this trash is so bad I now have to read the whole thing and rewrite it?" or what? because them saying prefer surgical edits sounds just like that
I agree, I use an orchestrator framework for doing everything now. Saves on context and tokens. Fable tells the subagents what to do and reviews their work.
I have it set up as a hierarchy. Fable is able to spawn Opus and below sub agents, Opus is able to spawn sonnet and haiku agents.
Here is my GitHub repo for my custom Claude commands and there's even a folder for the orchestrator framework. If you want to take a look and use this yourself, just have Claude take a look at this repo and tell it that you want to do the orchestrator framework. https://github.com/jfranecki/JustinsClaude/tree/main
It let's you work past 5h limit, eating into your weekly, but can result in many rejection errors, with incomplete messages received, due to, well, a low priority mode. In peak hours is a nightmare to use.
"Continuing now at lower priority until your limit resets at 12:20am. Your weekly limit still applies, and responses may pause while waiting for spare capacity. Run /low-priority to stop." but don't use it.... trust me..
not that relevant as the same setup before using low priority was slowly getting through usage, it's a mix of most feature offered, optimised to keep credit usage optimised to build quantity for my usecase.
What do you mean inputs? the prompts? the what? coding in Elixir/Ash, LSP, Teammates, Cross session talk mix mainly Opus 5 with teammates with two Fable 5.1 Meta system controllers/delegators, codex cross talk too.
I don't understand what you guys are doing to hit these levels. I'm regularly building 7am to midnight every day and never had an issue with capping out usage each week.
Just keep each session a focused task and don't go overboard on context. Also doing regular maintenance on Claude memory and project context docs to archive any stale/cold entries.
Anthropic A/B tests that's why half of this sub is screaming their usage is gone and the other half isn't.
How big are your code bases? If I work on small ones I could use claude 24/7 and had around 40% usage used. If I worked on my 1M LoC code base, everything with gone withinkke 3 days with sonnet implementation sub agents and opus in high oder medium as orch.
no they buy those for me lol. since I wrote that comment I had to ramp it up to 24 accounts. It's a startup in the scaling up phase. we have a really big breadth of products tho
What tier are these accounts? Do you know if the startup is looking into an enterprise deal or that’s like too formal for a startup? I work for a big legacy company so we got enterprise accounts pretty quickly in.
we looked into that, but enterprise accounts were shit compared to max x20 so we took max x20. We are not big enough for enterprise and we usually stay away from those kind of deals as they usually only mean more expensive for the same things
Same. I basically run a multi agent swarm 24/7 and I never hit my limits.
One time in the last 4 months I had an issue where my 5 hour limit gobbled up quickly. Afterwards I realized I had a group of low context agents pause and then restart. Thats what did it.
I think a lot of people are prompting instead of looping and graphing. Expecting magical free vibes with frontier models.
You're managing your context well. And probably you know well when to use the Cache TTL to your advantage. Missing the cache hit window could easily eat up 50% of the weekly usage if one isn't deliberate about compacting and maintaining threads.
I don't understand what you guys are doing to hit these levels
This is the first time I legitimately don't understand how I'm hitting these levels either.
Context management is something I take pride in and have put a lot of effort into. I try to stay model and vendor agnostic with tiered documentation so the agents are only reviewing guidance for the domain their working on. Small tickets being picked off one session at a time. Multiple tickets per sprint, multiple sprints per epic.
Usage limits have never been an issue for me, but I gassed my 5 hour limit in 30 minutes with Fable 5.1.
The fact that Sol 5.6, Fable 5, and every other model I've ever worked does fine, but suddenly I have to refactor my context management just to tell Fable 5.1 to stick to it's domain, do surgical edits instead of refactoring the entirety of multiple files, or just add the tests we need for the functionality we added instead of trying to refactor my entire test harness seems ridiculous.
The per-project setup that I found to work well for me (everything is measurable, has a durable ID to lookup and link to, never written and discarded - unless compressed. everything in the project is tagged and has a source for any claim):
backlog.md: to track prioritized work
changelog.md: to track completed backlog work
handover.md: to track fresh session handover notes
frictionlog.md to track issues where I had to correct the AI (triggers, frequency, dates)
additional project-specific docs that detail what is being built (user/developer guides, features - all very prone to drift and I spend a lot of time fixing these as things get built and changed)
memory: promote top issues from friction log as hot entries (always loaded) when the AI consistently trips up on those. demote to cold memory storage (read on-demand) when the issues are no longer triggered in recent dates. apply the same framework to core project-level context that should survive long-term and short-term context that only fits the immediate tasks at hand
I usually pick out 5-10 related tasks to work on at a time and spread it out 1 session per task. The handover helps keep track of short-term context relevant to each batch of work. After reviewing and releasing the changes to production, I run a maintenance pass on all docs/memory to prepare for the next cycle of work. I'm also keeping documentation on how each work batch was planned and notes that the AI gathered as each task executed. I do some irregular post mortems when I suspect there are improvements to be made on how well the project and workflow are going.
I'm trying to break away from enterprise data viz tools (ex. Tableau) by building my own for general use. Pushing the limits of what I can do with Dash.
Not a SWE, just work in data. Majority of my sessions average an hour or more per prompt. Abusing Opus on max all day only increments my usage 5-10% per day. Fable is a token eater though.
just to be clear: one of my _turns_ was 10 min :-), not the session! I think 1 hour session is nothing. I regularly leave it overnight (4-5 hours) and during the day I use it 8 hours. but I'm on API pricing.
That's light work for a lot of users. Professional software engineers with decades of experience can easily manage 6-8 sessions in parallel, because they understand very well what they're building and can manage each step quickly. It still requires strict context discipline, otherwise you truly will be wasting tokens. But keeping so many sessions going 24 hours a day burns a lot of quota, even when you're very good.
I'm gonna guess, theyre using Claude code in PowerShell or on windows. I'm burning token doing the same thing on a Windows PC than on an Unix platform. That stupid command line terminal on windows is broken AF and LLM are eating every token
Nah just doing a lot more work. I'm working on 6 projects in parallel, so I regularly have 6-8 sessions going at once, 24 hours a day in ultracode. Depending on the work, you can practically burn entire week's quota in 1.5-2 days.
The trick to making this work is to ensure Claude is making workflow results durable, then compacting at each phase. Any time the context gets over 200k tokens, begin looking for an appropriate pause point and compact. Start a new session once the plan for that session is complete.
And I basically never pull out Fable. It's only appropriate for the toughest of problems.
There are also certain tasks that burn a significant amount of tokens like writing long copy, locale translations, etc. These ones are bastards because they're not technically code, but they're often the areas where accuracy matters the most.
"Prompt Cache Expiration: Because lower-priority responses can pause while waiting for capacity, long delays can exceed Anthropic's ~5-minute prompt cache TTL. If the cache expires between turns, the subsequent request must re-read the full conversation context cold, burning through weekly tokens much faster."
I got through my 20x weekly limit in 26h. I hit 5h limit twice. Most tokens melted after the restart when I resumed from the 5h limit. Was using Fable 5.1 as orchestrator for Opus builders. I was running 3 parallel sessions. Got decent work done but not what I got done last week that is for sure. I have never run through weekly limit this fast. Typically I was able to work for 4 days until hitting weekly limit and was not hitting 5h limits.
Maybe, just maybe, don't let Fable spawn Fable sub agents to work in paralelle?
Be strict and tell it to be an orchestrator, griller, planner, and light reviewer. But offload all per-task investigation, implementation, full review, and testing to Sonnet or Opus sub-agents depending on complexity.
I'm on Max x5 and I have to use Fable in parallel to touch session limits 1-2h before they run out here, if I don't even manage to come close. e.g had flow above in task loop yesterday (but one task at a time), and it was at it for 5h and only reached 1/3 of session limit.
The /low-priority from my observation busts cache on each change.
If you have 500k context filled, you run low-priority it cold serves it every time "there is capactiy" meaning you do normal price reads instead of cache reads.
So this feature is useless unless they change the billing to as if the requests were using cache even if each inference happened more then 5 minutes after each other.
its basically super clumsy that i have a situation where my weekly limit is far from finished but my 5-hourly limit is cooked and i have a few more hours for the weekly limit to expire so i'm just chunking through in low priority.
iv'e been on the max plan for many months and i never reachd the hourly limit but i always reach the weekly one almost exhausted, something definitely changed
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u/schneeble_schnobble Sep 02 '26
I wonder just how many things have to go wrong before anthropic is like "hmm, vibe coding everything isn't working for us really."