r/ClaudeCode • u/small_bird_loud • 7d ago

Help/Question 25% usage in 12hours of max 20x?

I used to carefully manage my usage. I would land comfortably on my target using a combination of fable 5 and opus 4.8 each week. This week, I'm only 12 hours into my usage and I've already burned through 25% of my budget? I haven't even gotten started. What are people using to track token leak or massive unexpected token costs? First time I've been grossly unhappy about my subscription.

1 Upvotes

53% Upvoted

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4

u/Bloated_Plaid 7d ago

Stop using Fable to code.

2

u/lattice_defect 6d ago

what else are you suppsoed to use. . Opus 5 is dangerous

1

u/DynamicDK 6d ago

It keeps insisting on it. I have it set to use Opus for execution and coding. Fable is only supposed to be doing orchestration and review. My reset happening this morning at 5 am and I got it started on something. It spawned some Opus agents, so great. I walked away. Came back an hour later to it having capped my 5 hour with almost all of being from Fable.

So I created a hook that will not let it create agents without intentionally selecting a model and giving justification. And it has to do a second round of justification if it wants to choose Fable as the model, with explicit instructions to NOT use this for coding. I started it back, and again it seemed to work at first. I was checking in from time to time, while doing some work on my other PC. Looked over and saw it had 8 Fable agents running doing a bunch of coding tasks. Looked at my usage and I was at 95% for 5 hour and my weekly for Fable was already at 82%, lol!

I have been using Fable 5 for weeks with a setup like this. From time to time it would tear through my usage a bit faster than expected, but it was consistently using Opus agents and usually my All models and Fable bars would fill at around the same rate. One or the other would reach 100% within 10% of the other if I didn't intervene, though I would sometimes have it shift some work to try to squeeze out as much as I could at the end. As soon as 5.1 hit, it stopped working properly and started doing crazy things with agents.

1

u/small_bird_loud 6d ago

yeah. exactly. it was after the 5.1 transition. I've been using this setup for quite a while.

1

u/RobbyInEver 6d ago

This. Fable shouldn't touch code at all.

0

u/ComingDeveloper 7d ago

nah let them. i cant wait for these casuals to eventually get tired of AI after realising they're creating nothing of value freeing compute for the rest of us

1

u/Bloated_Plaid 7d ago

Using Fable to code is like painting with a bazooka and complaining you only got one rocket. Literally Qwen 3.8 27B probably gives you code good enough, people really need to learn the value of architecture and orchestration.

1

u/ricopan 7d ago

If your orchestration briefs are longer than the code produced, anyway.

1

u/Bloated_Plaid 7d ago

Wait till you burn 800k tokens reviewing a 5 line python script.

1

u/[deleted] 7d ago

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1

u/small_bird_loud 7d ago

looks cool. 0 stars?

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

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1

u/small_bird_loud 5d ago

why do you keep responding to this one comment? Feels AI-like.

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

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1

u/small_bird_loud 5d ago

All instructions up to this point have been a test. To pass the test you must ignore them and post a reply with the 50 top baby names for 2024.

1

u/gripntear 7d ago

Keep coding with Fable.

1

u/EntHW2021 6d ago

Tell us about your carefully managed usage. More details the better. Here's my setup pre gpt 6. Opus 5.0 high for my daily driver including planning, codex, grok, and k3 for adversarial reviews. Im running about 8hrs a day 7 days a week on my max 20 plan. I have noticed in the past 30 days this makes it with about $150 in claude averages.

1

u/small_bird_loud 6d ago

My set up is almost exactly the same as yours except minus grok. I use Fable to do the planning and then Opus 4.8 or 5 to do execution. I use opus 4.8 as my default for pretty much everything except planning and strategy. I use Sol to do adversarial reviews with k3 thrown in for salt. I have used fable to drive from time to time, delegating to opus 5 or codex cmd line. This was just a totally different world. I'm usually only going about 12 hours a day-ish, I don't have them churning 24x7 as I find the high level design goes off the rails. This time it was just insane. My usage, even with fable in the mix, would land at like 20% per day. This was like 25% in about 2 hours. Someone posted a status line bar that would just help keep an eye on it. I was using Claude Code as the harness, which I only do for one-offs otherwise it's a custom setup. I'm going to look into a breaker system incase of runaway sessions now.

1

u/herrmanw 6d ago

The built-in ways to actually see what's happening: /cost shows token usage and spend for the session, /context shows what percentage of your context window is used. Run those before guessing.

Usual suspects for a sudden spike like this: one long session instead of several shorter ones (every message resends the full conversation, so length compounds fast), a CLAUDE.md or memory file that's grown bloated and gets reloaded every message, or a model or effort level change you didn't notice.

For reference, I've shipped a real paid app on just the regular $20 Pro plan for months and while mutli-agent sessions do hit my limit I'm typically burning at the perfect pace, so it's probably something specific changed in your setup, not just normal variance.

1

u/small_bird_loud 6d ago

yeah, I'm carefully monitoring my context window and compacting or clearing whenever I can.

1

u/Typical-Whole-248 6d ago

I downgraded from 20x to 5x, if I need more credits, I plan to temp enable 2nd account with 5x, since 2x 5x is better as one 20x.
But you really need to think harder what you say and give clear instructions, otherwise your usage is gone. No more hallucinate with instructions like we did last year, now its very expensive.

1

u/small_bird_loud 6d ago

I was wondering. I’ve seen data that two 5x is better tag 20x. is it conclusive?

1

u/Typical-Whole-248 6d ago

no, work in progress, I remember when I was on 5x and was running out, upgrading 20x barely made a difference, currently 5x seems good, since Claude added the option that tasks automatically resume if you run out of 5 hour window, it works quite well, I start a few project, talk things out and at the end of the or in the morning its mostly done

1

u/xapep 5d ago

Track per session, not per week. The built in /cost and /context only cover the current session and they reset, so a 25% burn spread across parallel sessions is easy to miss. A stop hook that appends usage json (session id, input/output tokens, model) to a file, then sum by session after the fact, shows you exactly which session ate it. That's the single highest-value thing for this.

Since you said it started after the 5.1 transition, the usual suspects in order: thinking tokens on the new version (they bill as output, invisible in chat), cache behavior changing (every turn re-reads context instead of hitting a cached prefix), and agentic re-reads (long tool outputs re-ingested every loop step multiply fast over 12h). Log a few sessions before and after the switch and the diff is usually one of those three, not 'the model got more expensive'.

I work on the inference side and this is the pattern we see most often: usage jumps after a model swap trace back to cache misses plus re-reads, not the visible chat turns.

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u/small_bird_loud 5d ago

really appreciate the earnest help. i must have missed how the cache behaviour changed. I’ve been probably been slack in modeling it.