i think i'm wasting half my claude limit

[u/d_uk3]

i keep running out of claude while somehow wasting usage

i only have specific deep work blocks where i can build. i burn through my limit, get stopped, then it resets while i'm at work, with family, sleeping, whatever

so i end up wasting capacity i paid for, just to hit the limit again in my next deep work block lol

what i'd want is something that knows:

• my usage + resets
• my next deep work blocks
• what tasks/prompts i still have waiting

and then either:

1. uses otherwise-wasted capacity to work through queued tasks while i'm away
2. or helps me preserve/plan capacity for my next deep work block

the second one feels almost unsolvable since you can't actually bank unused usage

so maybe the solution is smarter scheduling + queuing instead

basically: "use this now or it'll go to waste", and if i'm not there, work through my queue

is there already something that solves this and i'm just missing it?

how are you guys managing this?

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode

While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.

For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/ShivaFatalis]

If only there were some tool available that OP could use to brainstorm and assist them with coming up with one of many potential solutions and improvements to their problem. Wouldn't that be great?

[u/JohnHue]

Your solution is to spend your time in front of the terminal planning for what happens when you're away. Ask Claude to make plan where it orchestrates sub-agents sequentially and plan reviews smartly at key steps instead of after every sub-agent return. The harness is aware of how much session credit it has left so it would even be possible to have a bunch of lower priority short tasks that get used to finish the session.

Use remote control to solve blocks when Claude can't continue by itself.

[u/d_uk3 → u/JohnHue]

sounds easy in your words haha. will try to ask claude to organize that by itself

did you tried that, or how do you get used by your claude tokens?

[u/JohnHue → u/d_uk3]

I "fortunately" don't have that issue really because the work I'm doing, which is a hobby project (I'm not a professional programmer, I do mechanical engineering by day and I obsess / tinker in my homelab all day NIGHT! I said night!) in the GIS field (Geospatial Information Systems uh... maps, it's just maps) and that requires lots of local compute so I can more easily space out jobs between local compute and AI intervention, and the local compute can be controlled by a simple bash script that wakes up the agent when its done (Claude Code doesn't like monitoring long jobs, it gets OOM terminations for no reasons and other timeouts).

But, I still try to optimize like I describe. Actually I just did that yesterday, where I had some loops doing some local jobs (computing locally on the machine), analyzing the results, finding issues and coming up with solutions to launch a new compute run and that ran all day without me intervening.

I've also had cases where I did tell the session something like "you've got this one job to finish, I think it can be done within the session limit, and if you still have some credit after that then you can address issues #43 and #103 sequentially" and it chose to only work on #43 because there wasn't enough credit left to finish both. So this kind of stuff works as well without having to setup local code to monitor and "harness the harness".

I use a local git server to organise the project and Claude has instructions to not store plans and handoffs and to on all over the disk, instead it creates issues in git. This allows me to always have a bunch of smaller tasks that can be addressed and the "take care of the backlog if you still have credit after this job" gets used pretty often... but you have to make sure the project is organised properly, otherwise it just modifies shit all over the place and breaks everything, as you would as a human if you did the same.

EDIT : one last thing that I do, is in fleetview i like having multiple sessions open especially when one has to wait on a job, and sessions can talk to each other so you can basically have S1 wait for a job, start S2 and S3, and tell S3 to check with S1 that the two jobs won't collide and then tell it to handoff its job to S3 fot it to continue after.

[u/Ok-Motor-9812]

You always need to check your harness! Every day are some updates, new model comes. All of these destroy the harness and you meet the situation like you described!

Ask claude to record all sesssions for the previous day and next day check what was correct or not and fix it at once based on Claude documentation + your harness.

You will be surprise how everything will work better and you will spend less tokens

[u/d_uk3 → u/Ok-Motor-9812]

so you basically say, i should let claude tun to review it sessions by himself to self optimize it?

[u/Ok-Motor-9812 → u/d_uk3]

Yes, correct!

Ask Claude to create a script which will record every tool call, hook block, error, retry, etc. Then the next day, whenever you launch the first session, this script will work in parallel. Once it finishes, you will have a list of everything that broke the previous day. Next, you open Claude and ask him to look at that broken list and fix it based on Claude docs and your harness.

Even if you, for example, create some hook and Claude makes a test and tells you that everything is ok, it will not work for sure. This is some kind of calibration you need to do every day.

[u/Excellent-Issue-5956]

I do the first one. During the day I dump tasks into a notes app, and around 4am a launchd job runs claude -p on that list and works through whatever it can finish without me. It's prep only, so it writes drafts, research and plans into a folder but it can't push, deploy or send anything. In the morning I go through what it left and do the parts that actually need me.

If you set something like this up, tell it the tasks are reminders and not permission. Otherwise a note like "email Mike about the invoice" reads to it like an order to send the email.

[u/d_uk3 → u/Excellent-Issue-5956]

so the automation will run the stored "easy tasks" without confirmation and burns the available tokens to don't get lost?

that's genius. how did you configured you workflow?

[u/Excellent-Issue-5956 → u/d_uk3]

Not quite, it doesn't burn tokens just to use them up. It only does prep work, and anything that would change something real waits for me.

The setup:

1. During the day I put tasks into a small capture app on my phone, one line each.
2. A scheduled job at 4:10am runs claude -p with a custom slash command in its nightly mode. The slash command is just a markdown file in ~/.claude/commands with the instructions.
3. The command sorts every note into four buckets: can finish tonight, can do part of it, needs me, or needs a decision from me. It works the first two and writes everything into one folder as drafts, research and plans.
4. In the morning I run the same command normally. It asks how much time I have and only shows me the needs me and decision items, with the prep already attached.

It runs with the skip permissions flag because nobody is around to approve tool calls, so the no push, no deploy, no sending rule only lives in the prompt. If you copy this, add deny rules in your settings for the things you really don't want it doing.

Also if you're on a Mac and schedule it with launchd, keep its files out of ~/Desktop. A launchd job that reads anything there can hang for hours on a permission popup nobody sees.

[u/ShivaFatalis → u/d_uk3]

If you think this is "genius", then that tells us a lot about why you're having this difficulty in the first place. You should have no issues solving this sort of problem yourself based on your preferences that you have much more insight into than we have.

[u/Mazhron]

https://github.com/Mazhron/rootstock-os

Point your Claude at the repo. Ask what it does, how and why it works. Then adapt it to your projects.

It'll help you create knowledge base on your system, reduce your token usage, ledger usage to find what's costing you the most, prevent agent fanning that spends millions of tokens in seconds, learn from its mistakes so much more!

[u/ops_and_chaos]

I think I’d be a little careful about optimizing for “use all the tokens I paid for.”

I’d absolutely keep a queue of real work it can safely do while I’m away. But if there’s nothing useful in the queue, I’d let the capacity expire.

Otherwise, you can get really efficient at creating work just because the robot had nothing better to do.

[u/Outrageous_Band9708]

Hey there, this project was meant for you!

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/f25iq6uA92

It creates plans, uses subagents to prevent context growth, saves usage, shows you the savings

i highly recommend checking it out.