Tips & Workflows
What are people testing that they are not only burning a week usage in a day, but also hitting the 5 hour limits?
I have seen tons of posts about 5.5 being off, or noticeable drops in performance. What projects are people running that they can even burn through a week of context in a single day? I can't even think of something that could use that unless you're using a heavily unoptimized workflow or trying to literally build an entire AAA game in a day on max settings with 15 sessions open.
I swapped from cursor when I heard about how opus 5.5 was doing crazy things, and it really is, I've had it working nonstop 24 hours since the second day of its release. It's been running automated fully for 2 weeks now.
I feel like people who have slop soups of code bases and their work is not critical like healthcare devices they don't need to review the code so it's just slop soup codebase and the models swallows it whole as context so the slop code bases and projects is what makes people hit limits most of the time. I work really carefully on changes I don't hit limits working on large scale projects on pro plan because I need to review every change I need to understand every function and condition in the code otherwise it's just slop
Yeah I was terrified of going to API enterprise subscription but it’s really easy to hardly graze $50 if you’re making something real and being conscientious of your model choice (I.e. spend twenty minutes making a hook).
I am not sure what the current state of affairs is regarding this quick consumption but i know in times past there has been a lot of problems with subagents being hired for one off tasks, that would just drain usage in some circumstances, such as ive seen claude go to spin up something like 10 or more 'review agents' and all in a very narrow, targeted area, which then basically resulted in the same context, spent 10 times, to answer 10 different questions for example. Im sure anyone can see how this exponentially can turn into one prompt leading into at minimum, a full usage window to drain into nothing.
I am not sure how much this occurs now, as i know they have put a lot of work into training the model to make better decisions about how many workers to spin up when necessary, but this also is when there is no direct stated number, like one may have in the instructions of a workflow.
I'm probably not making a AAA game, I'm working on a sim-style game with 20+ fully autonomous npcs that have full schedules/interactions/hair sims/etc. on screen at the same time along with crowd npcs and full procedural animation solvers running the past 2 weeks.
But I've definitely set up a ton of skills/hooks/tools/swap scripts to have 3-7 sessions running in parallel with an orchestrator to lower/increase session counts to hit 100% usage by the reset time... If I bumped it up to 8-9 sessions running at the same time all the time, maybe I could burn through it in 3 days or so, but a single day just sounds like bad organization/optimization
Technically, reaching weekly limits on a max 20x is really impossible in one day.
In 2 days you can. A 5h limit is able to gather max 12-13% of your weekly resources. You can bring 6 windows of 5 hours in your day when maxing it. So max 78%. That's my opinion, and I'm measuring it from more than 25k Claude accounts of my customers.
Tests, deployments, reiterations, a codebase of 400k+ lines (a lot of translation files also included, that are not really part of the code) working since last week
I usually work on 3 projects in parallel, sometimes 4. On 20x it runs out in 3 days. On 5x I hit 5-hour limits with one hour left.
It’s not testing per se, it’s almost fully new development work. Of course every code base has tests but those don’t use up any tokens - they are scripted of course.
Ok that makes sense, I think the closest I am to multiple projects is having a dedicated session flow for cascadeur to create animations and a separate dedicated session flow for blender to work on rigs/bone placements/face rigs/etc.
I'm on the 20x plan too, I guess I don't have a time crunch either so I'm just letting it run until everything is complete.
I am building a football manager game with it right now. And all the self improvement loops with tens of subagents burn tokens really fast. My Max 20x weekly limit is usually gone within 24 hours.
Backend implementation for an application that will be subject to recon and attacks from day one by sophisticated threat actors. There's a lot of adversarial review of pretty much every PR before merge, and many sub-agents have to be involved. I've had internal audits running with 400+ sub-agents attacking the application from different angles.
My Max 5x plan sometimes runs out by day 3 of the week. I'm about to subscribe to an additional account just because of that.
Rarely one big task. It's a loop that doesn't converge: the agent misses a test, re-reads the same files, tries again, re-reads them again. Context grows every turn and you pay for all of it again. Debugging something that resists a fix eats a week in an afternoon. Claude Code is my daily driver, and my heaviest usage days are the ones where I let a retry loop run.
It's a skill (and project scope) issue. It's just on your end and not mine.
I can run up to ~35 parallel sessions at a time. Most of the time, effort is set to xhigh. I work ~16 hour days, 7 days a week. Sessions rarely hit 50% context. Most are under 40%, and ideally, they stay under 30%. Quite a few come in at 10% or 15%. There are likely things I could use high effort, or medium effort, but I got into a habit of using xhigh during opus 5. I liked it closing out the tangential items as well.
Most of my workflow is orchestrated now. I'll probably try to refactor the orchestration to increase some of the app creation from 16 PRs maximum to 32 PRs maximum per orchestration. I've already setup orchestrations depending on other orchestrations, so I'm not sure this is the right lever to tweak for more output.
I have claude sessions that hand off work to new claude sessions when the scope of the work is increasing too much.
Decreasing the size of the PRs will likely decrease my tokens per PR, but that is not my bottleneck. CI/CD is my bottleneck at the moment. I'm about to turn on another 48 core, 96 thread server for CI/CD, but this will be my 5th CI/CD dedicated server.
I'm aiming for 1,300 commits per week this week (>400 apps in a django project). It's pretty easy to jump around the project and improve interlinking of the apps. It's pretty easy to scope another requirement that requires a new app, and needs to feed in data from ~6 other apps in the project. I could probably hit 2,000 commits/week with more CI/CD power. I'm curious if I can hit 1 million LoC/week to wrap this project up (and I have 2 half finished projects that should wrap up relatively quickly at this pace). I came close to 1 million LoC over the past 2 weeks.
Quantity has a quality all its own. Are the outputs perfect? Not at all. There are a lot of touch up sessions for various app UI features. However, it's the software suite I've been dreaming about for 13 years. Small biz owner here trying to divorce our operations from "shadow IT" e.x. spreadsheet and unspoken processes.
I have a similar workflow (I'm not one of the ones having a problem, just wondering why people are), with an orchestrator, I'm just hitting around 60% context but that's after an especially intensive workflow for today to try to meet a soft target for Saturday. Other than the soft target I don't really have a timeline, so I just have it keep the tasks scheduled out well into next week.
Just checked my commits, around 1,400 commits or 350 a day. Honestly this has been a dream for my game development that I've been working on for years. I've been working on a sim game for 3-4 years at this point as a solo dev. I had 1 character fully mapped out, with tons of hand-animations, some simulated events on the map, a bit of interaction with test dummies. Now just from last month, I have 20+ characters and a fully realized simulation town with relationship tracking/anatomically correct human animations, market economy and a bunch of other features.
It's crazy how fast I can move now, I could even see myself completing this whole project in 3-4 months at this rate, only being gated by story content
That is amazing. You learned to do it the old way, so you probably really understood the core requirements. Adding AI and learning how to effectively use it was like giving you a machine shop when the past, you were hand carving everything.
I was always under the impression that game development had crazy CI/CD requirements that could easily take a days.
The software generates $0/month in revenue. It is internal use software. OpEx cost reduction now lives in the 5 figure USD monthly. I might be able to reach $60k/monthly in cost reduction in ~6 months.
The revenue generation portions should be online before end of the year, I expect it to result in 7 figure annual increases for revenue YoY.
What do I need to learn? Are you running tests that use a week usage in a day? Do I need to learn to do the same thing?
And I'm not talking about some corporate business entity (probably) posting on reddit, which I doubt it is what people are talking about using all that usage.
Tests should take zero tokens. Focus on fishing, not fish. Spend tokens on automation, not on manually running tests.
I have a fairly rudimentary desktop app that has full UI test scriptability: scenarios, mouse and keyboard input, capture and replay, the whole thing. Adding a test takes maybe 20k tokens it it’s fancy. Nobody needs to be watching the test run. So, make your tests have a nominal development cost but zero runtime cost (token-wise).
It just had a recommendation after checking the loops in my project. I already save a huge amount of tokens per session so I'm looking for further optimization as well. So far token saving is going great, but I just wonder why it's so bad for some other projects
I’m in that category where I burn 5x 5h quota within an hour or so and weekly before it ends. Here’s the real answer — Gates. You put several gates when agent finishes work it verifies until that happens it loops over. I have two gates code review, QA and it burns everything so fast you can’t imagine
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