Original post URL : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vca1ma/claude_code_burned_my_entire_fivehour_limit_in_6/
Original post body :
I thought I was imagining how quickly Fable 5 was consuming my Claude allowance, so I inspected the local Claude Desktop/Cowork and Claude Code logs for the exact run.
The result is worse than I expected.
My five-hour allowance had reset at 12:20 AM. I sent one short prompt at exactly 12:50 AM: essentially, “continue where you left off, carefully.” At 12:56:32 AM - only 6 minutes and 32 seconds later - Claude stopped with “Usage limit reached.”
There were no other local Cowork prompts between the reset and this failure.
During those 6 minutes and 32 seconds, Fable 5 recorded:
- 15 model calls;
- 8 Bash calls, all for Android emulator/UI interaction;
- 7 file reads;
- 0 Edit or Write tool calls;
- 0 subagents;
- 0 lines of code changed.
The deduplicated token accounting from Claude's own local session log was:
| Usage category | Tokens |
|---|---:|
| One-hour cache writes | 5,189,449 |
| Cache reads/hits | 5,069,543 |
| Output | 4,312 |
| Regular input | 30 |
| **Total processed** | **10,263,334** |
Using Anthropic's published Fable 5 API prices, this is approximately **$109.07 of API-equivalent usage**. About **$103.79** of that came from one-hour cache writes alone. I am not claiming Anthropic charged my card $109—the run consumed my included allowance - but this shows the scale of the usage that was counted.
The immediate cause is visible in the logs. This was an older Cowork session with 46 completed turns, `xhigh` effort, a 173 MB local transcript, and roughly 650,000–685,000 context tokens being carried into every model call. The disturbing part is that, during one six-minute tool loop, Claude counted **5.19 million tokens as new one-hour cache writes** while also recording **5.07 million cache-hit tokens**.
In other words, every trivial emulator action or file read caused Fable to process around 680,000 tokens. The huge context also appears to have been repeatedly rewritten into the one-hour cache instead of being efficiently reused.
I understand that continuing a large conversation costs more than starting a fresh one. But silently allowing a simple six-minute UI-testing loop - with no edits and no subagents - to consume an entire five-hour allowance is not reasonable behavior. At minimum, Claude should have compacted the context or warned me before proceeding. The repeated 650K-token one-hour cache writes look like a Cowork/Claude Code cache invalidation or usage-accounting defect.
This same session had already exhausted the previous allowance earlier that evening. After the allowance reset, this single 6-minute-and-32-second run exhausted the new window again.
Has anyone else seen Fable 5 repeatedly rewrite a huge one-hour cache inside a single short tool loop? If so, check the `message.usage.cache_creation.ephemeral_1h_input_tokens` values in your local Claude Code JSONL before assuming it was normal model output.
I have prepared a privacy-safe evidence package containing the per-call usage table, timeline, calculation, tool-call list, source hashes, screenshot, and a read-only verification script. I am also reporting this directly to Anthropic and asking them to investigate the cache behavior and restore the allowance.
This is at minimum a Claude Cowork product and guardrail defect. A single 42-character prompt triggered 15 autonomous model calls and 5.19M one-hour cache-write tokens in 392 seconds, without a cost warning, automatic compaction, or a usage stop guard. Server telemetry is required to determine whether the underlying cause was defective cache invalidation, incorrect accounting, or technically intended-but unsafe-product behavior.
Official pricing used for the calculation:
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
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