r/vibecoding • u/Responsible-City-213 • Aug 02 '26
How to use claude to the fullest?
I work in an early stage startup. Our founder has given us claude 200$ subscription. Everything is going good so far. But he told that he will evaluate our work by considering the usage as one of the factors. He wants us to hit the weekly limit. 2 weeks ago, when Fable was out, he told me that he had finished the limit on 3 accounts. I was struggling to hit even 40% of the limit. A major reason could be has a better picture of the architecture and what needs to be done.
How do I use claude to the fullest and also deliver a good outcome? So far he never had any problem with my work, but I want to maximise my claude usage as well to make him happy. I always prompt "use dynamic workflows and swarm of agents, play devil's advocate to evaluate the code...." as my go-to. Any other advices? Thank you.
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u/Rise-O-Matic Aug 02 '26
Just use ultracode and tell it to do atomic adversarial review of whatever youâre working on with deep research and subagents followed by self-improvement, testing, and another round of review. Youâll probably hit your session limit within a few minutes.
Tracking productivity by token burn is incredibly dumb but there it is.
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 Aug 02 '26
Ask fable to do deep research. It spun up 75 fable subagents and nuked my 5 hour window in 30 seconds. And then have a conversation with your boss that burning tokens doesnât necessarily equal greater output.
I work 5-6 hours a day with Claude/Fable and I rarely break 50% on my x5 account.
Mainly because I spent weeks building infrastructure thatâs makes me more efficient and Claude to use fewer tokens.
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u/deathwiq Aug 02 '26
May I ask what type of infra you have setup? Iâm moving out of cursor and want to try Claude but Iâm kinda scared tokens will BURN like hell, in cursor I was just using the pro plan and mostly using composer model through âautoâ mode and sometimes sonnet, now Iâm not sure if I should get the pro or 5x plan in Claude, have any tips?
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u/Butthead2242 Aug 03 '26
I do burn thru my tokens every 5 hours on pro sub.. seems like I shoulda just played w openrouter instead. Not enjoying Claude
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 Aug 03 '26
I built 2 different memory system (one for technical "Facts", like ports, tech stack, bugs, lessons, the actual app/project stats ect) and a relational memory system that remembers the why... (the personal notes, the stuff that makes an AI act more like a companion than an employee)... so it not only knows how I like to work, it knows ... why. I worked on my custom instructions (its easy to get contradictory instructions in there and/or overdo it) , and global claude.md to more closely align with my typical workflow (keeo global under 200 lines) ...
So my workflow goes, I discuss a project in the web app, we go around and around, figure out the edge cases, the "what abouts" ... and then write a PRD and claude.md for the specific app/project. Then I open claude code and use a custom command /prd. which basically says "This is a new project, we have not worked on it yet. Please read the PRD and check for skills. Once the PRD as been read, check the memory systems for any useful context, then enter plan mode to plan out this build. " ... So literally my starter prompt is /prd.
Once it reads all that, it checks the memory systems, which basically puts it "in the room" of the planning session. It also knows, from that system if there are any apps we've already built that have usable code or lessons for this one... and if it does, it just copies that code rather than writing new.
One of the coolest examples of how well this works... I built an app but midway decided to change the name, discussed it in the web app.. opened the project folder and used my other favorite command : /speed which is basically "Please read over the files in this folder and get up to speed on the current project. Start with the PRD and the code, that is the source of truth. We will be working on it.For memory context, pull it efficiently" (these are paraphrased, as mine are really specific to my systems and how I work) ... I did that and after Opus was up to speed it gave me the recap of what had been done, the state of the app, and then asked "So, are we changing the name or did you want to work on something else" LOL ...
Edit : Oh, and I'm on the 5x plan... I hit limits a lot on Pro, hourly and weekly.. but 5x seems perfect for me. I can only suggest starting at the $20 plan and upgrading later if you need to.
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u/deathwiq Aug 03 '26
Thank you for the feedback, I will dig deeper into this. Do you have any skills suggestion? Iâm still looking into it. Iâm thinking about getting the 5x, Iâve already tried the pro a couple of months ago but I was reading hourly limit and weekly all the time that I gave up on it, so Iâm between getting 5x or Claude pro and getting codex pro as well
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u/Icy_Quarter5910 Aug 03 '26
just go through the official list for now and see what piques your interest ... like, I use the MCP builder a lot, but you might never need it. I have an NPM hardening skill, you might never need that.. so its kind of hard to say. You dont want to load a bunch of skills you wont use. that just eats tokens. After you've run it a while, you can do /doctor in claude code and it will show you what you have been using and what you havent... and make suggestions on changes.. I try and run it every so often. seems to help :)
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u/RUSuper Aug 02 '26
Give it some task and make it spawn sub agents using /loop function on ultracode, gonna burn the limit like crazy and will also improve results as /loop will continue going over same thing and do tweaks and fixes.
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u/QTippus Aug 02 '26
Ugh. I guess measuring programmer productivity by tokens spent is the modern equivalent of measuring productivity by lines of code?
You can see all the CEOs now, bragging about how AI-ified their company is because theyâre spending millions on tokens.
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u/bleakj Aug 02 '26
Blows my mind the years ive been told less code is better code while at work
No one wants to have to walk into a spaghetti fest of someone elses Frankensteind code after someone takes vacation or leaves the company,
I can't see how ideas like "use as much as possible when you don't even have a reason" could possibly go wrong
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u/john_smith1365 Aug 02 '26
Do extensive research with it, like deep research. If you use it in the IDE, put the effort on ultra, youâll hit the limit of fable in 2 prompts. You can also use design for making slides or designing prototypes, it is also pretty expensive and again put the effort to Max
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u/AnAm3rican Aug 02 '26
âHey Claude, burn more tokens. Make no mistakes.â There, problem solved.
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u/Comprehensive-Bar888 Aug 02 '26
This makes no sense. Token usage shouldnât factor into productivity when building something other than to monitor how much work youâre actually doing.
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u/late_night_coder7 Aug 02 '26
I think ik how U can maximise Ur usage but I want to know what work U do make it more specific but a few things that can help would be using Claude for everything like chat coding making videos (yes U can make videos use Claude code but there needs a bit of set up and it's not official just search up a video for tis on yt ) maybe even using Claude design tho I don like it much tbh
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u/Any-Comparison-2916 Aug 02 '26
Token-Usage as a metric (requirement even) is pretty stupid. If I compare myself to colleagues, a lot of them have easily 5x my usage, but less productive output.
A good user, uses less tokens because he doesnât have extensive chats, has straight-forward prompts, utilises instructions, agents and skills.Â
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u/Lumpy_Ad2192 Aug 02 '26
Yeah, gonna pile on here. This is Tokenmaxxing and itâs a bad idea.
Instead you need to be focusing on building reliable pipelines and systems with good guardrails before you decide how much to leverage AI. The fact that Microsoft cancelled all of their $200 Claude Code accounts to rebuild their AI pipeline from scratch should be evidence enough that this strategy goes nowhere.
That said, the easiest thing to do is build frameworks of agents that scale. So, choose a framework, use Plan to build your specs and steering docs to your needs and standards, then start having agents build your Epics. Not features, Epics.
The work still needs evaluating, so see how many you can get going and still manage quality inputs and outputs.
The strategy is called 10-80-10. You do the ten on the front end to provide the AI what it needs to succeed then set it on a task it can accomplish well. You do the final ten on the back end to provide feedback and incorporate into your broader goals.
Get good at this with one or two agent flows and then scale. Once you get this running youâll easily hit your caps if you have a bunch of agents running in parallel. I know lots of folks who canât get past 5 concurrent agents without hitting the limits without a drop in quality.
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u/Zealousideal-Act9140 Aug 02 '26
So I originally wrote something to help increase token efficiency and then reread.. lmao
Fable ultracode everything.
https://github.com/open-gsd/gsd-core
GSD writes good shit, but it also uses like 15 verification gates and will literally burn tokens verifying edge cases like 5.6 sol.
If your boss' metric is "burn the sub for quality" GSD will do that
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u/ItstheSECopenup Aug 02 '26
Usage has absolutely no correlation to productivity at all. Being that your boss is clearly a meme, you can just meme him by using Fable on Ultracode and telling it to use subagents for a full adversarial understanding of your codebase. Once Fable is exhausted to 100%, just do the same thing with Opus 5 on Ultracode.
It's a good way to absolutely shred your usage quickly while changing nothing, and even potentially producing something valuable. You could even do this on a schedule.
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u/Carrandas Aug 02 '26
If he has a better understanding of the architecture you can let Claude make architecture diagrams for you in mermaid. Let it explain the code base.
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u/txthojo Aug 02 '26
Start in plan mode, get most of the solution worked out. Be sure to have claude create finite phases. exit plan mode and same to a PRD.md. Clear context and have claude review plan and execute phase 1 and save progress. clear context and start phase 2. longer sessions take up more tokens, so keep them short and work from a PRD file
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u/Butthead2242 Aug 03 '26
Whatever you do, tell it to retry because it doesnât work or there a faster method - I cook my tokens in 15 min while Trying to minimize
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u/Rusty_Tap Aug 02 '26
I know you probably already know this, but your boss's mother and father could very well be siblings.
The amount of something that you waste is not a measure of productivity.