Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why(github.com)
61 pointsby sachinneravath6 hours ago19 comments
  • hungryhobbit4 hours ago
    I just used Claude to write a plug-in which changed the bottom of the CLI to say:

       ( ) Usage: 34% (resets in 2h 47m) Context: 56% [Opus 4.6]
   auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle)
    That way if my usage starts shooting up, it's very easy to notice (and the color of "( )", which is a circle that I couldn't paste here, changes when it gets high, ensuring I don't miss it).

    I coupled that with a hook that watches for usage spiking (basically when I've been talking too long or did something to add a ton of context, so suddenly every turn sends a ton of context back, using up a ton of usage).

    Between the two I haven't hit usage caps in weeks.

    • Tadpole9181an hour ago
      This is actually a built-in Claude Code feature: `/statusline` will ask how you want it to look and set it up for you.
  • DarmokTanagra5 hours ago
    I didn't know it was still possible to develop software after your ai quota runs out.
    • francisofascii5 hours ago
      You wait until the month resets.
      • arealaccount3 hours ago
        You’re joking but from the readme

        > Is it safe to start a big refactor now, or should I wait for my window to clear?

      • weego3 hours ago
        Is this the new 10x engineer hammock meme? No one is vesting anymore they just burned their quarterly token quote in 10 days.
      • dakolli4 hours ago
        Why not juat write the code. Its not that much faster to produce good code with AI. I spend nearly identical amoubts of time reviewing AI code as it would take to write. Im honestly not convinced there is all that much of a productivity boost, maybe 20% faster.
        • francisofascii4 hours ago
          I was mostly joking, but to answer your question, the productivity boost entirely depends on your concern for code quality. Sometimes is it faster to just write the code than to try to explain in the prompt what to do. But if you don't care or don't need to understand what it is creating, you can get a ton of functionality fast.
    • aaronbrethorst4 hours ago
      Darmok and Jalad, after their quota ran out.
      • intothemild3 hours ago
        Shaka, when they discovered open models!
    • cyanydeez2 hours ago
      Local AI has no quote, except cold hard WATTs
  • ryandrake4 hours ago
    I made an "amateur hour" error with Codex. Given Anthropic's recent reliability problems I thought I'd take a little time to try Codex with their $20/mo plan. So I downloaded it and gave it a whirl, not realizing that the default model was gpt-5.6-sol. Well after just an hour or two, I blew through my entire week's quota. Whoops! It would be cool if these harnesses could all graphically display your quota usage on the screen at all times.
    • jdthedisciple4 hours ago
      You can enable showing the quota usage (and much more) in codex via /statusline
  • LuD1161an hour ago
    I just checked the repo. Nice work A suggestion: 1. Adding which repo/project was where my most tokens were consumed. I checked the image in the repo README, didn't see that graph.
  • sva_4 hours ago
    In 95% of cases it is because you had a large context for which the cache expired.
    • bearjaws4 hours ago
      The amount of people I see running around at 800k context and wondering why they are burning through tokens is always surprising.
    • enraged_camelan hour ago
      Yeah. I like the way Claude Design handles this: if you come back to a chat after the cache expires, the chat UI shows a message like "start a new chat to save 300k tokens" or whatever. It's pretty nice if you're working in multiple design sessions and are quota-constrained.

      Surprised they haven't brought the same UX to CC.

  • luciandan4 hours ago
    Pretty cool tool! Congrats! Not sure if I'm missing something but this tells you where your tokens went, breakdown per day/tool. So the "why" is still a question left for the user to answer. Can be something like "Because I was missing a good CLAUDE.md file so it had to explore the whole repo before doing any work" or anything else. Just my take.
  • Zak4 hours ago
    The only time I've ever managed to burn through a quota that fast (on the cheap plan) was with an open-ended request to check a codebase for any defects or deficiencies. It dispatched five Fable subagents.
  • jasonjmcghee4 hours ago
    I care more about your experience. I'd read the blog post of the story behind this.
  • underlines4 hours ago
    You can't ask Claude if your quota ran out. You have to wait for the reset...
    • chews3 hours ago
      for claude, it's response headers contain available usage, you can get it there. My deepseek harness plugin auto stops asking things when I am at 80% to allow inflight prompts to finish.
  • nonameiguess4 hours ago
    23 em-dashes in the span of a single README. I gotta hand it to Anthropic. They seriously managed to find a completely legal way to sell crack to crack addicts using other crack addicts as their unpaid sales force.
  • skeledrew3 hours ago
    I've been recording every statusline output for months now so I can easily get answers to questions like this whenever I wish.
  • defied4 hours ago
    I’ve been using headroom to save on token usage and it’s pretty effective.
  • jdthedisciple4 hours ago
    this kind of stats feature should be shipped by default with every harness imvho
  • lbrito4 hours ago
    How on Earth does one use 1.1B tokens in a week?
    • _zoltan_14 minutes ago
      last 7 days I've used ~4.8B tokens. most of that was during a 2 day span when codex was using one of my harnesses to iterate over a codebase to improve performance of some parts of it - fully automated.
    • hetspookjee4 hours ago
      With cache reads and writes and a couple of long running session without /clear or /compact it can get there rather fast
    • Sohcahtoa82an hour ago
      By doing ALL your work in a single chat. The context window explodes.

      I typically do one context per feature.

    • what-the-grump4 hours ago
      Can do that in a day...
  • stas40005 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • vladigtr4 hours ago
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  • securecloudgrou2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • KinetiNode4 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • seki2855 hours ago
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    • sdcfgy5 hours ago
      At least it's not rewriting stuff in Rust.
    • zuuna5 hours ago
      Genuinely of the best reasons to build a tool tho? "I had a problem X, so I did nothing and kept complaining (without LLM)" would be pretty tiring to me personally
      • jghn4 hours ago
        The problem is that anyone can type "I have this problem, plz fix" into Claude Code.

        What unique insight or skill did they bring to the process? That's the interesting part. Otherwise it's just a small part of a huge sea of people's individual attempts to solve the same problems that everyone else is solving by themselves.

        • hetspookjee4 hours ago
          These kinds of trivial CLI vibes tools save an evening and some tokens. And sometimes it’s also not something you think of, or done with better or worse taste than your own. I think it’s nice
        • remus4 hours ago
          Indeed. Pre-LLM this kind of thing was a little interesting because you'd need to put a little thought and effort in whereas now it's a one-shot thing straight from an LLM. Don't be a slop proxy, as the saying goes.
    • jasonlotito4 hours ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

      • jsrozner4 hours ago
        Hi Claude, please build a tool for analyzing Claude token usage and then deploy it to github.

        If you're going to fully vibe code a repo, maybe we should get the build artifacts (i.e., the claude session).

    • SomeonesAccount5 hours ago
      That is a very common title format for HN, and has been for a while. It wasn't just since AI has evolved—it has always been a load bearing part of HN

      100% Human written slop