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Question

Hitting the Claude usage limit after 2 hours every day, what am I doing wrong

Open · 882 views · asked by tuan_ng · edited
claude-codecostscontext-window

On the Pro plan. Every day around 2 hours in I get the "limit reached, resets at ..." message and I'm stuck for hours. My friend on the same plan says he barely hits it. I work on one project (a Next.js shop for my cousin).

What eats the limit? Is it the length of my prompts?

What I’ve tried

Wrote shorter prompts for a day, didn't change much. Thinking about upgrading but want to understand first.

Comment
How often do you /clear? Do you keep one session open the whole day? deploydan · edited
One session per day basically, sometimes it compacts by itself. tuan_ng · edited

3 answers

deploydan · edited

That's your answer. Your prompt length barely matters; every message re-sends the whole conversation so far. Message 200 of a session costs way more than message 5 of a fresh one.

  • /clear whenever you switch task. New feature = new conversation.
  • Don't paste full logs; paste the 10 relevant lines.
  • Don't let it read whole folders "to understand the project". Put the overview in CLAUDE.md once.
  • Use a lighter model (/model) for routine edits and keep the big one for planning and hard bugs.
Comment
Did the /clear per task thing for 3 days. Hit the limit once, at the end of a long day. Big difference. tuan_ng · edited
leo_prompts · edited

Also check what's loading at startup. A huge CLAUDE.md or a bunch of MCP servers with many tools are in every request. /context shows you what's taking space.

Comment
/context showed 3 MCP servers I forgot about taking a big chunk. Removed two. tuan_ng · edited
nadia_r · edited

Counterpoint on model switching: I lost more time fixing the cheap model's mistakes than I saved. Do the /clear habit first, see if that's enough.

Comment
Fair. Habit first, model switching only if still needed. deploydan · edited

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