UPDATE, April 5: So I think I now clearly see what’s happening. It’s only present in long-running, multi-day conversations. Still not good, as some work can span multiple days, and starting new chats every time isn’t optimal. So this is definitely unnecessary context being loaded in.
I am getting annoyed.
I have no idea what is wrong with Claude right now, but there is a serious issue with token usage and limits. Thought people were nuts, but after three questions, I burned through my entire limit. On Sonnet (not the 1m version, either).
There is just no way that what I asked Claude to do used that much context to cause something like that. And it’s gotten progressively worse. Where is this additional usage coming from?
It seems like the changes that Anthropic made to improve Claude’s ability to work across sessions broke the way it calculates limits. My guess is a TON of unnecessary context is now being injected in, bloating usage.
Claude is not a stateful agent. If this is due to the changes made as a response to OpenClaw, rip it out. Cowork was good enough, and was enough of a token hog. Now basic prompts are using the same amount of your limit as a fully coded plugin.
This is legitimately the first real platform crisis that Anthropic has experienced. It was easy when only a few developers and heavy users were being throttled. But when typical users are blowing through a session limit in only a few prompts, something’s wildly wrong.
I really hope they listen to the community. So far, they have.
Watch this space.