Hey all, Boris from the Claude Code team here.
We've been investigating these reports, and a few of the top issues we've found are:
1. Prompt cache misses when using 1M token context window are expensive. Since Claude Code uses a 1 hour prompt cache window for the main agent, if you leave your computer for over an hour then continue a stale session, it's often a full cache miss. To improve this, we have shipped a few UX improvements (eg. to nudge you to /clear before continuing a long stale session), and are investigating defaulting to 400k context instead, with an option to configure your context window to up to 1M if preferred. To experiment with this now, try: CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000 claude.
2. People pulling in a large number of skills, or running many agents or background automations, which sometimes happens when using a large number of plugins. This was the case for a surprisingly large number of users, and we are actively working on (a) improving the UX to make these cases more visible to users and (b) more intelligently truncating, pruning, and scheduling non-main tasks to avoid surprise token usage.
In the process, we ruled out a large number of hypotheses: adaptive thinking, other kinds of harness regressions, model and inference regressions.
We are continuing to investigate and prioritize this. The most actionable thing for people running into this is to run /feedback, and optionally post the feedback ids either here or in the Github issue. That makes it possible for us to debug specific reports.
I wish people would pay more attention to:
* Anthropic is in some way trying to run a business (not a charity) and at least (eventually?) make money and not subsidize usage forever
* "What a steal/good deal" the $100-$200/mo plans are compared to if they had to pay for raw API usage
and less on "how dare you reserve the right to tweak the generous usage patterns you open-ended-ly gave us, we are owed something!"
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