Different users do seem to be encountering problems or not based on their behavior, but for a rapidly-evolving tool with new and unclear footguns, I wouldn't characterize that as user error.

For example, I don't pull in tons of third-party skills, preferring to have a small list of ones I write and update myself, but it's not at all obvious to me that pulling in a big list of third-party skills (like I know a lot of people do with superpowers, gstack, etc...) would cause quota or cache miss issues, and if that's causing problems, I'd call that more of a UX footgun than user error. Same with the 1M context window being a heavily-touted feature that's apparently not something you want to actually take advantage of...

Me and my colleagues faced, over the last ~1 month or so, the same issues.

With a new version of Claude Code pretty much each day, constant changes to their usage rules (2x outside of peak hours, temporarily 2x for a few weeks, ...), hidden usage decisions (past 256k it looks like your usage consumes your limits faster) and model degradation (Opus 4.6 is now worse than Opus 4.5 as many reported), I kind of miss how it can be an user error.

The only user error I see here is still trusting Anthropic to be on the good side tbh.

If you need to hear it from someone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stZr6U_7S90

Why did it suddenly become an issue, despite prompt caching behavior being unchanged?

PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

Yes same here. I use CC almost constantly every day for months across personal and work max/team accounts, as well as directly via API on google vertex. I have hardly ever noticed an issue (aside from occasional outages/capacity issues, for which I switch to API billing on Vertex). If anything it works better than ever.

You know that people are not using the same resources? It's like 9 out of 10 computers get borked and you have the 1 that seems okay and you essentially say "My computer works fine, therefore all computers work fine." Come on dude.