alt Hacker NewsMe 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
> past 256k it looks like your usage consumes your limits faster
This is false. My guess is what is happening is #1 above, where restarting a stale session causes a 256k cache miss.
That said, I hear the frustration. We are actively working on improving rate limit predictability and visibility into token usage.