As someone, working with GenAI for more than 3 years, it's time for this circlejerk to realize that Claude no longer is at the forefront of GenAI.

And yes, I am obviously paid by OpenAI and have massive skill issues.

Seemed like a pretty simple prompt, but using opus 4.8 max used 6% of my 5 hour credits? Should I have used a lighter model? 6% for 1 prompt means you get 16.6 prompts for the 5 hr window, which equates to 3.3 prompts per hour. That seems insane for a pro plan. Maybe I'm just not understanding how to efficiently use my tokens?

With Kimi K3 and Chat 5.6 being available in their Pro tiers, Claude has become a sub-par product. Do you think Anthropic will restore Fable 5 to Pro soon or should I just leave now? I don't want to have to wait months using stone-age AIs but I don't want to have to switch back and forth if they may restore it soon.

EDIT / TL;DR: I’m not saying Claude never regresses or that every complaint is user error. I’m saying a raw model is not a complete agent. Mine improved dramatically after I built persistent memory, skills, hooks, specialized roles, validation gates, and reliable handoffs around it. A blank chat is basically a new engineer with no onboarding, documentation, or project history. The system around the model matters as much as the model itself.Everyone says Claude got worse. Mine got dramatically better because I stopped writing prompts and started building an operating system around it for ~> 9 months

OG Post:

I keep seeing the same complaints:

“Claude forgot my instructions.”

“Claude destroyed my codebase.”

“Claude can’t finish anything complex.”

“Claude used to be smarter.”

Some of those complaints are legitimate. Models regress. Tools fail. Usage limits are absurd. Anthropic changes behavior without warning.

But that is not the whole explanation.

My Claude is currently doing the best work it has ever done, and the biggest improvement did not come from switching models or discovering a magic prompt.

It came from building infrastructure around the model.

A raw model is not a complete agent. It is a reasoning component.

My system gives Claude:

Persistent project memory that survives individual sessions

Core files defining architecture, standards, decisions, and current state

Specialized roles for architecture, orchestration, execution, and validation

Skills that convert recurring work into explicit procedures

Hooks that inject the right context at the right stage

Validation gates that can block Claude’s own bad changes

Context boundaries that keep unrelated history from contaminating a task

Failure protocols that require Claude to report missing information instead of inventing an answer

One of the most important changes was implementing a page-fault-style protocol.

When a worker lacks required context, it does not guess. It returns something equivalent to:

BLOCKED: Missing DEC-X §4

The orchestrator then retrieves the missing information and redispatches the work.

That one rule eliminates an enormous amount of confident nonsense.

The system also maintains handoff state across context windows. Long-running work does not depend on one giant conversation surviving forever. A worker can finish a bounded unit, record what changed, preserve evidence, and hand the next unit to another session or specialized role.

I can run extended workflows where Claude:

Breaks a goal into bounded work units

Dispatches them to specialized roles

Validates the output against project rules

Rejects unsupported or incomplete work

Updates its durable project state

Hands off before the current context degrades

That is very different from opening a blank chat and typing:

“Build my app. Make it production ready.”

Most people are effectively hiring a new engineer every session, giving them no onboarding, no documentation, no repository map, no coding standards, and no record of previous decisions.

Then they fire the engineer for asking where the database lives.

Claude still makes mistakes in my system. The difference is that the mistakes become visible, bounded, and recoverable instead of silently poisoning the project.

So no, I do not think every “Claude is useless” post is wrong.

I do think many people are evaluating the engine while refusing to build the rest of the vehicle.

The biggest upgrade was not changing models.

It was building the operating system around the model.

Honestly, I’m certain Anthropic thinks its customers are idiots that don’t notice the daily increase in token consumption.

We all know Claude is 18+, but I really need it for coding and development, and studying and overall schoolwork. I'm thinking of getting the $100 max plan but my concern is if I get banned.

I'm skeptical if I'll get banned because if I do, I'll lose my money.

I really need Claude specifically as I've tried other platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and they aren't quite what I'm looking for. I've tried them specifically due to Claude's 18+ policy but other models just aren't cutting it.

Anyone got any idea if you can verify with someone who is an adult and 18+? I got a friend who is willing to verify for me but I'm not sure if that's going to stop the flagging or monitoring issues during chatting.

Looking for some advice here or if anyone has went through this. Thanks in advance.

I was having a random thought about USA infrastructure, and had Claude explaining like road maintenance, make up, cost, etc. in the best case scenario, a charismatic and intelligent president, yadayada. I asked it, how much it would cost, what the worst roads would be, etc.
It then said "Good, let's get concrete about this (pun intended, sorry)."
I did not make any jokes, puns, etc in this conversation, conversation history is off, prompt messages doesn't include anything relevant to humor.

Nothing bad per se, just found it weird that it made a pun on its own? Has anyone had Claude just make jokes on it's own like that?

Claude just gets shit done. I miss the fuck out of Fable. But gave a network IP challenge to Sol 5.6 this evening because I ran out of Claude tokens, and was given reasons why I’m blocked. I had 4 minutes left until tokens refreshed and I told Sol to give me a summary for Claude, and to be fair it gave a great one. Once fed to Claude, it continued to just get shit done.

My 20x account (max) run out of usage and has resets on Sunday.

Today the subscription was over. I cancelled it alrady so my subscription became a Pro model for 22 usd (charged today as new contract start)

I used the pro to code and no issues, then upgraded to 5X also no issues (charged my card today and had 0% usage)

I then thought okay the 5 hour limit is not enough for what I need to get done so lets again activate 20x and pay for it

Guess what happened, back to 100% usage until my next reset. Cannot use it anymore and got thus punished for upgrading from 5X to 20X

what the fuck is that? charge my credit card and then not reset my usage!???

It seems like Anthropic does not honour newly paid subscriptions?! I should have used an entirely different acciunt to pay to not fall for their scam? Or bug?

I have been on the Claude Max plan for a while now. I have been working on my personal dream projects which I have been holding off for the last 15 years due to a busy schedule at work and home.

Fable as an architect and Sonnet as an implementer makes me feel like I am just a kid in my 20s again (when I used to code for fun for 10-14 hours every day). I am constantly reading all the steps it takes and how it thinks before answering, and it actually makes sense. It thinks like a real analytical person from all different angles and then makes a decision.

I just provide best software design practices to it and it follows them to a T. Sometimes I want it to take shortcuts to complete a task, but it pushes back and keeps me honest.

Honestly, I wish I had these AI models available in my 30s. I would have started multiple startups by now.

Any big company not using Claude for their deep thinking, research, and implementation departments is missing out on so many levels. They are not even aware. Small companies will start popping up everywhere and take over the big giants in the market in the next few years. I am so excited after playing with Fable. Opus was not this good.

I have been managing many enterprise-wide systems and I can honestly tell you we would be releasing products with 300% efficiency if we embraced Claude Fable in our day-to-day workflow.

It sucks to see these IT executives who do not understand the full value of AI models spending too much time trying to control its usage.

Time to look for new opportunities is on the horizon... but I am loving how these models help an analytical, curious mind explore opportunities that used to take 6 months minimum to understand.

Thank you Claude team.

Noticed a skill on Claude (web), /morning, by Anthropic. Hadn't seen it before, is it new?

So hi guys! I need some help for school, i have some hard exams ahead of me and i want to use Claude for extensive notes. The problem is that the source materials are really big pdfs (600ish pages) and in my native language (Romanian).

The part where i need help is what can i do to make sure that Claude makes the best (as possible) notes on the materials, here i include possible mind maps and such.

I know skills is a possibility to get some better answers, or even a link with notebookLM. But i am a bit out of depth and decided to ask for some help.

THX.

EDIT: Thought i should mention when i say school i meant university (law to be exact)

This needs to be fixed asap. Since they have included Fable in the Max plan, they have nuked session lengths.

Even using Opus. I usually run multiple day, 10+ hour sprints and never reach my session limit before it resets.

I pay $250+ CAD a month for Claude's Max 20x plan. Here's how yesterday went.

My usage allowance reset at 5am. By 3:24pm, most of it was gone. I hadn't been writing essays at it — I'd given it a handful of instructions to do some agentic coding work on my machine. The consumption came from the tool's own file reads and command outputs, not from anything I typed.

Fine, that's how it works. Here's the actual problem: there is no way to see what any of it costs. No estimate before a task, no live meter during it, no breakdown afterward. You fire an instruction into a black box and find out later that a chunk of your month is gone. Anthropic confirmed this to me in writing.

So I contacted support. Got a bot. Asked the bot for a human. The bot said I'd get an email. The email arrived — from the same bot. I replied asking, plainly, whether Max subscribers can reach a human for a billing dispute. The answer, in writing: their documentation doesn't confirm that they can, and the bot cannot issue a ticket number or assign a representative.

Two hundred dollars a month and the company can't confirm a human is reachable.

The bot then told me to run a command inside the tool to report the bug. The command doesn't exist.

I'm not writing this because I think Claude is bad — it's genuinely useful and I use it for real work. I'm writing it because "useful product, unreachable company" is a pattern worth naming while this industry is still deciding what normal looks like. If you're on a paid AI plan, know that you may have no way to see what you're spending and no way to ask anyone about it.

So I opted in for $100 credit given by Claude, Run the command, and it finishes in a day of work? the app just had a one page and all of the credits gone??

Sorry if this has been discussed before. I am new to using Claude. Been on this for about three weeks, and so far, I've been pretty content with it. It's better and brighter than ChatGPT and Gemini, and it's pretty good at explaining things to me.

That said, this morning I prompted it literally four times. Two simples questions, one straightforward coding question that required about 20 lines of code, and then I asked it to do another deep research report for me, since the one it did yesterday covered the wrong topic (my fault).

That said, this is FOUR prompts. Why is it using tokens so quickly? Am I using this wrong? Should I not be using Sonnet? It seems bizarre that four prompts uses up my tokens for five hours? This is only on my current session, not my weekly usage.

Again, what am I doing wrong here? I don't understand how these tokens are used, and it's pretty fking annoying because I never ran into this problem with ChatGPT, even with me having to go back and forth within repeatedly because it wasn't listening. Any thoughts?

Since the debacle of the last few days with Claude's token evaporation, I upgraded my GPT to Pro — and honestly, the tokens lasted ages for the same tasks. The quality of work also improved with fewer mistakes, and it even allowed limit resets. My cluade weekly limit resets today, so let me confirm if anything has changed and I'll keep you guys posted.

also given 100$ credit from claude for over usage limits.

I paid for a Claude sub on mobile through the Google Play Store. And then the next month I cancelled it, but it didn't reflect in the Claude servers I guess, so it kept on renewing even though I wasn't paying anything.

Around April I think, they caught on and it stopped working. But it did work for like 6 months lol.

Did this happen for anyone else?

I'm using claude-company to work on client software. This is my custom harness, it works on the basis of a CEO controlling a team of tech leads that each control dev teams

It was working great till like day before yesterday, but now apparently subagents can no longer spin up their own subagents.

Work that use to take 1-2 hours now takes 5-6 hours.

I don't understand these random harness changes. Makes no sense.

Hey everyone,

I’m stuck in a region that Anthropic restricts, so I can’t make any direct payments or top-ups for my Claude API account. None of my local payment methods work — they all get blocked instantly. To make things worse, I’ve already had a previous Claude account banned just because of my location, and it’s been super annoying and disruptive for my daily work.

I have two possible workarounds in mind, and I’m hoping someone here can help me out. I’m also open to any better solutions or ideas you might have!

1. Help me top up / pay my Claude API bills with your working payment method
   
2. Help me get a functional virtual card that works for Anthropic official payments
   

If KYC verification is required for the card or payment process, I’ll need help getting that sorted out too.

Of course, I’ll pay you fairly for your help and time. Feel free to DM me to sort out the details!

Really appreciate any help or suggestions!

Hey everyone,

I'm currently in a region where Anthropic heavily restricts payments, so I can't top up my Claude API account with any local methods — they all get declined immediately. I also had a previous account banned purely due to location, which has been really disruptive for my work.

I'm looking for advice and legitimate solutions to this problem. Specifically:

Any reliable ways to make official Anthropic payments from restricted regions?

Recommendations for virtual cards or payment services that are known to work with Anthropic (without breaking their ToS).

If anyone has successfully dealt with this and can share what worked for them, I’d really appreciate it. I’m happy to compensate for detailed guidance or time spent explaining the process.

Thanks in advance, and feel free to DM if you prefer.

Which one is the best for session handoff? sonnet? opus or fable? i tried opus 4.8 its a bit high for me. Is it normal? Or should i write handoff myself