Comment by deaux
6 hours ago
> It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two.
I genuinely have no idea what people mean when I read this kind of thing. Are you abusing the word "prompt" to mean "conversation"? Or are you providing a huge prompt that is meant to spawn 10 subagents and write multiple new full-stack features in one go?
For most users, the $20 Pro subscription, when used with Opus, does not hit the 5-hour limit on "a single prompt or two", i.e. 1-2 user messages.
Today I literally gave Claude a single prompt, asking it to make a plan to implement a relatively simple feature that spanned a couple different codebases. It churned for a long time, I asked a couple very simple follow up questions, and then I was out of tokens. I do not consider myself to be any kind of power user at all.
The only time I've ever seen this happen is when you give it a massive codebase, without any meaningful CLAUDE.md to help make sense of it and no explicitly @ mentioning of files/folders to guide, and then ask it for something with huge cross-cutting.
> spanned a couple different codebases
There you go.
If you're looking to prevent this issue I really recommend you set up a number of AGENTS.md files, at least top-level and potentially nested ones for huge, sprawling subfolders. As well as @ mentioning the most relevant 2-3 things, even if it's folder level rather than file.
Not just for Claude, it greatly increases speed and reduces context rot for any model if they have to search less and more quickly understand where things live and how they work together.