Comment by hombre_fatal

3 days ago

The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone.

Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are actually sitting at their computer using the service over someone's server saturating the limit 24/7.

The goal is to have different tiers for manual users vs automated/programmatic tools. Not just Anthropic, this is how we design systems in general.

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hombre_fatal

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goosejuice  3 days ago

Well earnest here just means using Claude code directly or the Claude app. Both that just happen to support using tokens while you sleep!

  • hombre_fatal  3 days ago

    Defining earnest (placeholder word btw) is the hard part of the trade-off, though.

    When your least automated, most interactive users are competing for capacity with fully-automated tools, let's say, you're forced to define some sort of periphery between these groups.

    OpenClaw is a self-directed, automated loop that sits on a server. It's wowing its owner by shitposting on moltbook and doing any number of crazy stories you can find online that amount to "omg I can't believe my self-directed claude loop spent all day doing this crazy thing haha."

    On the other end of the spectrum is someone using Claude.app's interface.

    And then in the middle, you can imagine "claude -p" inside a CI tool that was still invoked downstream of a user's action. Still quite different from the claude loop.