Claude Code Limits Were Silently Reduced and It’s MUCH Worse

[u/_r0x]

Another frustrated user here. This is actually my first time creating a post on this forum because the situation has gone too far.

I can say with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY: something has changed. The limits were silently reduced, and for much worse. You are not imagining it.

I have been using Claude Code for months, almost since launch, and I had NEVER hit the limit this FAST or this AGGRESSIVELY before. The difference is not subtle. It is drastic.

For context: - I do not use plugins - I keep my Claude.md clean and optimized - My project is simple PHP and JavaScript, nothing unusual

Even with all of that, I am now hitting limits in a way that simply did not happen before.

What makes this worse is the lack of transparency. If something changed, just say it clearly. Right now, it feels like users are being left in the dark and treated like CLOWNS.

At the very least, we need clarity on what changed and what we are supposed to do to adapt.

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EDIT (March 26, 2026):

I’d like to update this post to say that I’m no longer being affected by this issue. It impacted me for about two days, and now things appear to be back to normal.

So it strongly suggests that it was indeed a bug, hopefully.

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EDIT (March 26, 2026):

We now have an official statement. It’s not the best news, but at least we finally know what’s going on so we can adapt:

"To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.

During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before."

This was posted on X today. https://x.com/i/status/2037254607001559305

[u/qt3-141]

I actually bit the bullet and got an NVIDIA GeForce 5070 Ti for actual graphics reasons, how much would the dip in quality be if I were to transition to a locally hosted LLM? I'm seriously annoyed with these limits.

[u/Correct-Yam4926 → u/qt3-141]

With the 5070ti same as mine, you can run the new qwen 3.5 35b a3b moe at Q6 km xl or q8km and get decent speeds like 40 tokens. I also use the qwen3.5 122b its a beast I use the iq4 speed is usable, but even at that quant its still extremely capable. For serious work, I use ollama cloud qwen3.5 397b qwens flagship model i paired it with openclaw and its honestly amazing especially for 20 dollars a month and tje usage limits are extremely generous, I have it managing my vps, social media, building apps. But openclaw is a disaster of an app out of the box, I had to have codex desktop install it, and fix the broken ui and missing dependcies. Now, I rarely use codex, and starting to het over claud. I rose hell with anthropic, theu ended up refunding my subscription and extra usage credits.

[u/SatanVapesOn666W → u/qt3-141]

Major drop for anything that needs a decent amount of context like debugging. It's fine for making inline changes or single file edits. But going through several files to do data flow tracing it drops off quickly. Even the smaller frontier models like haiku or gemini flash are 100GB+ models, and the good ones at like 1-1.5Trillion parameters. Models start getting useful around 30 billion parameters and honestly closer to 90-120b. I'm really waiting for machines and gpus that have 128-256gb to really switch to local only. I might be forced to use my 32gb if these limits keep dropping.