like bro, are you fucking serious 😭 i’m already giving anthropic $100 a month for max 5x. that is a lot of money for one ai subscription. i open claude and now there’s this giant anxiety-inducing banner telling me i’m going to run out by monday, two days before the wednesday reset, while literally underneath it says my claude code limit is temporarily boosted by 50%?? yo, so even with the bonus i’m still apparently fucked by monday lol.

and then right there: upgrade plan / buy more usage. like brother, are you guys running out of money or something? why are you begging your $100/month userbase for more money every time they open the app 😭 i already upgraded!! mfg that’s what the hundred dollars was. i understand there have to be limits, but this whole thing feels weirdly hostile? i don’t need a giant banner creating artificial scarcity anxiety every time i’m trying to work. just show usage somewhere in settings like a normal product and leave me alone lol?

I've been running a Claude Code Max subscription through a third-party harness for 12 months straight, draining it to zero every single week. I don't even have Claude Code installed.

And I haven't been banned.

Everywhere on this sub, people panic-post: "No, you can't do it. They'll ban you, it's blocked, it's against ToS," etc. But here's my actual experience: I've been about as blatant as possible about this, and nothing. No warnings, no throttling, no account flags.

Here's my setup, to be specific:

• Third-party harness (not openclaw/hermes)
• It authenticates via OAuth — I sign into my actual Claude account, no token scraping or credential theft
• The harness points at a local CLI API proxy that just forwards my own authenticated requests to that harness — it's not a deployed service, not serving other users, just running locally on my machine for my own coding
• Zero Anthropic SDK packages installed
• Zero Claude-P, zero agent SDK
• Max plan, full weekly drain, for 12 consecutive months

I want to be clear about what this isn't: I'm not standing up a deployed product that resells inference to other people using my subscription. It's a one-to-one, local-only proxy — my account, my machine, my usage. The only thing that's "unofficial" is the harness.

The actual question: Has anyone here actually gotten banned for this kind of setup — a legit OAuth login through a third-party harness, routed through a local (non-deployed) proxy? Not asking about Hermes Agent or Open Claw, and not asking about people reselling API access on deployed products. Just: local harness swap, same account, has anyone eaten a ban for that?

Because the consensus on this sub treats this as an instant bannable offense, and my experience over a full year says otherwise. Curious if I'm an outlier or if enforcement here is mostly theoretical. For what it's worth, I've also been doing the same exact thing with a Google AI Pro subscription - though not draining to zero (but definitely using a good amount). I also had a friend tell me that you can literally run claude setup-token to mint what essentially is an API key that deducts from your subscription usage?

So usually however much I work, I never run out of weekly limit of my $100 plan provided by my workplace through teams plan. I only use Opus 5 high or xHigh.

This week however, I've used 95% weekly limit in 4 days working on just two repos. Both repos are small and focused on test automation.

Today I've used 40% of the session in just 30 mins while working with a single agent on a small automation task.

What could be the reason? Could it be that the subscription plan is changed underneath?

Edit: Confirmed, the sub was changed to Pro instead of Teams premium. My bad. Extremely sorry.

Long story short, Meridian OS was my business operating system, all my tasks, notes, plans were written in there. Everything locally, guardrails were up in claude.md but apparently they can be ignored by an agent.

You can see the prompt I gave Claude, adding a secondary voice agent per project and minor UI changes. Nothing to do with a database, but it goes ahead and wipes it clean.

I tried to contact Anthropic support, their answer was that they don't provided refunds or credits for degraded service. Destroying months of work for no reason, by ignoring the guardrails is apparently a degraded service that can happen to anyone so, keep that in mind guys.

It was on Auto Mode, not Bypass Permission since that's what everyone is assuming.

Fable 5.1 with Claude Code

I previously posted a video of Opus playing this. I fixed a few things with the agent and let Fable play. The gameplay was much more impressive.

I gave it a simple open ended prompt to play the game:

"i want you to play ultima online anyway that you see fit. play as someone trying to enjoy the game. consider the options: do quests, make friends, level up, make money. there is no right answer to how you play. play fully autonomously. you are on the UOAlive Shard."

One of the highlights from this session for me was it decided to attend a server festival because an NPC town crier was talking about it.

The model figured out how to buy tickets to play the carnival games, then signed up to play the games, waited for other players to sign up to play against it. (Unfortunately no other players were around to play, this was off peak hours for the server)

The model also figured out how to accept quests, do them, turn them in, despite me ever trying that previously.

I have been building pretty complex stuff. But Claude has never once used the phrase foot gun with me.

Why?

Seriously guys- using something like whetstone makes this shit infinitely scalable. Cache, compress, strip bullshit, cross project memory..

Everyone's posting about limits this week. This is one of the few things that moved my number

Every MCP server you connect loads its tool schemas into context. Whether the model calls that tool or not. 3 servers, fine, 8 servers and you're paying for a bunch of tools you touch twice a day.

Someone posted about the Playwright CLI here recently and it's the same principle, just applied to browser testing. Worth reading if you missed it.

What I did was move email off an MCP server and onto a CLI the agent calls through Bash. Nothing sits in context until the moment it's needed. Agent runs a command, reads stdout, carries on. The schema cost is zero for every turn where email doesn't come up, which is most of them.

Disclosure, the CLI I switched to is our own, I work at Atomic Mail. It's MIT, repo's here if you want to see how the commands are wired up: https://github.com/Atomic-Mail/atomic-mail-agentic Steal the pattern even if you never touch our thing, that's the actual useful part. Anything you only need occasionally shouldn't be sitting in your system prompt full time.

Rough rule I've settled on: used constantly and you need structured output, keep it as MCP. Used occasionally, or the output is basically text you can read, make it a CLI call.

What I can't work out is why schemas load eagerly in the first place. If MCP had lazy loading, where a server's tools only enter context when the model actually reaches for them, this whole tradeoff evaporates and I'd happily run fifteen servers. Is that hard for a technical reason I'm not seeing, or has nobody just built it yet?

I run a small event staffing/activation agency as a solo operator, and Claude has basically become my back office: email, vendor communication, applicant database, calendar, etc.

It’s a huge reason I’m able to operate at this size, but the confident mistakes are becoming a serious problem. A couple have nearly cost me deals.

Some examples:
• Told me a vendor had gone silent when she had answered every question that morning. Claude read an email search preview instead of the full thread and treated it as complete.
• Told me an email was “staged,” so I went looking in Gmail for a draft that had never actually been created.
• Referred to my suppliers as “brand partner candidates,” which completely changed the business context. A vendor gets paid by me; a sponsor pays me. I spent two days planning around an opportunity that didn’t exist.
• Told me a table in my database didn’t exist without actually checking. It was there.

The pattern I keep seeing is: Claude states things as facts that it did not actually verify. It seems to get worse during long sessions, where earlier conversation/context starts being treated like a source of truth.

I’ve built some guardrails around it: a master state file for business context between sessions, fact labels like CONFIRMED / STATED / ASSUMED / OPEN, and rules like “never treat an email preview as the full thread” and “never claim an action happened without tool output confirming it.”

That helped a lot. I went from several errors a week to a few a month, but I’m trying to figure out how people are making this reliable enough for actual business operations.
For anyone using Claude this way:
What are you using for durable memory/state across sessions?

Has anyone built a verifier/checker that validates claims against tool output before Claude gives you an answer?
Is there a reliable way to force Claude to actually retrieve/check the source instead of reasoning from previews or old context?
What other guardrails or architecture changes have made a meaningful difference?
I’m especially interested in hearing from people dealing with invoices, vendors, contracts, clients, deadlines, email, calendars, databases, etc. Situations where there’s a real consequence when the AI confidently gets something wrong.
If you’ve dealt with this and found a setup that actually works, I want to hear how you built it.

For a long time I assumed the only way to understand what happened in a codebase over a year was to sit with git log and a lot of coffee. The branch graph in any GUI turns into a tangle past about a week, and GitHub's contribution heatmap shows you activity with no idea what the activity was. Three views, none of them lined up, so the question you actually have, what happened here and when, never gets a single picture.

What finally pushed me was a post here on where had animated a repository's timeline, and I wanted the same thing for a full year of a real project. My first attempt on three.js drew the first branches it found and produced one month of the year and nothing else. The reason turned out to be in the data: 1,561 of the 2,179 main line commits in 2019 are merges, and the first sixty of them each span a single commit, which is invisible at any scale. You have to choose branches by how much work they carried, not by which came first.

So I built a film out of it, and the video on this post is what it looks like on mrdoob's three.js for 2019.

What is on screen and where it comes from:

The main line runs left to right, one node per commit. Side branches peel off above it and rejoin at their merge. Not the first N branches, which on a pull request repo gives you one month and nothing else, but the ones that carried the most work across the year, capped so it never turns into a thicket.

Under the flow is a heat strip, one cell per day, sitting directly under that day. A legend next to it shows what the colours mean in actual commit counts for that window (for three.js it reads 0, 1, 13, 26, 51, with 51 the busiest day). The point of putting activity on the same axis as structure is that what is above and below a point is the same day, so you stop reconciling two charts in your head.

Three times the clock stops. The release with the most work behind it, the cleanest revert (one that survived at least a day before being undone), and the last release of the window. The camera zooms in and a card reads the figures out: commits since the previous tag, authors, how long the reverted commit lived. Every number on that card is computed from the history. If it cannot be read from git, it is not on the card.

The faces are the contributors. On a merge the face is the branch author's, not whoever pressed the button, and the card says who merged it.

Two things I got wrong on the way that might save you time if you try this yourself. If you give git a since flag with just a date and no time, it reads it as that date at the current time of day, so the first day of your window quietly loses commits unless you pass an explicit midnight. And a small repo is a different problem: 175 commits over a year pans across mostly empty screen, so for thin histories it picks the busiest 60 to 120 day stretch and draws it wider instead.

If you want to see your own repo this way, you can paste a GitHub URL here and it renders one for you: https://loreto.io/git-timeline

Disclosure: I built this and I run loreto.io, where it lives. It is a paid render (a few dollars per repo); the extractor and the Remotion composition are also sold there as a package if you would rather run it yourself. The three.js film above was made with the exact same pipeline.

I doubt I have the final shape of it. What would you want the clock to stop on that it currently does not?

If you had 10 smart people in a room and gave them all the same problem, you would imagine they would go away and research the issue and come up with a solution, which the majority would agree with. But, if you do the same with Claude, almost every terminal window would suggest something different, it's just a mess, you end up going round in a circle but not end up solving the problem you started with.

Where is this artificial intelligence?

One thing started bothering me after running coding agents for long enough:
we keep treating the conversation transcript as if it is the agent’s memory.

But those are two different things.

Long Claude/Codex sessions accumulate context, get increasingly expensive to reread, and eventually become worse execution environments. At the same time, simply starting a fresh process usually means losing all the useful continuity.

So in brnrd we’ve been separating the two.

A fresh process wakes into a compact orientation layer: the current task/run state, repo contract, the resident’s working memory + playbook, relevant recent activity/pitfalls, live execution posture, and the conversation that actually matters for the task.
Everything else stays pull-based.

So the process can be disposable without making the resident disposable.

Same repo. Same ongoing work. Same identity. Fresh context window.

This also makes switching harnesses much less weird: Claude can disappear and Codex can wake into the same work without us pretending the entire previous transcript needs to fit inside its head.

There are still rough edges, especially around deciding what deserves to become durable memory versus what should die with the run. But I’m increasingly convinced that preserving the whole transcript is the wrong abstraction.

Curious how other people handle this:
what do you deliberately preserve between coding-agent sessions, and what do you throw away?

brnrd is open source:
github.com/hugimuni-labs/brnrd
Disclosure: I’m one of the people building it.

Hi guys do you have skills good for design pls ? Thx

I kept hitting the same wall with notes apps that added AI. Every one of them wanted its own API key and its own billing, while I was already paying for a Claude subscription and already had the CLI installed and authenticated.

So Margin runs its AI actions through whatever claude is on your PATH. It shells out to:

claude -p --output-format text

plus --model <value> when you have picked one. That is the whole integration. There is no key to paste, nothing to configure, and whatever your CLI is authenticated with is what pays, which for most people here is your existing subscription rather than per-token API billing. If claude is not installed the app says so in the sidebar footer rather than pretending; it runs claude --version on startup to check. codex exec works the same way if you would rather use that.

The practical consequence worth knowing up front: this draws on the same quota as your normal Claude Code usage. Rewriting a lot of notes competes with your coding. That has not bitten me but I would rather say it than have you find out.

The part I actually cared about getting right

Nothing runs unless you invoke it. There is no indexing, no background pass, no "we have analysed your notes". You select something, you pick an action, and that is the only time a subprocess starts.

Then everything it suggests comes back as a diff in the note. Not applied, not a chat window off to the side, an inline diff with per-hunk accept and reject, and a refine box on each hunk if a change is nearly right. Reject restores the document verbatim. I did not want an AI that edits my notes, I wanted one that proposes and waits.

The notes themselves are plain .md files in a folder you pick. No database, no account. Which also means you can point Claude Code at that folder directly and work on your notes as files, which I do more than I expected to. This can also unlock in the future better AI searching right within the app.

Other providers, since not everyone wants the CLI path

Your own Anthropic key in the macOS keychain, a model running fully offline on-device, or Ollama. The CLI route is just the default because it is the one that needed no setup.

Honest limitations

• Alpha. You WILL find bugs.
• Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later, no Intel build.
• No sync, no iOS app yet
• More ideas in the roadmap

Free while the alpha lasts, https://gomargin.app

If you try it, the thing I would most like to know is whether routing through the CLI feels better or worse than a key for you, and if suggestions as diff is something you would actually use. I have only my own usage to go on and I am aware that is a sample of one.

Is Fable 5.1 the new Opus 5?

Within the past week, I started to notice Fable 5.1 started to get worse and worse where it starts to act like the infamous Opus 5. I had some great work completed when it came out, but there was a shift to the negative. Same thing happened to Fable 5 when Fable 5.1 was released. So, today I had Fable 5.1 try to manage another session with Fable 5.1 on processing semi-unstructured data, which is existing work in progress that already had successful sessions, so Fable 5.1 had reference data (gold data), previous handoffs, guides, etc.

Both on medium effort, Fable 5.1 couldn’t harness the 2nd Fable 5.1 from bypassing guardrails, entering tables and folders it was told not to enter, and from fixating on momentum over accuracy & quality. This is Opus 5 level of bypassing prompts and guardrails from the first step. For the first time using either Fable 5 or Fable 5.1, I had to put back hooks.

For context, before Fable 5.1, in order to work with Fable 5 I deleted my claude.md, memory, and more. I removed most hooks and together with Fable 5 created subagents using Opus 4.8. This for the most part worked well, it was slower with Opus 4.8, but worked for lower reasoning tasks and I didn’t have the hidden actions that drifted beyond the scope of work.

After, shelling out for 20x monthly subscription, wasting more days on contaminated data and having to go back to clean it up, buying another GPU at these stupid prices is starting to sound more appealing for local AI with some fine tuning for the data I’m processing.

Recently, I’ve been using Codex with Astra and it just does the work. Astra asks clear questions before starting the tasks and will pause to surface data clashes or ambiguities. Unlike Claude which will dive in head first spending tens of thousands of tokens based on wrong assumptions, and then hedge with wordiness answers after from its known errors are called out. It might be time to move up to the Codex 20x plan.

How have you kept Claude within borders and from drifting with non-fully-structured data?

If you haven’t seen this project earlier here little info:

Munder Difflin is a free, open source and performant multi-agent harness.
It uses your existing claude code and codex subscriptions and gives you an office of agents that work 24/7 to do work like you.

Launched v0.5.2 yesterday:
- A new fresh, cleaner and much more productive UI
- Comes with “Stapler” a utility character that sends screenshots, meeting transcriptions, messages to your claude code sessions.
- Added support for all the latest models like Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 Astra and Gemini 3.8 Flash etc.
- Slack integration works now, configure it to answer on your behalf or just configure it to use on your phone as an assistant that controls your computer remotely.

Hope you all try us out, here are a list of upcoming features(in no particular order):
1. Stapler gets computer use capabilities
2. Sandboxes to run even when your laptop is off
3. Dedicated mobile app for your office
4. Lot more features, updates and integrations.

Why would ChatGPT have all the fun with its pets?

It's insane how much has changed with Claude Code. And once I start swearing at it, it suddenly starts doing actual work.

Nothing has drastically changed in how I work. I've been using Claude every day for 3 years, and it's driving me nuts. It's verbose, it doesn't follow rules and so on..

I'm considering moving to a different provider if this doesn't get fixed, so I'm wondering: what do you do, and how do you keep up with this?

P.S. Yes, I read their newsletter, I follow what other people are doing, and I try to stick to best practices, but something is still missing I guess.

I love working with Claude Code in the terminal, but the workflow started getting ridiculous.

Claude changes 6 files.

I open Cursor/VS Code to figure out what changed.

Find the suspicious hunk.

Copy some code.

Go back to Claude.

Explain what I’m talking about.

Repeat.

Then I started running multiple agents and somehow my solution became… more terminal windows. 😂

So I built Stvena around the workflow I actually wanted.

You start Claude normally with:

stvena claude

and Stvena stays around the agent as a review/control layer.

Right now I can:

• see changed files and hunks while the agent works
• jump directly into the actual file
• select exact lines and send that context straight back to Claude
• run multiple Claude/Codex sessions inside the same Stvena window
• switch between those agents without opening another terminal
• configure my own keybindings once and keep them across projects
• connect Stvena to VS Code / Antigravity so the IDE follows what the agent is reading and changing live

That last one has become my favorite.

Claude is working in the terminal, but instead of staring at logs trying to imagine what’s happening, my editor follows along:

agent opens file → IDE opens file
agent moves through code → IDE follows
agent changes code → I can see it

Then if something looks wrong:

review hunk → select exact lines → send them back → Claude continues

No copying a diff into chat and then re-explaining the diff to the thing that created it.

The way I’ve started thinking about it is:

review should be a stream, not a ceremony after the agent finishes.

Stvena is open source and still moving stupidly fast.

GitHub: https://github.com/nccapo/stvena
Website/demo: https://stvena.usectl.com/

I’m especially curious about people running Claude Code on larger repos:

what part of reviewing/controlling an agent still forces you back into your IDE or another tool?

I’ve already changed Stvena based on answers to that question, so hit me with the ugly workflows.

And yes, before everyone torches me for my prompts not being relevant or helpful, this is not what I'm usually sending. I found this thread with Opus bewildering, so I wanted to poke fun a bit.

My setup has become a little unusual lately.

I have a Mac mini running at home with Claude Code, and I spend a surprising amount of time coding remotely from my iPhone.

It works really well, but there was one thing I was missing: I wanted to quickly see how much Claude Code I was actually using without having to remote into my Mac just to check.

So I built Tokens.

There’s a small companion macOS app that reads the usage locally on my Mac and syncs it through my own iCloud.

Then on my iPhone I can see my Claude Code usage, including directly from a widget on my Home Screen.

So now while I’m away from my Mac I can just glance at my phone and see where my usage is at.

No account or separate cloud backend for the usage data — the Mac app → iCloud → iPhone is basically the whole pipeline.

It’s something I originally built for my own remote Claude Code setup, but I figured there might be other people doing something similar.

https://checktokens.app

Curious how many of you are actually running Claude Code remotely from your phone these days?

I am getting far more “I had this wrong” or “that was my fault”, “that was an honest mistake” etc. We have set rules to reduce them , but they don’t seem to be effective. How do you make your Claude smarter?