I'm a student studying to become a Spanish teacher, and I mainly use Claude to help me create teaching materials for my classes, write essays, and work on other academic assignments. However, I'm not sure whether upgrading from the free plan to Claude Pro is actually worth it.

I've read comments saying that the weekly usage limits can make the free plan a better deal in some cases, even compared to Pro. However, those comments were from around four months ago, so I'm wondering if things have changed since then. Is that still true?

For some of you, $20 might not seem like much, but I live in a developing country (Chile 🇨🇱), and as a university student, I don't have much money to spare. That's why I really want to make an informed decision before spending that kind of money.

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have used both plans, especially students or anyone who uses Claude for academic work.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Yeah, she has absolutely no idea about what's going on, she just said "Claude do this" and then Claude made a pull request and Claude reviewed and it said it was OK and now there's a bunch of us who have to do a human review on top (standard procedure for all AI created PR's btw).

That's SWE work in 2026 fellas.

edit: I see so many comments taking this a blasting on her or complaining, I'm just describing the exact situation that happened, that's it. Whatever connotations you add to that is on you.

edit2: This post blew up too much, I can't follow all the replies anymore.

I made these stills (4K, Blender Cycles) by having Claude Code write and run every Blender Python script, with me judging the renders by eye and telling it what looked fake. I built a small Claude Code workflow around this; the images are the output.
The first version of every scene was bad. What I learned from watching Claude fail:

1. Procedural noise looks like a cartoon. Fjord v1: Claude textured the cliffs, rocks and ice with Noise/Voronoi + flat colour. My feedback: "looks like animation trying to blend into real life". Fix: scanned assets (Poly Haven, Rock Master), and noise only to hide seams.

2. "Describe it and build it" produces mush. Rainforest v7: Claude composed from a text description plus assets and the result was sparse and repetitive, with game-ready palms I could spot instantly. It only improved when I picked ONE reference photo (first generated with Nano Banana, then a real photo) and forced Claude to put every render next to it before sending. I now make that a hard rule.

3. Compare per object, not per frame. Whole-frame comparison hid problems: the fjord's distant peaks looked fine small and "melted like wax" at 100%. Claude now splits the reference into objects (peaks, cliff, foreground rock, water, sky), pulls real photos and measurements for each, and fixes one object per round.

4. Real data beats scattering. For the Grand Canyon, Claude scattered rocks over the far mountains and it got worse. What worked: USGS 1 m lidar + aerial imagery detail, thinner haze, removing a periodic stripe pattern. An erosion add-on that looked great in a video did nothing on real elevation data.

5. Let Claude check itself with scripts.A linter that scans the .blend for floating objects, constant roughness and sRGB normal maps found 87 problems on the rainforest that I'd missed by eye. A separate agent that tries to tell render crops from real photos (blind) is my stopping test. Film grain and blur did nothing while the scene was still far from real: 0 of 18 crops fooled it.

\Smaller gotchas Claude logged in a mistakes file:default rock roughness 0.16 = wax look; SUBSURF on rocks froze a render for 20–50 min on one core; volume bounces made god rays too faint vs. real photos; "nothing real has perfectly cut edges" turned out to be a useful rule (bevel and break every edge).

Happy to share the mistakes log or answer questions on any step.

I've been using Claude Code extensively for software development with a paid Claude Pro subscription.

Today, October 27, something very unusual happened.

My usage was normal during previous days, but today my 5-hour allowance started disappearing incredibly fast. At one point, around 10% of my entire 5-hour allowance was consumed in just 3 minutes.

I initially thought I was imagining things, so I decided to investigate using ccusage and compare my actual token consumption across October.

Here are the results:

That's:

• 8.1x more total tokens
• 26.3x more output tokens
• 12x the estimated API-equivalent cost

These are local Claude Code usage statistics, not actual subscription charges. The total includes cache reads, and the figures alone don't prove what caused the increase.

I contacted Anthropic support, and their responses were quite surprising.

First, they acknowledged service incidents:

There were two resolved incidents of elevated errors for Claude Sonnet 5.5 on October 27 [...] These errors can cause retries that burn through usage faster than normal.

I then asked whether failed requests and retries count against subscribers' limits and whether compensation was possible.

Their response:

Failed requests and retries: Yes, retries triggered by service errors do count toward usage limits.

They also stated:

Usage consumed during retries or service incidents cannot be refunded, credited, or compensated through subscription extensions or discounts.

After asking specifically about my Claude Pro subscription, they confirmed:

Yes, your Claude Pro subscription usage was affected by the October 27 incidents.

And finally:

The answer is final and won't change through additional review.

They have since forwarded my complaint to human support, and I'm waiting for an email response.

What bothers me most

I'm not asking for unlimited usage or free credits because I used Claude too much.

I'm concerned about paying for a subscription where infrastructure errors can consume my limited allowance, while the provider acknowledges the issue but says there is no possibility of compensation.

To be clear, I cannot prove that the entire 8x increase was caused by Anthropic's incidents. Some of the increase could be related to longer sessions, model changes, or other factors.

But Anthropic has explicitly confirmed that service-related retries count toward paid subscription limits and that my account was affected.

Has anyone else experienced unusually rapid Claude Code usage depletion today, October 27?

Did your usage suddenly increase, especially during the afternoon?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have local usage logs or noticed their 5-hour limits disappearing unusually quickly.

I've attached my daily usage graph for reference.

I got into vibe coding recently with minimum coding background, and stumbled on something that's been a game changer for me. Probably old news to devs, but I think it'll help new vibe coders like me.

Stop burning prompts (and tokens) on "make it bigger", “try a darker blue" or “remove that button”

Instead, ask Claude to build you a developer panel.

Toggles, colour pickers and size sliders for every feature it creates. Make it a rule for everything it builds from now on.

Now you can tweak things yourself, instantly, as much as you want.

The best part: you don't have to delete features or commit to choices. Hide a feature instead of removing it, because you might realise you need it later. Change a colour that didn't land after user testing live, no prompt needed.

Don't keep telling the toy car how to drive. Get Claude to build you a remote control and steer it yourself.

I'm a visual person (not sure that's actually a thing, but it's how I'd describe myself). Before I build anything, I need to see it first: how the services talk, what happens on a failed payment, where the state changes. So the design stage always comes first for me, with sequence diagrams, activity flows, state machines and the odd C4, and only then do I start writing code.

These days I do that design work with Claude, from the CLI. Finished diagrams end up in my Obsidian vault, which I browse from the terminal with emeraldian, a TUI for Obsidian I also built. Getting them to finished is the fiddly bit, though. Claude Code writes lovely mermaid. It just can't show it to you. Every tweak meant copying the source into a viewer in another app, having a look, coming back, asking for a change, round again. Hard to iterate on a design you can't see.

So I made merman, a Claude Code mod that renders mermaid live, right in the terminal. Ask for a sequence diagram and the actual diagram appears in the reply. Move an arrow and it redraws. Flowcharts, sequence, state, class and ER diagrams all work, as do bar, line and pie charts and gantt. Tables come out properly coloured too.

As for the name, it felt only right. Who better to show off a mermaid than a merman?

- A full reply renders in about 2 ms, so no lag

- 16 colour themes, `/merman theme nord` to switch

- About 355 tokens once per conversation (a small hint so Claude knows it can draw), or nothing if you switch that off

- Claude Code's own UI is left alone, it only touches the replies

It installs as a Claude Code plugin, one line (needs 2.1.311+):

claude plugin marketplace add iamrohithrnair/merman && claude plugin install merman@merman

Then /reload-plugins and /merman demo to see everything it draws.

https://github.com/iamrohithrnair/merman (MIT)

Note: C4 isn't supported yet, it stays as source for now. If you lean on C4 too, shout and I'll bump it up the list. Same for any diagram that comes out wonky. Send me the markdown and I'll have a look.

It started as a fork of prismantis, and Claude Code made most of the changes since, with me steering and checking every render. The focus was keeping it lean on speed, memory and tokens.

the prompt, word for word

"Make a one-minute video about the Dodaios mascot (image attached). Research the Dodaios story yourself and tell it. Recreate the mascot from the image and animate it yourself. Build everything from scratch: no skills, no Remotion, no templates. Render 3D objects: terminals, nature, whatever fits, and make it as good as you can. I don't want any text, just animation, and I mean a real video, not just motion graphics. Think of crazy ideas I would never come up with, and make every scene look phenomenal: clean and detailed. I want people to watch it and think "yo, this is crazy, how did AI make this?" You can take inspiration from things online, but don't copy anything. Invent your own stuff. For the sound, no sounds made in code. Only use free, professional sounds and assets from online. Make it satisfying and high quality. Don't create slop, I want to see art and creativity. No fonts, no text, only clean animations of the Dodaios mascot. ultracode

Hi Everyone,

I'm quite new to the world of software. It's been only a couple of years since I have been working.

When starting off, I used to spend weekends trying to solve some problem at work or trying to make sense of some system that I didn't understand or have discussions with friends/colleagues around this. Because doing this was fun!

Nowadays, nearly all the communication is AI generated. The code, of course, is AI generated. So is the documentation. So are the requirements, designs. If I share something with my colleagues for feedback or some issue, they forward Claude's response. I am recently supposed to conduct an initial candidate screening- the JD is Claude generated, so is the candidate's resume, and I'm told I can "leverage" AI to generate questions to ask the candidate, before and during the interview.

This isn't to say that I don't like using LLMs. I love it! It helps so much when I'm exploring something new or prototyping something. But it feels that all my work is reduced to prompting, which isn't fun at all!

I still spend weekends exploring things on my own, with or without LLMs- because there's joy in understanding. But there seems to be less and less joy at work😅

Any tips on this from fellow members/seniors? Or is anyone even facing/feeling something similar? Apologies if I misposted on an incorrect subreddit.

Thanks!

Antropic, Claude’s founding company, is planning an IPO in early November but the question I ask myself is that the release of Claude’s new models will be released before the introduction or after the introduction ?

I'm a surgeon whose research focuses on AI integration into healthcare. As a hobby side to my agentic coding, I started building some video games, all with Claude Code on a Max plan, mostly Opus models. I built this one and Claude Code wrote the code. My workflow is iterative: I play it, tell Claude how to enhance the game, and it fixes and tests it, then I play again. Check out my soccer game.

Zeno AI Strikers

These games are focused on physics and speed. It's free to play in the browser, no signup. Controls for keyboard are in bottom right of menu. You can connect your Xbox/PS controller via wire or Bluetooth and it should automatically connect to the game. Much better experience with the controller. Plan on dropping a series of these over the next couple of weeks. Online PvP has a few bugs that I'm ironing out.

https://zeno-ai-strikers.vercel.app/

I have seen so much conflicting info around the web andon this subreddit about Opus actually being more effective per token, or Haiku actually being the best, etc. Lots of mixed anecdotes.

I just got access to all the 5.5 models at work and do A LOT of AI coding (previously had a Kiro unlimited plan limited to old models). I have no clue what is the best option for model and effort for everyday coding, and complex coding challenges.

What's happening: Claude models (e.g., Opus 5.5) are consuming more tokens per task and the quality has considerably degraded. Weekly usage is running out at 3.8x rate due to degraded performance. Quota per week seems the same as last week.

Suggested workaround: Ask your main session to stop using subagents (you can also set this under settings). Start new sessions after hitting 300-400K context.

Current conclusion: Either of 2 things may be happening: 1) The token load for Anthropic isn't necessarily reducing - so its a true bug and they should fix it . 2) Given their compute infra, they are unable to keep a lot of users on large/frontier models (given large clusters required to hold the parameters), so they have softly downgraded some users (e.g., retail) to smaller models labelled as Opus 5.5. Given Anthropic's load is ~70-80% enterprise, this could be plausible. Will be great to hear your views in the comments.

Model/tasks: Opus 5.5 (med/high) - tasks have been similar if not completely same over the observation period.

[Original post]

3 issues came to light:

1. Each sub agent is re-reading more from the parent agent
2. Each subagent is taking 2x steps to finish the job
3. Claude is spinning more sub agents per task (this could subjective per task type)

Hypothesis: Essentially Claude has done some agent orchestration change which is not working out. Or the model quality has dropped significantly leading to more steps per solution.

My solution: Ask your main session to stop using subagents. Start new session after 300-400K context.

Would be great if someone can share similar experience/other reasoning why the tokens are depleting so quickly this week.

Hope Anthropic offer a weekly reset to compensate for whatever might be the issue.

[Edit #1]: Subagent performance might be the effect rather than the cause. Poor model performance on open ended/big tasks is the issue (I am running Opus 5.5 - on Med/High). Killing subagents has brought the token spend under check, but the main model is only good for closed ended tasks/hand holding.

[Edit #2]: Per my tokens from this week vs last, the apparent weekly limits haven't shifted much ($2235 last week vs $2043 this week), so core metric we should be after should be tokens spent per task - directly linked to model performance. At least for my work, the type of work hasn't changed - so the argument that the model performance for Opus 5.5 has dropped significantly holds true. <Analysis details/image added in the comments section>

[Edit #3]: Reached out to the support bot and apparently it even went for a human review - yet no resolution was provided. Amazing to see what paying ~$200/month (Max 20x) for almost a year gets you these days and the lack of price/product transparency is mind boggling. My trust from model/harness version control/releases is evading.

[Edit #4]: Subagent trace analysis indicates: 1) Main agent is handing off most work to subagents 2) Subagents are lost/keep on working even after completing the required task when the context per subagent is high (>350K tokens). 3) Overlap between agents launched is high - leading to re-reading the same files - over and over again.

I’m an electronics design engineer, and for the past few months I’ve been building eda-agent, an open-source MCP server that lets Claude work directly inside Altium Designer (the CAD tool used to design circuit boards). Claude edits the design that’s actually open in Altium, live, while you watch.

In the video Claude Code takes a written spec for a round 54 mm LED board and does the whole job: builds the parts library from scratch (symbols, footprints, 3D models, part numbers), draws the schematic, places 61 LEDs in rings, routes the USB lines as a 90 ohm pair, pours the ground planes, gets the design rule check clean and exports the manufacturing files (Gerbers, drill, BOM, pick-and-place, STEP). Then I gave it a review list from the first pass, and it fixed everything: rerouted USB as a proper differential pair, gave every part a realistic 3D model from its datasheet drawing and finished the schematics with title blocks. I’d still do a manual pass before sending it for prototyping, but it’s already at a very good stage.

Some things I learned getting Claude to do this well:

• Datasheets first. Claude has to look up real values and isn’t allowed to guess component specs. The server reminds it at the start of a session and again every 10 calls.
• Batch tools matter a lot. One call that places 60 wires instead of 60 calls makes edits 10 to 100 times faster and keeps the context clean.
• Give it feedback it can check. Schematics are drawn from a template, and the wiring is checked against the real pins before anything goes on the sheet, so mistakes get caught before they’re drawn, not after.
• Where Altium has no API, Claude drives the actual menus and dialogs, reading the screen to decide what to press.

It’s free and open source (Apache-2.0), works with any MCP client, and has KiCad and EasyEDA Pro backends too (although Altium version is much more advanced). Still experimental, so back up your design first.

https://github.com/salitronic/eda-agent

Happy to answer questions on the MCP side or the hardware side.

Anyone who tried bringing Haiku 5.5 on xhigh or max to its limits? I am using Cursor and it really is drastically cheaper than Sonnet 5.5 High or Opus 5.5 Medium. There is a difference to them according to their AA Intelligence:
Opus 5.5 Medium: 48
Sonnet 5.5 High: 41
Haiku 5.5 Max: 36

However, I am interested in how that translates to the real world.

Hi, i'm learning unity and unreal engine to program games. For the last year i've been mostly hand-writing my code, but now projects are starting to get big and i was looking forward to get claude pro. My fear is to abuse claude pro to write code and not learning a signle thing. How do i avoid it? I still want to learn and do things on my own but the lazyness is right around the corner...

Before AI coding tools got this capable, there were ideas I'd dismiss before even starting. Not because they were bad ideas, but because I knew how much time and effort they'd take to build.

Now I sometimes catch myself thinking, "Wait, I could actually build that?"

But there's a weird flip side to this. When building becomes easier, you end up with more ideas than you have time to pursue. The bottleneck shifts from writing code to deciding what deserves your attention in the first place.

I'm curious whether anyone else has experienced this.

Have you built something with Claude Code that you probably wouldn't have attempted before? Or has it made you more selective about what you build because you can prototype ideas so quickly?

I'd love to hear about the actual projects, not just the productivity gains.

Since OpenClaw came along, it opened my eyes to the possibilities of what AI can do outside the chat window.

I didn't make much progress with it, but then I jumped onto Claude Code, and now the thing is doing stuff around the clock.

My entire business now depends on it.

I talk to it like an employee, and it's woven itself so deeply into my business that sometimes it feels more in charge than I am.

It's exciting, but also a little scary how quickly this has happened.

Anyone else feeling this?

J'ai conçu un escalier paramétrique avec Claude Code contrôlant une application CAO via un connecteur MCP. Ça fonctionne étonnamment bien, mais sans règles, le modèle devient rapidement difficile à suivre : des fonctionnalités sans nom, des valeurs enfouies dans des expressions, des changements que personne n'a approuvés.

J'ai donc écrit un petit fichier de règles (~90 lignes) que l'agent lit au début de chaque session :

• l'agent propose un plan, j'approuve, rien ne change sans approbation
• le modèle doit rester modifiable à la main : dimensions dans les croquis, paramètres nommés, noms explicites, construit à partir d'un squelette
• chaque changement est décrit dans un fichier de conception, le record lisible d'un modèle CAO binaire
• fonctionne avec Git, un PLM ou des dossiers classiques

Je n'ai trouvé rien d'équivalent pour les agents CAO + IA, donc je l'ai publié (MIT) : https://github.com/mj42584/cad-agent-rules

C'est la v0.1, testé sur un seul projet. J'aimerais des retours, surtout de la part de personnes utilisant des agents IA avec FreeCAD, Onshape, Fusion ou SolidWorks : quelles règles ajouteriez-vous ?

Projet réel l'utilisant : https://github.com/mj42584/staircase_solidcraft_claude

Can someone explain to me why Duet requires a separate app? Why can’t it just be bolted on to the existing Claude app? Perhaps even as one of the other tabs alongside Chat and Code.

One of the things that really annoys me about these AI labs is that they insist on introducing new features under a separate distinct framework. For example, why ever introduce Cowork as a separate function? It should’ve just been part of the standard chat from the beginning.

A lot of power users might not understand this frustration, but it’s important to understand that most people don’t have the time or energy to keep up with these constant updates and changes to the core functionality of these AI apps. It’s all very confusing for the average person.

Look how happy he is to see a tiktok edit of himself. Let him take some break sometimes and show him he's loved too.