alt Hacker NewsThis feels less like a pricing issue and more like a structural mismatch.
Subscriptions assume “human usage” — bursty, limited, mostly interactive. Agent systems are closer to autonomous infrastructure load running continuously.
OpenClaw is a good example of this. Once agents operate freely, they don’t behave like users — they behave like infrastructure.
That’s why this kind of restriction isn’t too surprising.
Long term, it seems likely this pushes things toward: - API-first usage - or local / open models
rather than agents sitting on top of subscription-based UIs.
I am pretty sure Claude Code limits were being hit so fast recently because there was an increasing amount of OpenClaw style usage on the subscription. From tweets from the people in charge it sounded like they were having more usage than they expected which was causing them to have to be more aggressive on the rate limits. They said they were working to address it soon. I have a feeling this is what they were working on changing. I bet OpenClaw was the reason for the rate limiting being so bad lately.
I'm hoping with this change we see the rate limits start to not be as rough.