alt Hacker NewsWhat's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?
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Addiction being enabled is a big thing but AI stocks are dropping and the companies are getting nervous people will stop investing or -- worse for them and better for the planet -- start selling it all off.
Combined with the fact that China's also catching up with its open source AI (no i dont want to debate whether or not it actually is or if china is 'safe'; particularly not with anyone from the USA as i am canadian) and also everyone protesting against the giant data centres AND the UK giving up on digital IDs?
yeah. they're trying to get people hooked again.
My guess is they are getting folks used to the idea of:
1. The end of unlimited token subsidization and a new status quo of metered usage limits.
2. Adding to the above, self-initiated usage limit resets give you some control and again help lessen the sting of the end of subsidization.
Right now though, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are in open MAU war ahead of their respective IPOs and that might be a bigger factor.
I can see three reasons:
1. They have left over capacity that will go unused otherwise. Most users have hit their limits before the end of the week. Might as well get some use out of the servers.
2. A backend change made migrating usage tracking hard, inaccurate, or impossible.
3. A usage tracking issue meant the usage wasn’t accurate anyway and they needed a reset to save face / avoid contract breach.
The addiction or marketing strategy seems too clever. Why explain something with cleverness that can be explained by laziness or stupidity.
It's a weird thing to optimize for. If you care about availability for work you can just pay more where it feels limitless and never look at the limits. I think a lot of people have a tendency to want to minmax as a "game". I also occasionally have the urge to do it but then realize it's a means to an end, not the end itself. I would feel good having maximised usage even if it wasn't productive usage which is irrational.
I think the main problem is the usage limits. You would never feel like you are saving money by watching movies on Netflix. If they didn't have limits, many might find themselves using agents less actually.
I am also trying to resist all those remote control, control from your phone, or run your agents from anywhere kind of "promotions". I feel like they are trying to make us addicted to AI agents. I set my work up before I go home in the evening and no more agent-checking until next morning.
Software engineering has always been kind of a game for the people who love it; it turns out that making it a game-as-a-service with lootboxes is just as effective for driving engagement as with other kinds of games.
putting aside the possibility of very badly implemented token limiting doing requiring our accidentally just doing a reset for whatever reason
we (industry) have reached the point where questions about productivity gain, use-cost analysis and similar get asked increasingly more often
by resetting tokens they are silently decreasing the cost and increasing the use (hit limit ==usefulness stops until end of period) they are effectively fudging any "simple" internal company studies in their favor leading to a potentially pretty bad surprise if this isn't noticed by the assessing personal
An alternative is that they bought to many GPU resources in relationship to actual demand and they still need to show that they are "highly used".
Either its is appreciated for anyone benefiting from it but fishy as which company which doesn't do something fishy gives out rabbats to already paying users without turning it into a advertisement/PR benefit???
Yeah I've been noticing for a while. Definitely didn't want to be one of the first to bring it up! Few weeks ago it was really unexpected resets the day before the actually reset. Now I'm noticing Claude keeps going for a while after the 7 day quota hits 100% (I setup my statusline to include quota as I got tired of checking the app), but also it could just be bad calibration and even at 100% I still actually have quota left.
The last few have corresponded to basically within the hour or two of the release of a competing model that is getting good reviews. Twice I've gone "well, I'm over my weekly limit for the next two days, may as well check this out" and almost just as I've finished that thought, a refresh landed and I went to blitz a week of usage in 48 hours instead because once it's gone, it's gone.
Hurray market competition and what capitalism was meant to be. Go above in providing a service or the customer leaves.
Read: AI companies found a way to make AI chatbot to look less expensive driving people to become more addicted to it.
This is the result of a forgotten phenomenon called "competition".
I think this is because they're having trouble with capacity planning. They plan conservatively, and they have extra capacity that's going unused. But they don't want to commit to anything, in case usage spikes.
I paid for a month of Claude and paradoxically I am not using it at all because of how quickly the 5 hr limit fills. Deepseek and Mimo do not give me that "Time's running out" anxiety.
If I had to guess uncharitably, I’d say they want you to feel like you keep getting something extra for “free” while you’re getting the same service you should have expected as normal 3 months ago.
Operant conditioning random reinforcement is a pretty well researched science
This article reads like a description of gambling-addiction behavior; the author appears to be addicted to using LLMs.
He's eagerly awaiting his next hit of dopamine from his favorite model. He's setting timers to be ready for when his next hit comes available. He's spinning up unnecessary queries just to start the timer ticking on new models.
You could basically write the same article about some guy who sits in a casino all day eagerly awaiting double-your-winnings bonuses or similar.
Push down official on paper limits while limiting real world backlash by artificially inflating real world usage above paper limits with resets.
I think your hedonic treadmill's motor is close to burning out. Might be time to hop off for a bit.
edit: Ok, I have been reflecting for a bit. This article really irked me and I realize now it's because I see a lot of a former version of myself in it.
Anyhow, to the author, I implore you to take a step back and look at what your mind is doing. Humans love prediction, and we love optimization, I get it. But, you're effectively rewriting history, and holding yourself to an impossible standard of perfectly optimizing past decisions with future information. As a result, you're sucking the joy out of pursuit that you seem to love.
I know it's easier said than done to not have your mind work against you like this. But, I think you might benefit from taking a step back and asking what your actual goals are in the work you're doing, and what sufficient value to justify the $100/mo subscription looks like in terms of output or work. Playing the token consumption optimization game is a losing battle that has turned a free gift into a source of angst.
Competition. If Anthropic had followed through on their plan to put Fable under API pricing, users would have jumped ship en masse to GPT 5.6 (or perhaps to K3 if it turns out to be good enough.)
That explains it! I was wondering about this just today as I saw it hd reset. Alas I don't need to wait another 7 days..
Ive typed out several things, none of them really capture succinctly the level of disdain I have for people that this article is describing.
I cannot fathom the idea that one is warping their work on a given engineering problem around the availability of a magic next token predictor box.
>Resets of the weekly quota for all users must be ludicrously expensive for these companies
Why can't people see the alternative hypothesis, inference has huuuuuge margins?
I like money.
It feels like Anthropic was affected by resource limitations upon launch or big adoption curves in the past, and now they're tyring to be mindful of having less of those, in several ways, one of which is trying to keep capacity to keep core services running and let the high demand not impact the rest of the system.
WHen it doesn't turn out that way, it opens up options.
At the same time if other model providers were anticipating Anthropic or someone else to have problems at launch, and were waiting in the wings with their own models to launch competitively, it sets off a capacity release competition.
One might lower prices, one might give it away, or just make it available, and then there are users on other platforms with limits, or free until a certain day, etc.
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They're giving everyone their next hit.
What I read on social media about people and these resets gives off literal worst kind of addiction vibes. I've literally seen people talking about "Oh I had an existential crisis without Fable/GPT-5.6"
These people legitimately need help, or alternatively a social life.
Maybe its different on my end because I just use a sub outside of work for fun stuff. At work its not my money so I don't really care. I go to work, maybe use these subs at home every once in a while for a fun personal project and if I hit the limits (I rarely even do) I play video games or hang out with my wife/family.
People are borderline tying their identities to these models it seems, and yet most people aren't even building anything interesting.