alt Hacker NewsClaude Code May–August 2026 weekly limits promotion
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Looking like this will be the last month with Anthropic. Between the outages and just overall crap utility of Opus/Fable lately...
For anyone on the fence, I was a hardcore CC user since it was released. I made the full switch to 5.6 sol and Codex about a month ago.
It's the better experience. The limits are way higher (I almost never burn through my $200/m plan), and the output is better than Opus 4.8 (Opus 5 is completely unusable for me).
The promotion is ending; the limits are reverting to pre-promotion levels.
"From May 13, 2026 through August 19, 2026, your weekly usage limit in Claude Code is 50% higher."
I've been watching this to see if they "extend" it again, let it end, or make it permanent. I'm regularly hitting 90-100% on my $200/mo sub and will switch to Codex in a heartbeat if they drop these limits. This constant uncertainty is really annoying.
Anthropic has just announced extending the limits through August 31st with plans to make the new limits permanent.
That is about the time I started using Claude Code as a paid account at any level. Previously I was extremely skeptical. Overall, it works and it has sorted out some things I would have probably let go for a lot longer especially with the markup on my very ancient website. Markup issues, template migrations, maintaining stringent preservation going back to HTML that was hand crafted in the late 1990s. I also learned quickly you cannot ask the magic 8 ball to solve things. You have to make it read, and plan, and then review and go back and forth with it. This can legitimately take hours. The difference is I can oft get most of the website modernized rather than just some of it following the more traditional methods. I've also seen how one can hit those limits pretty quickly, if they are going down from here that will make it less useful. And no way I am paying more on a usage credit basis. Prior to this, all my code work had been strictly with local AI as the inference engine and I can go back to that.
Edit to add: As a 3 month experiment, it has been positive. I have gotten things to work that none of the people I have hired and paid over the years took care of. And I myself have been too busy to prioritize. It's a useful tool, but only a fool would think it replaces the judgment of a professional. Not yet anyway.
To anyone like me that switches between Codex and CC based on limits, but prefers CC to Codex, PI has been really great to migrate over. It can customize itself very easily, I was expecting to have to clone the repo or whatever, but no you can just tell it "add a manual mode where you present all changes as diffs in VSCode, letting me edit them or save to accept" and it will do it.
I wish I could use my Anthropic sub with it but I heard you get banned, but at least you can use it with any other subscription or model.
I got a max account during this promotion and it's been very fun but I'm a little burned out and am kind of looking forward to going back and tinkering with game engines without the help of an LLM for code gen (will still use it for documentation questions but I can do that with the free tier)
So your dealer has cut your drugs, isn't always available when he says he's going to be, and the price is going up?
A cautionary note. Your Claude account is tied to your email address, and it cannot be changed. If you lose access to your email address (I sold the domain), you cannot access your Claude account any more, you cannot change the email address, you can't cancel it, and the billing continues.
This happened to me, so far two months without any progress with Claude support trying to resolve it. Chatbot support got no response, email support got a single response after a month saying it had been passed on to another team to resolve. Mostly just silence.
This and the word watermarking is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, me included.
Like, stop toying around with token limits and just focus on more efficient models.
Once the local models are good enough we are so abandoning these elephants.
I'm gonna walk as soon as possible.
Anthropic's struggles have only started - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/
prediction: extension of promotions because of the progressive move to codex.
Will they, though? I could see Anthropic extending it since OpenAI cut the pricing of Sol by 50% for the time being.
I’m supporting you as a company , but since grok 4.6 and codex , it’s just stupid to go with your pricing model . Cursor + grok + router that uses open ai and a bit of anthropic to verify tests etc it’s a no brainer .
Why should I pay you money , and have slower model and less intelligence? Oh yeah and I do not care about limits with cursor ultra at all . Unlike with you .
This is a very bad time for them to be doing this when other plans are being very liberal and catching up to Fable. I predict they will revert this decision once they see their sub numbers drop.
The whole thing seems pretty opaque. I have a personal Pro subscription that I'm using exclusively with Claude Code on personal projects. I have no idea how close I'm currently getting to any limits, or whether that will start happening tomorrow. Nothing I've been able to find has really clarified it either way.
I suspect the net result will be that more Pro $100 subscribers upgrade to $200/mo. If you explicitly do simpler stuff with Opus, you generally have enough Fable time for most programming and planning tasks.
Opus yesterday produced this gem: "Standing where it stood."
I replied, "never stop stopping!" and we had a stalemate, lol
I wonder if they schedule these promotions around training runs?
I saw this announcement when it came out and completely forgot about it. That explains why Claude Code felt so surprisingly generous these past few months.
I've never wanted to punch a meta physical entity in the face more, than I do Claude. I realised a lot of the AI context fatigue was from having to try and comprehend the absolute ridiculous wording. I cancelled my sub a while back (obviously).
They extended it: https://x.com/claudedevs/status/2089798442306711646
I don't know, we've been the tiny hamsters in the biggest A/B test ever, I'm possibly very tired of the token/limits game. This is clearly not how this can be monetised (if that's even possible)
I have both chatGPT pro and Claude max accounts and I am considering switching Claude for Grok. Despite all those claude hypes, for me personally, claude just does not match codex in almost all tasks, both coding and non-coding.
consumer hardware is moving towards local ai and the models you can run now locally are already at opus 4.6 level. within 3 years most pc's sold will be ai computers.
Meanwhile every time their servers go down, your caches go down with it and you can pay for your entire context again. This sucks even harder when you like to use parallel subagents.
Ah, forgot about that. I was questioning if I should switch my big subscription to ChatGPT (was on the 20$ Open AI and 100$ Claude), seems like a no brainer now
Yeah, this is going to matter for me. Most of my sessions are long scoping/architecture conversations rather than coding loops.
This might explain the outtages today, as folks race, misguidedly or not.-
I wonder if this promotion was because of the summer holidays.
two claude max subs + one codex max here, just rotate to whichever isn't capped lol
I forgot this was in effect. I’ve been hitting my weekly rate limits two to three days in because of needing to steer Slopus 5 with Fable. Absurd that they’re being cut further in the face of steep competition from open weights models.
So I upgraded to their Max 20x for nothing, then. Guess Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 it is, then.
I have already moved away from anthropic for debugging and design in general and this will force me to look elsewhere for coding too
they never made money on Claude code, it was always a way to get used recommend API access to your company
Buy a subscription, get something different every month.
I actually use claude these days mostly for mission critical tasks and code reviews. Everything else I use Sol. I have $20/month plans on both. For non-coding I also use Gemini on a $20/plan. So far I haven't had any issues but we'll see how things go. I have Qwen3.8-27B installed locally but until I upgrade my mac it's not for day to day stuff.
As we speak, Claude is down. I was already complaining about how extremely slow and dumb it has gotten since Opus 5. I guess this will be the last nail in the coffin for Claude. At least for me.
I have no idea why anyone would spend the money Anthropic asks for Claude models these days. There was a brief window in time when it was worth the money to use them a bit through GitHub Copilot, but there's no way in hell I'm spending that for Claude Sonnet when DeepSeek is basically doing all of my work right now.
Claude Opus and Fable are so bad compared to GPT-5.6-Sol it's ridiculous, their desktop client is worse, and the value is worse because OpenAI has been spamming discounts. They better get their shit together at Anthropic!
Edit: If you're mad I'm light on the details I have provided some in the replies.
Was anyone impressed by Fable? I was never wowed by anything it generated.
you guys are jumpy... relax
If Anthropic doesn't figure out why OpenAI is eating their lunch, they're in some trouble. I'm guessing they already know why, but aren't able to accept that they won't somehow come out #1. Or in fact they really believe they will still come out #1. Delusion?
The 'tokenmaxxing' and the extreme gambling fiesta with Anthropic's latest Claude Code slot machine engine called 'Fable 5' which has given many subsidies and free spins of the wheel and cheaper tokens are all incompatible with the desires of their future owner: Wall Street.
If Wall Street sees a single outage or a tiny drop in usage, they won't be happy and will pressure Anthropic to take away the free tokens.
Better to reduce the limits now rather than to wait until Wall St. tells them to just to avoid a stock punishment.
The "...aaaand it's gone" meme now applies to tokens and money at the same time. Clever AI future we live in!
And in the end, selling tokens ENCOURAGES the companies to sell more tokens. And how do they sell more tokens?
"Thinking" aka 'trust us bro!' without proof of thinking.
Making the model waste more tokens.
Advertisement: aka you pay to be advertised at.
Silently downgrading you and still faking models with the more costly tokens.
Intentional strategies to eat more tokens with no real gains.
Giving out almost-but-not-quite solutions that require another pull of the slo(t/p) machine.
Yet another scramble to use up weekly quota before an Anthropic cliff. This isn't fun.
I think the difference between the Anthropic token maximization approach (vibe code all the things!) and OpenAI's focus on efficiency, terseness and token reduction are going to be the defining features of who wins the long-term race.
My money is on the more efficient solution. Even if Anthropic can win some benchmarks by using 3x tokens over 3x time, it is a terrible base to build toward the future. Users are no longer willing to wait exponentially long for linear improvements. And as we see from some of the Chinese models, they can quickly distill frontier models with the tax of being slower and more token-guzzling, while retaining most of the quality. The real differentiators are becoming speed and efficiency, which translate to cost and user velocity more than incremental capability improvements.
It's great that frontier models can solve complex math equations, but bread and butter LLM usage (where the money is made) has already shifted from "I need the best always" to "what solves my day-to-day problems quickly and consistently". Fable usage as a percentage is flat-lining. We are already at the point where output quality is negligible. What wins going forward is cost, speed, consistency and the compounding effects of "softer" improvements to the harness.