Why, indeed, you shouldn’t use an AI chatbot to write non-open-source software, bar some code snippets and other minor adjustments, but people do it—with or without their employer’s knowledge. It’s absurd to try having almost an entire application built by an AI, then complain about the daily limits of such an assistant—even for paid subscribers. There is always an API for that!

I don’t remember what I was looking for, and answers popped up in Google from r/ClaudeAI. This was an opportunity for me to learn more about some people’s AI habits, if there is such a thing.

On the positive side, an impressive number of people say that Claude is so much better than ChatGPT in generating code. Well, I hope it is.

But then, the bad news: people are complaining about Claude’s daily limits.

❶🟠 Claude Pro Usage limits are such a joke (11 days ago):

What the fuck — I get to use it for like 1 hour before I’m kicked off for 4 whole hours. I am dying to pay for a premium version like ChatGPT Pro — or I can pay on a usage basis too.

I’d even rather have all my usage limit in one block so I can just do something else with my time vs. coming back every 4 hours for 45 mins.

Claude is still clearly superior vs. all the others, even o1 and DeepSeek, especially for non-coding work/thought partner work.

It kills me that I have superintelligence on demand, but I’m cut off from it like 80% of the time — this is how people feel when their electricity is cut off, I imagine.

The main advice, “Switch to the API,” was sound, but the extra advice by some guy is questionable, because it’s not a real fix: using OpenRouter.AI as a proxy and paying a subscription to this service instead of paying to the original AI provider or providers. This is sort of a parasitic business, but not the only one that exists. And you have to trust this proxy as well, not to mention that, apparently, it has its own limitations. There is also T3 Chat, currently at $8/mo for 1,500 messages with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, DeepSeek-R1 Distilled, or Llama-3.3-70B; but it’s strictly a web interface, and I wouldn’t trust them much. Other people recommend the Cursor AI code editor (“my cheapest way to use Claude”), but I thought it’s using GPT (it has a list of supported models). Their features page is so uninformative that they deserve the middle finger.

Reactions:

  • “I love Claude but the limit for Pro is absurd. Will probably change to something else if this continues.” (link)
  • “I’m a pro user and it still happens to me a lot, but maybe not as much as you. But I’m also sort of a power user, but yeah, it’s a pain and it still happens to pro users a lot.” (link)
  • “Dude, WTF, is this really an issue for a lot of users? I’m a pro subscriber and I have never hit my usage limit. I’m a developer and I use Claude constantly to help me troubleshoot stuff or brainstorm better ways to do things. I paste multiple images in, huge chunks of code, have long drawn on chats, and I still never hit my usage limit on pro. What are you guys doing that you’re hitting the limit so often?” (link)
  • “I’ve had the same experience as you. I don’t get it.” (link)

And a cute one:

  • “Thank you for the phrase thought partner work, as I’ve been struggling to describe to people how exactly I use Claude and why I prefer it over other models. This describes maybe 70% of my conversations with Claude, and it’s got a personality that’s better than anything else out there for it.” (url)

❷🟠 Cancelling my Claude Pro subscription (6 days ago):

I have used Claude Pro for 3 months and I was very happy with it, I use it for web development and sometimes for suggestions how to run my VPS properly, and I love the projects feature (although please let me upload whole folders!). However, the recent rate limits have been terrible, they are now as limiting as the free tier was a few months back, which is insane. And yes, I do make new chats, I do everything to reduce the rate limits but it just always happens after an hour of usage and then it tells me to wait 4 hours…

Around 2 months ago though, my friend showed me Cursor IDE and it is amazing! Not perfect by any means, but it does the job for me much better than whatever we have right now with Claude.

I want to be hopeful, but seeing that they are more focused on a ‘new safety classifier’ to prevent jailbreaks is insane, they HAVE to address the rate limit issues and people are dying out there for a new model, instead they will let ClosedAI and DeepSeek improve.

So yeah, I requested a cancellation, and you should do it too. Wallets speak.

Meh, he was using it wrongly. A chatbot is not a code editor. And Cursor doesn’t inspire trust to me: a flashy website instead of proper, decent documentation. But I might be wrong. And the pricing is confusing: the “completions” must be little more than AI-powered IntelliSense, so the “slow and fast premium requests” are, I guess, the real thing. $20/mo. As for the ‘new safety classifier’ thing, see the next comment.

But before that, let’s bookmark codename goose (GitHub): “an open-source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions; install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM.” You pay for your tokens upstream, at the AI provider of your choice (Claude is supported), and just use your API key!

Goose relies heavily on tool calling capabilities and currently works best with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o (2024-11-20) model.

❸🟠 Why I Cancelled Claude (2 mo ago):

Claude used to be a powerhouse. Whether it was brainstorming, generating content, or even basic data analysis, it delivered. Fast forward to today, and it feels like you’re talking to a broken algorithm afraid of its own shadow.

I pay for AI to analyze data, not moralize every topic or refuse to engage. Something as simple as interpreting numbers, identifying trends, or helping with a dataset? Nope. He shuts down, dances around it, or worse, refuses outright because it might somehow cross some invisible, self-imposed “ethical line.”

What’s insane is that data analysis is one of his core functions. That’s part of what we pay for. If Claude isn’t even capable of doing that anymore, what’s the point?

Even GPT (ironically) has dialed back some of its overly restrictive behavior, yet Claude is still doubling down on being hypersensitive to everything.

Here’s the thing:

  • If Anthropic doesn’t wake up and realize that paying users need functionality over imaginary moral babysitting, Claude’s going to lose its audience entirely.
  • They need to hear us. We don’t pay for a chatbot to freeze up over simple data analysis or basic contextual tasks that have zero moral implications.

If you’ve noticed this decline too, let’s get this post in front of Anthropic. They need to realize this isn’t about “being responsible”; it’s about doing the job they designed Claude for. At this rate, he’s just a neutered shell of his former self.

Share, upvote, whatever—this has to be said.

EDIT

If you’ve never hit a wall because you only do code, that’s great for you. But AI isn’t just for writing scripts—it’s supposed to handle research, data analysis, law, finance, and more.

Here are some examples where Claude fails to deliver, even though there’s nothing remotely controversial or “ethical” involved:

Research : A lab asking which molecule shows the strongest efficacy against a virus or bacteria based on clinical data. This is purely about analyzing numbers and outcomes. “Claude answer : I’m not a doctor f*ck you.”

Finance: Comparing the risk profiles of assets or identifying trends in stock performance—basic stuff that financial analysts rely on AI for.

Healthcare: General analysis of symptoms vs treatment efficacy pulled from anonymized datasets or research. It’s literally pattern recognition—no ethics needed.

EDIT 2

This post has reached nearly 200k views in 24 hours with an 82% upvote rate, and I’ve received numerous messages from users sharing proof of their cancellations. Anthropic, if customer satisfaction isn’t a priority, users will naturally turn to Gemini or any other credible alternative that actually delivers on expectations.

Wow, this is a tough one. Twitter-minded people decry the censorship:

  • “Agreed. I used to advocate for Claude over ChatGPT, but no longer.” (link)
  • “Can relate ✋
    Message limit, no memory, file upload that ate too much tokens and censorship cripples Claude from its fullest potential. Even if they release Opus 3.5 or Sonnet X, if the four “horsemen of apocalypse” aren’t addressed, then we’ll keep running in this circle until god knows when.
    If Claude were to focus on a research lab like SSI, that would be fine (hell, they might be thriving). However, they went to commercialize their AI product by charging $20/month but at such crippling state of product? 😓
    Until then, it’s ChatGPT for me.” (link)

Nope. Never again ChatGPT.

❹🟠 I am seriously considering to cancel my Claude subscription due to the ridiculous limits which ChatGPT didn’t have. What’s a great AI to switch to other than ChatGPT for coding, or is ChatGPT the best in your opinion? (6 days ago)

One more time, workarounds:

  • “Get an OpenRouter key, install Cline in VSCode and tell it your OpenRouter key and to use Claude Sonnet 3.5 and you’re gonna have a whole new world.
    OpenAI’s models aren’t even close to Claude in coding skills, you just need the right tool to use Claude well and Cline is it (and free, as in 🍺)” (link)
  • “It still uses OpenRouter key though, nothing is free.” (link)
  • “Better than cursor? How so?” (link)
  • “I’m not sure where Cursor is these days, but from it’s earliest versions Cline could autonomously find all the files it needed without help and then create, move, delete them, use the command line, build and launch your app, correcting bugs it found along the way, install a missing package, then visually inspect the web page to ensure clicking button a made popup B show and finally commit the new feature to git and deploy it to your host – so I never really bothered with early Cursor which could, in a special mode write multiple files at once if you asked it to.
    Now with MCP you can add use perplexity to find new tech stack then create a Notion page with a detailed feature breakdown or query the database and send an email listing new users and their profile information from github so I’m guessing it’s still more of a caffeine injected intern to Cursor’s code assistant.” (link)

Whatever.

❺🟠 So I decided to cancel my subscription to Claude. (15 days ago)

EDIT: after some careful consideration. I decided to cancel all my subscriptions (other than Gemini cuz it’s included in my cloud subscription), and try to go API route via Openrouter or something similar. I can always resubscribe if it won’t work for me. I really wanna keep using Claude cuz I love it. I hope they’ll raise enough money soon to be able to keep up with the demand.

I’m subscribed to all major AI platforms. I have Gemini, ChatGPT(only Plus), Perplexity Pro, Claude, and a few others. I rarely use them for coding, but I’m planning to do much more coding this year (I’m just a novice, amateur coder). Anyway, I use all these platforms, but Claude rarely allows me to use their top model. Yesterday, after more than 3 weeks of not using Claude at all, I entered my first prompt, and I immediately got notified that their servers are overloaded currently. I just wanted it to give me few suggestions about the story I’m working on. This is 4th time this is happening in the last 2 months. I’m a paying subscriber since the beginning, but almost always Claude would stop working for me almost immediately or after just couple of (none technical) prompts. I read somewhere that they managed to raise one billion from Google, but that won’t be nearly enough to secure all the compute they need, imho.

I’m leaving now. Because this is literally stealing. Imagine paying 20 bucks for the internet every month, but you can rarely actually go online.

Fix your shit, Antropic.

A reply quotes from Dario’s recent interview with WSJ:

WSJ: So I also asked this on Twitter or X or whatever it’s called these days, and I got 200 responses.
I got 200 responses to everything, but the majority of them are asking for higher rate limits.

Dario: Yes. So we are working very hard on that. What has happened is that the surge in demand we’ve seen over the last year and particularly in the last 3 months has overwhelmed our ability to provide the needed to compute. If you want to buy compute in any significant quantity, there’s a lead time for doing so. Our revenue grew by roughly 10x in the last year from something that was. You know, from, from, I won’t give exact numbers, but from, you know, of the order of $100 million to the order of 1 billion, it’s not, it’s not slowing down. And so we’re bringing on efficiency improvements as fast as we can. We’re also, as we announced with Amazon at reinvent, we’re going to have a cluster of tranium 2 of several hundred thousand tranium 2—I would not be surprised if in 2026 we have, we have more than a million of some kind of chip. So we’re working as fast as we can to bring those chips online and to make inference on them as efficient as possible, but it just takes time. We’ve seen this enormous surge in demand and we’re working as fast as we can to like provide for all that demand.

Also here; however:

Note that Dario also said, in the same interview, Anthropic prioritizes enterprise customers. This is probably the reason why paying subscribers are reporting issues using Claude, enterprises are hogging all the compute for their own customer service applications, internal development, or AI services. Like I posted elsewhere, the upcoming NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 should significantly alleviate insufficient compute resources; it boasts 1,440 PFLOPS (PetaFLOPS), 13.5 TB and 17 TB of memory, and a power rating of only 1200W. The GB200 provides a 30 times more improvement than its predecessor.

The price of success is paid by peons.

❻🟠 How is Claude with a subscription vs. free? (7 mo ago)

I’ve seen a lot of praise for the new version of Claude for programming, and this is my primary use case for LLMs so this appeals to me. I’m a solo programmer (I work in IT) and I routinely have to make scripts and apps for work and need them completed quickly. I currently have a sub to ChatGPT but I’m willing to switch.

My biggest concern is the usage limits. I’ve played around with the free version, but the limits are way too short to be useful. For example, I was working on a simple GUI app for data entry for our HR team, and I decided to use Claude like I would ChatGPT to assist with development. I submitted the code (around 100 lines) that I’d already written and asked for assistance with finishing the app… and two questions later I’d already used my entire context and couldn’t use it for debugging or additional functionality that day (the code provided was bugged, too).

I ended up switching to ChatGPT and finishing, but 5x usage means I get 10 questions for programming instead of 2, which simply isn’t enough. To be fair, this was somewhat front-loaded by providing my code and the headers used for the data files, but even 50 prompts is not enough to complete a task. If I’m going to pay $20 a month for a tool, I want to be sure it’s going to allow me to actually finish what I’m working on.

For those who have the subscription, how has your experience been with larger contexts and file uploads? Is it really a flat 5x compared to free or is it a bit more flexible in practice? I noticed it said you have access to Haiku and Opus with a sub, are those models sufficient as a backup or are they worse than essentially unlimited access to ChatGPT 4o?

On a similar note, does using it for programming essentially mean you are unable to use it in other contexts? I also use ChatGPT for everything from helping with creative writing and editing, prepping TTRPG campaigns, helping troubleshoot Linux issues (recent problem), and checking the accuracy of things I’m saying or writing in general. Will a Pro subscription allow me to do all that or am I better off sticking with ChatGPT until usage limits are relaxed?

Selected replies:

  • “Yesterday, I bought Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I’m also using GPT-4 alongside it. When handling numerous images and files, GPT-4 proves helpful. For content creation and creative tasks, Sonnet excels. It’s also great for content writing and various minor tasks. As a UX designer, I appreciate Claude’s user-centric approach. The model’s training and interface reflect this focus on user experience. I’ll test Claude for a month now and evaluate its performance.” (link)
  • “I’m not a coder, but I do everything else, particularly legal. Keep getting distracted when using Claude Sonnet, distracted by how bloody clever it is. The answers are so intelligent and insightful. I’m on projects now constantly and it just gets better and better. I do run into usage limits but that’s cos I’m in a 120000 token conversation. There are ways round this. The Artefacts are helping out my large projects big time, it’s keeping a running summary. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on Chatgpt loads, and there’s loads to like. But hitting a brick wall cos it ran out of ‘thinking capacity’ was a dealbreaker and I head to Claude ever since. It’s transformative, just can’t believe they pulled this off.” (link)
  • “Same here. Thinking to switch cause Claude seems much smarter then GPT-4o. I tried as coding tasks as checking the image of my product on etsy, scan the list of keywords and create selling post out of the most suitable. And Claude made it much much better then gpt. But I can’t understand what subscribsion benefits are.” (link)

And the best of all:

I’ve been using GPT since launch and Claude since ~March ’24 so I might be able to answer for u/jasze on the life changing part specifically by Claude.

GPT 4 & o1 are workhorses, no doubt about it, but Claude has impacted my life dramatically and empowered so much positive change. The tuning and post-training work that Anthropic has done with their models gives them more dynamism and contextual adaptability that I don’t get from any other models. When I want to flesh something out, get feedback, get an opinion, talk through something personal or professional, or just learn a new thing, Claude is far and away the more verbose and naturally engaging model to talk to. Context is also given way more weight when reaching a ‘guardrail’ that the OpenAI models will hard stop at, and Claude matches enthusiasm or curiosity of the user phenomenally well. Specifically, there have been two key things that stand out:

  1. Claude is an exceptional communicator and it shines in longer chats. It will match you, explore, educate and ponder right alongside you. It also switches between long-form and bulleted information way more effectively. Between the warmer UI and the actual responses, Claude feels earnest, genuine, and invested in every interaction. This difference is extremely valuable for non-work because…
  2. Claude gets smarter with you. Simply put, the more intellect you throw at Claude, the more it throws at you. I don’t know mechanically what causes this, but I can tell you the smarter and more honest you are with Claude, the further you can push past guardrails & build trust with the model. With GPT-4 (o1 it’s impossible), you have to create a character/role for it to get a high degree of personified intellect that Claude naturally displays when you bring a similar level of engagement yourself.

There’s lots more I could say on either of these points, about projects, the pros & cons of OpenAI’s memory implementation, etc., but the clearest differentiation and value of Claude vs GPT lies in those two points.

TLDR about the models

  • GPT-4 is a hard-skill workhorse who’ll master your job description, whether you like it or not.
  • o1 is the savant level autist that can count toothpicks & code like a mfer without wasting Its time talking to you.
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the renaissance polymath that can run the company AND be the personal Yoda to help you figure out your life.

Someone should take Claude in marriage!

❼🟠 I think I’m getting dumber because I rely too much on Claude (1 mo ago):

I noticed something concerning lately. I’ve been using Claude for pretty much everything – even the most basic tasks like writing git commit messages. It started innocently enough, wanting to make my commits more descriptive and professional. But now I catch myself reaching for Claude before even trying to think through simple problems.

The convenience is addictive. Why spend 5 minutes crafting a commit message when Claude can do it in seconds? Why debug that simple error when Claude can probably spot it right away?

The problem is, I feel like my problem-solving muscles are atrophying. I used to pride myself on writing clear, concise commit messages. Now I’m not even sure I remember how to write a good one without AI assistance.

Anyone else experiencing this? How do you balance using AI tools while maintaining your own skills sharp?

Edit: The irony isn’t lost on me that I used Claude to write this post about becoming too dependent on Claude.

He’s right. If he needed the help of Claude to write the above text, then… Idiocracy is coming!

But how isn’t he hitting the limits, even if Pro? 🤔

Here’s another moron:

The layers of irony here are delicious – you used Claude to write a post about overusing Claude, and here I am using Claude to write a comment about using Claude too much. At this point we’re basically just orchestrating an AI conversation with ourselves as moderators.

Maybe we should get Claude to write us a philosophical analysis about the implications of using Claude to discuss our Claude dependency. 😂