I’m on the Claude Code Max 5x subscription and I rarely hit my 5-hour usage limit. Today was a different story. I had two active Claude Code sessions running: apps-nrgee
- reviewing a PR skill-creator creating a custom skill using Anthropic’s “skill-creator” skill My gut told me the skill-creator session was the culprit. During the skill test/validation phase it felt like it was burning tokens fast . Within about 5 minutes my usage jumped from 5% to 79% . After I killed the skill-creator session, it crept up to 81% over the next 10 minutes, so that seemed to confirm my suspicion. But then I checked ccusage by session… and the data completely contradicts my theory: So apps-nrgee accounts for the overwhelming majority of token usage: 397M tokens and $307.60. The skill-creator session? A mere 245K tokens and $0.91. The key insight I missed: the apps-nrgee session had a massive cache read of 382,840,621 tokens. Cache reads are cheap in USD but they still count toward your usage limit. So while the dollar cost of the PR review session looked reasonable moment to moment, the token volume was enormous due to repeated large context reads. Related note: Anthropic announced doubled rate limits for Max subscribers, but I’m honestly not noticing it in practice. Today’s session hit the wall just as fast as before the announcement. Not sure if the new limits are fully rolled out yet, or if heavy agentic usage with large contexts just chews through any limit regardless. TL;DR; Don’t judge your Claude Code usage by wall-clock feel or dollar spend. Check your actual token counts with ccusage . Cache reads are nearly free in cost but still burn through your usage quota. My “suspicious” skill-creator session was innocent; the PR review with a huge context window was the real culprit. submitted by /u/OMX2000
Originally posted by u/OMX2000 on r/ClaudeCode
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