I’m fairly new to Claude Code, using the $20 Pro plan, and I’m struggling with the 5-hour limit. The weekly allowance is actually fine for me, considering the size of the projects I’m working on, but the 5-hour window feels incredibly tight when working on larger projects. For example, my usage had just reset to 0%. Claude suggested using /compact to save context, smart suggestion, so I did. Within seconds, my usage jumped to 11%, without actually getting any work done. Even worse, I’ve had sessions interrupted by the limit where, after the reset, simply telling Claude to continue what it was doing sent my usage from 0% to around 40% almost immediately, I just switched to usage tab and it was on 40% instantly. I understand that large contexts consume tokens, but burning that much allowance just to resume work seems crazy. So I’m curious how you guys handle this. Do you regularly compact, start fresh sessions, maintain handoff files, or use some other tricks? Is switching model to Sonnet or even Haiku for context compaction a thing? I’m especially interested in saving usage without sacrificing context or quality . Upgrading to Max isn’t really worth it for my projects, but I’d love to make Pro more usable during longer coding sessions. Any tips or workflows that actually work for you? submitted by /u/Global_Knee5354
Originally posted by u/Global_Knee5354 on r/ClaudeCode