The upcoming weekly usage limits announced by Anthropic for their Claude Code Max plans could put a dent in the workflows of many developers - especially those who’ve grown dependent on Opus-level output.
I’ve been using Claude Code for the last couple of months, though nowhere near the levels I’ve seen from the top 5% users (some of whom rack up thousands of dollars in usage per day). I don’t run multiple jobs concurrently (though I’ve experimented), and I don’t run it on Github itself. I don’t use git worktrees (as Anthropic recommends). I just focus on one task at a time and stay available to guide and assist my AI agent throughout the day.
On Friday, I decided to spend the full day using Opus exclusively across my usual two or three work projects. Nothing unusual - a typical 8-hour day, bouncing between tasks. At the end of the day, I measured my token usage using the excellent ccussage utility and this calculated what it would have cost via the API.
Then today (Monday), I repeated the experiment - this time using Sonnet exclusively. Different tasks of course, but the same projects, similar complexity, and the same eight-hour block. Again I recorded the token usage.
Here’s what I found:
- Token usage was comparable.
- Sonnet’s cost was significantly lower (no surprise)
- And the quality? Honestly, surprisingly good.
Sonnet held up well for all of my coding tasks. I even used it for some light planning work and it got the job done (not as well as Opus would have but still very very good).
Anthropic’s new limits suggest we’ll get 240-480 hours/week of Sonnet, and 24-40 hours/week of Opus. Considering a full-time work week is 40 hours, and there are a total of 168 total hours in a week, I think the following setup might actually be sustainable for most developers:
- Sonnet for hands-on coding tasks
- Sonnet + Github for code review and analysis
- Opus for high-level planning, design, or complex architectural thinking
I highly recommend you be explicit about which model you want to use for your custom slash commands and sub-agents. For slash commands there is a model attribute you can put in the command front matter. Release 1.0.63 also allows setting the model in sub-agents.
I would love to see more transparency in the Claude Code UI of where we sit in real-time against our session and weekly limits. I think if developers saw this data they would control their usage to suit. We shouldn’t need 3rd party libraries to track and report this information.
Based on this pattern, I don’t think I’ll hit the new weekly limits. But we’ll see - I’ll report back in September. And of course there is nothing stopping you from trialing other providers and models and even other agentic coding tools and really diving deep into using the best model for the job.