> pressures users to hoard

As a pedantic note, I would say 'ration'. Things you hoard don't magically go away after some period of time.

Anthropic also does this because they will dynamically change the limits to manage load. Tools like ccusage show you how much you've used and I can tell sometimes that I get limited with significantly lower usage than I would usually get limited for.

OpenAI's "PRO" subscription is really a waste of money IMHO for this and other reasons.

Decided to give PRO a try when I kept getting terrible results from the $20 option.

So far it's perhaps 20% improved in complex code generation.

It still has the extremely annoying ~350 line limit in its output.

It still IGNORES EXPLICIT CONTINUOUS INSTRUCTIONS eg: do not remove existing comments.

The opaque overriding rules that - despite it begging forgiveness when it ignores instructions - are extremely frustrating!!

I think the simple product prioritization explanation makes way more sense than a a second-order conspiracy to trick people into hoarding.

Reality is probably that there’s a backlog item to implement a view, but it’s hard to prioritize over core features.

I don't think this counts as a "dark pattern". The reality is that these services are resource constrained, so they are trying to build in resource limits that are as fair as possible and prevent people from gaming the system.

Well, kind of. If you don't use it at all you're going to unsubscribe.

This isn't like a gym membership where people join aspirationally. No one's new year's resolution is "I'm going to use o3 more often."

Noticed that my productive usage of CoPilot dropped like a brick, after they introduced those limits. You feel constantly on the clock, and being forced to constantly change models gets tiresome very fast.

Unless you use "free" GPT 4.1 like MS wants you (not the same as Claude, even with Beast Mode). And how long is that going to be free, because it feels like a design to simply push you to a MS product (MS>OpenAI) instead of third party.

So what happens a year from now? Paid GPT 5.1? With 4.1 being removed? If it was not for the insane prices of actual large mem GPUs and the slowness of large models, i will be using LLMs at home. Right now MS/Antropic/OpenAI are right in that zone where its not too expensive yet to go full local LLM.

Found it: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9824962-openai-o3-and-o4...

That's definitely not correct because I'm on the pro plan and make extensive use of o3-pro for coding. I've sent 100 messages in a single day with no limitation.

Per their website: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9793128-what-is-chatgpt-...

There are no usage caps on pro users (subject to some common sense terms of use).

No it's 100 a week for plus users.

I think it’s just a mistype

I have a pro plan and I hammer o3–I’d guess more than a hundred a day sometimes—and have never run into limits personally

Wouldn’t shock me if something like that happened but haven’t seen evidence of it yet

Code

Claude daily limit sure didn't.

I think this is different. Yes, 3rd party tools and services are nothing new. Depending on 3rd party libraries is also a standard thing, although minimum dependency is generally considered a good practice. But all these services provide something you don't want to do yourself and are willing to pay. They all complement what you do, and don't replace your core competency.

Apple is your business partner, doing marketing and distribution for you, and shares its user base. Bloomberg terminals provide real time data and UI to non-technical finance people. Github provides you Git hosting service so you don't need to setup and maintain servers. MATLAB (although there are Octave, Python and open alternatives) sells numerical computation environment to non-CS engineers. Xilinx is sells its hardware and dev tools. Game devs use Unity because they want to focus on gameplay and not game engine development.

These are all the examples of Division of Labor. This time, however, you have to pay for your core competency, because you cannot compete with a good AI coder in the long run. The value you provide diminishes to almost nothing. Yes you can write prompts, but anyone, even a mediocre LLM can write prompts these days. If you need some software, you don't need to hire SW engineers anymore. A handful of vendors dominate the SW development market. Yes, you can switch. But only between the 3 or 4 tech giants. It's an Oligopoly.

If we have FOSS alternatives, at least we can build new services around them and can move on to this new era. We can adapt. Otherwise, we become a human frontend between the client and the AI giants.

That's a good remark. As my sibling said, backend and web dev.

But indeed it always struck me that some developpers decided to become Apple developpers and sacrifice 30% of everything they ever produce to Apple.

I would argue that it might a bit different though, because when doing iOS development it's possible that you don't lose you core skill, which is building software, and that you can switch to another platform with relative ease. What I think might happen with LLM is that people will lose the core skill (maybe not for the generation who did do LLM-less development, but some devs might eventually not ever know other ways to work, and will become digital vassals of whatever service managed to kill all others)

backend web services devops frontend javascript

just three possible examples

Do their motorbikes stop working in the middle of the week if they make too many deliveries or ask them to pay multiple the base rate for the remaining time?

You ignore the fact that there are many suppliers there with plenty of competition.

The 'take me from A to N' is a pretty broad problem that can have many different solutions. Is that comparable?

We can all see this end up in a oligopoly, no?

That's a big if. People might feel faster because there is more "movement", but it's not clear if overall they are actually signicantly faster (though everyone would like us to believe so).

And note that I objected online services, local LLM don't have the same issues.

Has it? We don't use GitHub in my company, but our self hosted Gitlab occasionally goes down, and while it prevents us from merging (including doing code reviews) and deploying code, it does not prevent us from doing most of our work (ie designing and creating software). It merely delays the moment when things are shipped.

If you meant goes down for good, then I'm sure it would be annoying for a few weeks for the FOSS ecosystem, just the time to migrate elsewhere, but there is not much GitHub specific we would really miss.

>Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.

Funny story: The widespread of Knorr soup stock already made people unable to cook their own stock soup, or even worse, the skill to season their soup from just basic, fresh ingredients.

Source: my mom.

For the industry as a whole it absolutely does. And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice.

And yes, the goal might be to only use it for boilerplate or first draft. But that's today, people are lazy, just wait for the you of tomorrow

If you don't use a skill, it atrophies.

Now, maybe that is the future (no more/extremely little human-written code). Maybe that's a good thing in the same way that "x technological advancement means y skill is no longer necessary" - like how the advent of readily-accessible live maps means you don't need to memorize street intersections and directions or whatever. But it is true.

My experience was that reviewing generated code can take longer than writing it from scratch.

There was research about vibe coding that had similar conclusion. Feels productive but can take longer to review.

the moment you generate code you don't instantly understand you are better off reading the docs and writing it yourself

As a $20 month user, I can tell you in my experience it's "refactoring" jobs that really smash through those tokens quickly. If you do a "write a component that does this" kinda thing, you can use the $20 plan almost an unlimited amount of time. If you are doing "find all instances of ComponentFoo, change to ComponentBar, refactor each screen for correct usage of ComponentBar" kinda things, it's going to grep through your code, find multiple files, read all of them into context and start making changes one by one and/or spin up a subagent to do it. You'll be rate limited pretty quick doing things that way.

$20/mo plan doesn't include opus (the larger model) like the $100+ plans do, it's likely they are hitting the opus limit which is fairly low.

I set claude about writing docstrings on a handful of files - 4/5 files couple 100 lines each - couple of classes in each - it didnt need to scan codebase (much).

Low danger task so I let it do as it pleased - 30 minutes and was maxed out. Could probably have reduced context with a /clear after every file but then I would have to participate.

no opus in claude code on my el'cheapo plan ($20 - pro) - used it occasionally in claude desktop and its as expensive as they advertise.

I would probably show up in their metrics as an active user and one of the 95% but I barely use the product. I have a Pro subscription which I use for personal projects but I do very little, maybe using it once a week for a short session. At work I use Cursor via a corporate account.

I imagine there are lots of people like me who have a subscription to be aware of the product and do some very light work, but the "real" users who rely on the tool might be badly affected by this.

  … if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

I can personally think of a few internally licensed products, announced with huge fan fare, which never get used beyond the demo to a VP.

Sharing Netflix passwords was literally a common enough phonomena that it purt of Netflix's advertising, that's a very unique case that I don't expect to be happening for Anthropic.

What was the name of that CLI tool?

fair enough - DS probably ran through data and came up with 5% and some weekly cutoff as a good starting point until they have better measures in place

my point is that 5% still a large cohort and they happen to be your most excited/creative cohort. they might not all want to pay a surchage yet while everyone is discovering the use cases / patterns / etc

having said that, entirely possible burn rate math and urgency requires this approach

I've noticed the frequent perf issues and I'm on the 20x plan myself - good point that you'd want to stop the bleeding or bad actors to make sure the majority have a better experience

5% of a large number is a large number - this why it's both a significant problem for them and why I'm thinking out loud about the downsides of discouraging good actors who happen to be power users.

that 5% is probably the most creative and excited cohort. obviously it's critical to not make the experience terrible for the 95% core, but i'd hate to lose even a minority of the power users who want to build incredible things on the platform

having said that, the team is elite, sure they are thinking about all angles of this issue

"You're absolutely right!" i misread the announcement - thought everyone moved to primarily a weekly window but seems like 5hr window still in place and they're putting in place another granularity level control that DS teams will adjust to cutoff mostly bad actors.

correct me if I'm wrong, it's not like we have visibility into the token limit logic, even on the 5hr window?

At a bare minimum there needs to be some way to understand how close you are to these limits. People shouldn’t be wondering if this is going to impact them or not.

It’s tricky without seeing the actual data. 5% of a massive user base can still be a huge number so I get that it’s hard to be surgical.

But those power users are often your most creative, most productive, and most likely to generate standout use cases or case studies. Unless they’re outright abusing the system, I’d lean toward designing for them, not against them.

if the concern is genuine abuse, that feels like something you handle with escalation protocols: flag unusual usage, notify users, and apply adaptive caps if needed. Blanket restrictions risk penalizing your most valuable contributors before you’ve even discovered what they might build

i've gotten months of usage out of openai and claude where i seeded each with only $5

but if you use an agent and it tries to include a 500kb json file, yeah, you will light cash on fire

(this happened to me today but the rate limit bright it to my attention.)

you spend 400$ per month on api usage, but your AI builds the next unicorn worth billions, where is the problem?

With one months exception, I've never gotten past $150 with API. I plan to do the $100 plan and use the API for overflow. I think I will come out ahead.

Which is why I said I see how it could be a problem :)

Ms word does this by default