The trade-off is that if you set your usage limits so that you can handle the case where everyone is saturating their limit at all times, then (1) the usage limits would be too small and (2) you're optimizing for a usage pattern that doesn't exist and (3) you're severely underprovisioning, which is worse for everyone.

Instead, you can prioritize people "earnestly" bursting to the usage limits, like the users who are actually sitting at their computer using the service over someone's server saturating the limit 24/7.

The goal is to have different tiers for manual users vs automated/programmatic tools. Not just Anthropic, this is how we design systems in general.

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goosejuice 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Well earnest here just means using Claude code directly or the Claude app. Both that just happen to support using tokens while you sleep!

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hombre_fatal 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Defining earnest (placeholder word btw) is the hard part of the trade-off, though.

When your least automated, most interactive users are competing for capacity with fully-automated tools, let's say, you're forced to define some sort of periphery between these groups.

OpenClaw is a self-directed, automated loop that sits on a server. It's wowing its owner by shitposting on moltbook and doing any number of crazy stories you can find online that amount to "omg I can't believe my self-directed claude loop spent all day doing this crazy thing haha."

On the other end of the spectrum is someone using Claude.app's interface.

And then in the middle, you can imagine "claude -p" inside a CI tool that was still invoked downstream of a user's action. Still quite different from the claude loop.

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goosejuice 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Claude code has /loop. Claude app has scheduled tasks. The leaked source has a proactive mode.

I'm sorry but this framing just doesnt make sense.

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gbear605 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even with those tools, the usage of Claude Code with all of them turned on is going to trend much lower than OpenClaw usage. Everyone that I've seen with OpenClaw will intentionally waste tokens just to make sure they hit the cap, even if they're doing useless stuff with it. And it can be going 24/7, every minute constantly, while the intended purpose with scheduled tasks is to use them at a set rate but not nearly constantly.

	▲	goosejuice 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely. They will see less usage. That's good for them because they have infra scaling issues that they don't care to admit explicitly. Their competitor will also get less telemetry (if they enable it). It's a win win.