Its funny, I've noticed the same thing, but did not come to the same conclusion.

I currently don't have work access to Claude Code, but most of my teammates do. Watching from the outside, the cycle seems to look like this:

1. Experience some success, which hooks you into relying on AI.

2. The AI keeps failing at some task, but you don't want to stop. Keep trying over and over again.

3. Run out of tokens and take a break.

Now, sometimes 1 doesn't happen. Sometimes 2 doesn't happen. 3 is a certainty though.

Now, if you told me that the productivity gain from 1 is enough to offset the loss from 2 and 3, I could believe you. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.

As I work with Claude more and gain a feel for its capabilities, I tend to run into 2 far less often, as I'll decompose my messages more for the current model limitations. The threshold also changes each release.