I've found with opus 4.6 which im still stubbornly using i can burn about 10% of the weekly within a 5 hour window with my workflow.
Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day which results in me not using that much early in the week so i can kinda "burn freely" later on. which leads me to a spot where usually on the final two days im sorta thinking about how can i expend that usage ive "saved".
the 5 hour windows make this harder, sometimes the final day of the week im trying to get that 10% in every 5 hour window of my waking hours and i HATE that, i wanna work when i am most productive, not around some ridiculous window of time, i dont wanna think "I am gonna be utilizing claude the most around 11am so i should send a dumb message to haiku to get my 5 hour window started at 7:30am so i can have it roll over at 12:30."
So im happy about this change sure. But it is 100% them creating a problem and pretending having some relief from that problem is them doing their users a favor. I understand they are doing it to lower peak hours usage and all that, I still despise it.
People are waisting tokens by using Opus for everything.
Using Advisor [1], you can use Sonnet most of time; Sonnet can handoff work it can't handle to Opus. When Opus is done, you automatically go back to Sonnet.
[1]: https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/claude-code-advisor-strategy-...
I think the main reason that workflow has not worked for me is because im using an ide version of claude code, which means my main agent isn't a crafted agent and is "stock" sonnet or "stock" opus. I'll likely swap to the cli version soon enough and see if that remedies it (this isn't laziness on my part, i instead learned opencode workflows first because it applies more broadly, the only limitation is usage of a claude subscription within it).
So with the stock sonnet i get the chatty confidently wrong sonnet instead of a strict crafted agent. Stock Opus is a lot more reasonable, and hands off simple tasks to crafted sonnet agents with the chatty and more strict workflows, so i guess im literally doing the opposite(closer to what that old article describes).
I rarely use Opus for planning (in the Pro plan). Spec a feature in Sonnet, hand it to Haiku, come back for review. That’s a 5-hour window gone, sometimes 2.
I hit my weekly limit around day 4, with 2 maxed out windows per day (and sometimes a bit of usage at night).
I completely understand why people would use Opus for everything, it’s much more thorough and effective. Sonnet as well, but on Pro it’s gonna be Haiku all the time.
my workflow allows for about 10 windows being maxed out each week(if this threads claim is true that is now 5 windows), i always use Opus for planning and just have strict rules for delegation when its actually crafting the code.
I have a pretty nailed down .claude/ where the goal is single sources of truth, so agent md files all reference the relevant files for what domain they are working within with that domain's conventions and structure etc, i think keeping this stuff up to date is massive compounding context savings, as well as just better for performance because it keeps all agents context windows free of noise by helping them only load in what is actually needed.
I've never really messed with haiku for anything besides absolute low end repetitive tasks, its usually an agent i have crafted when i want to ask it to generate a bunch of seed data or generic questions for tests or something similar. My assumption is that it would just be terrible and even though its super cheap, it is still inevitably bringing the final results back to the better models and if thats not valuable tokens then im wasting the haiku tokens and the passoff to the better models with work that will be repeated anyway.
> Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day
20%, there are 5 work days in a week, not 7.
weird distinction to make when replying to someone talking about their own personal usage of the weekly limit that is a 7 day window of time.