I found this exchange both entertaining and informative. Appreciate you sharing an insider's perspective (while also acknowledging I have no possible way to verify if any of this is even true).
Heh... thanks. I don't expect anyone to just believe this information verbatim; as you said, I'm just some rando on HN. But I did offer to discuss it privately with @simonw.
I've been on 5x for a couple of months and the closest I've got to my weekly limits is 75%. I've hit 5-hr limits twice (expected). I'm a solo dev that uses CC anywhere from 8-12+ hr each day, 7 days a week. I've never experienced any of the issues others complain about other than the feeling that my sessions feel a little more rushed. I'd say that overall I have very dialed-in context management which includes: breaking work across sessions in atomic units, svelte claude.md/rules (sub 150 lines), periodic memory audit/cleanup, good pre-compact discipline, and a few great commands that I use to transfer knowledge effectively between sessions, without leaving a trailing pile of detritus. Some may say that this is exhaustive, but I don't find it much different than maintaining Agile discipline.
I know limits have been nerfed, but c'mon it's $20. The fact that you were able to implement two smallish features in an iOS app in 15 minutes seems like incredible value.
At $20/month your daily cost is $0.67 cents a day. Are you really complaining that you were able to get it to implement two small features in your app for 67 cents?
That last sentence didn't make sense so I'm not sure what your point is. But I'll run with the analogy.
You got into a taxi and they were charging you horse carriage prices initially. They're still not charging you for a full taxi ride but people are complaining because their (mistaken) assumption was that taxis can be provided as cheaply as horse carriages.
People are angry because their expectations were not managed properly which I understand.
But many of us realized that $20 or even $200 was far too low for such advanced capabilities and are not that surprised that all of the companies are raising prices and decreasing usage limits.
OpenAI is not far behind, they're simply taking their time because they're okay with burning through capital more quickly than Anthropic is, and because OpenAI's clearly stated ambition is to win market share, not to be a responsibly, sustainably run company.
Shortly after I ran out of credits in 15 min, they tweeted that they increased usage limits to compensate for the higher token usage, so perhaps it is not as bad now.
Codex, this afternoon, I was able to use for like two hours on the $20 plan. Maybe limits will be tighter in the future. But with new data centers, new GPU generations, and research advances it might rather get cheaper.
Anyway, as you said, this is all pretty cheap. I'll go with the $100 Codex plan, since I now figured out how to nicely work on multiple changes in parallel via the Codex app with worktrees. I imagine the same is possible in Claude Code.
It seems to me a bit naive to think OpenAI would not increase prices/decrease usage limits at some point. $20 might cover a very small fraction of the actual cost that is incurred over a month of sustained usage.
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