Dramatic quota consumption increase — 20% in 10 minutes vs full day's work yesterday #41662

Description

Dramatic and unexplained increase in quota consumption with Claude Code (Opus 4.6, Max plan $100/month, 5h window). This is starting to feel like being robbed.

Comparison: two consecutive sessions, same project

Yesterday (Session 308) — Normal consumption

• Work done: 7 review passes × 6 agents, 28 files modified, ~2420 lines added, 14 commits
• Duration: ~8 hours of active work
• Quota used: Did NOT hit the 5-hour quota limit
• Context: Full feature implementation with TDD, E2E tests, multi-agent reviews

Today (Session 309) — Abnormal consumption

• Work done: 3 review passes × 6 agents, 9 small files, ~300 lines changed, 6 commits
• Duration: ~30 minutes of active work
• Quota used: 20% of the 5-hour window in the first 10 minutes
• Context: Simple bug fix + small coding rules skill — a fraction of yesterday's workload

The math doesn't add up

Yesterday: 42 agent invocations + extensive file reads + heavy code generation → stayed under quota.
Today: 18 agent invocations on smaller files → 20% quota in 10 minutes.

Less than one tenth of yesterday's workload is consuming quota at 10x the rate. Something changed, and it wasn't communicated.

What makes this worse

A significant portion of today's quota was burned on correction passes — fixing code that Claude Code itself produced incorrectly. So I'm paying twice: once for wrong output, and again to fix it. At $100/month with a 5-hour window, every wasted token is money taken from me for work I didn't ask for.

Environment

• Claude Code CLI v2.1.88
• Model: claude-opus-4-6 (1M context)
• Plan: Max ($100/month, 5h usage window)
• OS: macOS Darwin 24.6.0

What I need

1. A clear explanation of what changed in quota calculation between March 30 and March 31, 2026
2. Visibility on per-call token consumption (currently hidden from the user)
3. The quota model restored to what it was — or at minimum, advance communication when pricing/metering changes

I've been a paying customer building a real project with Claude Code for 4 months. This kind of silent degradation is unacceptable.