If Claude usage limits are this important to your life, it seems a little smarter to just bite the Claude Max bullet. Isn't an ordinary sleep schedule easily worth $180/month difference?
Not sure if it's full on satire, slightly outrageous ideas expressed in fanciful language for the fun of it, or the writing of a true believer. Fun read, good luck with the stealth B2B!
Literally the first thing I thought when I read how claude counts usage is "I need to set up a cron job to do one claude request before I wake up, so my work day is split in half on the 7 hour bucket times. So probably 5AM, my tokens reset at 12, then reset again at 7.
Ah yes, polyphasic sleep. Like the classic Seinfeld episode [0].
Inspired by this, a buddy of mine tried "DaVinci Sleep" at our residential high school, and lasted a week before he crashed for 20 hours and went back to a normal schedule.
Apropos of nothing, he's now a very well regarded academic - in an unrelated field.
To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available.
I experimented with polyphasic sleep for a few months. It was really interesting to experience time as more continuous, not broken up into days.
I gave it up because I found it wasn't very fault tolerant. If I missed a bedtime even by just a few hours, or ate before trying to sleep, I was in a bad state for a day or two until I could get back on track.
A while back, I had a big paper deadline a week away and knew I didn’t have enough time to finish without sacrificing sleep.
Rather than cutting my sleep short, I decided to stick with 7–8 hours of rest and instead lengthen my wake window. I worked out a schedule that gave me six nights of sleep across seven days. It meant waking up at stranger and stranger times as the week went on, and getting some odd looks from my roommates when I emerged from my room. But in the end, it was totally worth it. I was waking up well-rested and ready to tackle those extra-long days.
The effort paid off 100%. Not only did I make the deadline, but my paper was accepted as well. A year later, that same paper helped me get into my PhD program of choice.
It’s funny how these short bursts of intense effort can sometimes have such a big impact.
Worked for me, too, in similar circumstances. 30-32 hours with 8-9 hours of sleep and 21-24 hours of activity is a somehow better sleep/activity ratio, closer to 1/4 than to 1/3. More important for me were longer stretches of uninterrupted concentration time. Likely it's not important in the vibe-coding case.
LOL, this is the most brilliant, unhinged productivity hack I've seen all year. What's next? Moving to a different time zone to get more GPT-5 credits? I'm taking notes.
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.
It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.
It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.
A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.
Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.
> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.
It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
Some of the happiest and most satisfied people I know are academics who work 80+ hours a week because they love what they do. You don't need to sacrifice health to work more than 50 hours a week. And realistically there is no long term health damage from what he is doing. And yes you can trade money for better health, though in the first world you rapidly hit diminishing returns but if your sleep deprivation can make the difference between being able to afford good health care or moving to an area with less pollution it absolutely can trade off like that.
If I never sacrificed health for money, I'd be broke and homeless. My job requires that I be in the office 8 hours a day, even if my body doesn't like it
Why isn't simply getting another Claude account an option that you've tried before damaging your brain with low quality sleep?
Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?
I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.
I believe both behaviors violate the Terms of Service - it's generally frowned on to create multiple accounts to work around usage limits, and I know the TOS prohibited scripted interactions designed to maximize 24/7 usage (the subscriptions are very much based on the assumption that you will "be normal" about them)
And yet businesses seem to have no trouble paying for multiple accounts. I’m sure OP could register as a business or even recruit a friend to pay for an account on his behalf. I don’t think Anthropic cares as long as you’re paying them for the two accounts…
Writing sofwtware is hard already, with such dependence on shitty AI code generation we must brace for the advent of the worst code ever era. Security and performance wise it will be a mess.
It is worth remembering that before artificial lighting the normal sleep pattern is to sleep in two segments and get up in the middle to have sex, talk, do some chores, change the baby etc. And I believe a normal sleep cycle is something like 90 minutes so if you *really* sleep in 3 hour chunks that's actually probably healthier than the normal us sleep schedule. I mean many of us find the usual wake at 7am alarm schedule to be pretty damn brutal. However, if what you actually do is kinda lie around check your phone in bed etc and then get blasted awake by an alarm that's a different story.
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seriously tho.. yeah I'm a skeptical bastard in every aspect of my life these days. its exhausting.
though I personally just make a single request right when I wake up, before making coffee.
Inspired by this, a buddy of mine tried "DaVinci Sleep" at our residential high school, and lasted a week before he crashed for 20 hours and went back to a normal schedule.
Apropos of nothing, he's now a very well regarded academic - in an unrelated field.
To be fair, computer science is famous for people rearranging their sleep schedule around when the compute time was available.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friar%27s_Club
I gave it up because I found it wasn't very fault tolerant. If I missed a bedtime even by just a few hours, or ate before trying to sleep, I was in a bad state for a day or two until I could get back on track.
A while back, I had a big paper deadline a week away and knew I didn’t have enough time to finish without sacrificing sleep.
Rather than cutting my sleep short, I decided to stick with 7–8 hours of rest and instead lengthen my wake window. I worked out a schedule that gave me six nights of sleep across seven days. It meant waking up at stranger and stranger times as the week went on, and getting some odd looks from my roommates when I emerged from my room. But in the end, it was totally worth it. I was waking up well-rested and ready to tackle those extra-long days.
The effort paid off 100%. Not only did I make the deadline, but my paper was accepted as well. A year later, that same paper helped me get into my PhD program of choice.
It’s funny how these short bursts of intense effort can sometimes have such a big impact.
Best of luck with your side hustle!
https://xkcd.com/320/
I'm depressed by their determination.
Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards.
Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But maybe in a year you'll come back and remember this comment.
It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.
It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.
A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.
Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.
> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.
If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.
It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
*Optimising My Claude Usage Around Their Usage Limits
Your sleep regime here is in no way optimal
Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?
I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.
You could just work 24x7 and Vibe code yourself to a trillion dollars.
In all seriousness, you need to rest properly, you will be more productive and make less mistakes and have less rework.
Finally, if you are using Claude to get your "React component to hydrate correctly", you are not being very efficient in using AI as a coding agent.
I wrote a post about using Full.CX MCP that will build complete features for you with test etc. https://dalehurley.com/posts/fullcxmcp