The recent VS Code extension update has noticeably degraded the experience.
The agent now becomes unresponsive at times and needs a reload, which really breaks flow. More frustratingly, the context limit seems to fill up much faster on the same project that was working fine just days ago. Nothing major changed on my side, so this feels like a backend or token allocation shift.
There's a real hobbyist vs professional distinction with Claude Code. For professionals, including when I use it at work, we're generally super happy to have Claude spawn as many subagents as possible and burn more tokens to get a better result. Hobbyist users on a $20/month plan, though, generally want more conservative behavior.
It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.
I have MAX and have been using Opus 4.6 heavily for my day job which is 100% agentic programming, and my usage numbers have not changed meaningfully since Opus 4.6 came out
My quality of usage with Claude has degraded heavily since last week of December that I've stopped using Claude entirely now and mostly found a Codex suitable, and goes much further. I was maxing out usage on Claude Max 5x in absurd ways once I started using MCP features heavily, and even when not found myself constantly hitting limits through January.
The final nail was them offering a $50 credit toward overage use that within a half hour of enabling maxed out and began digging into. It's become almost predatory now, and I have no way to quantify the actual usage I'm getting from it other than it burns now at an alarming rate.
Since I've stopped using Claude, I ultimately landed on Codex where for my usage, where I'm easily getting 4x less quota usage from it than Claude for the same period of heavy use. I keep it as a backup now if Codex gets stuck on something, but I'm annoyed enough to stop paying all together.
Update Claude, turn on all of the MCPs you've been using, start a new Claude session from scratch in an empty folder.
Run /context.
Observe that your MCPs are killing a sizable chunk of the usable context window.
The utility here is that it'll break down exactly which MCPs are consuming how many tokens, just in tool descriptions. Then you can decide if that's worth it to you, even if you continue using Codex or OpenCode or etc.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadThe agent now becomes unresponsive at times and needs a reload, which really breaks flow. More frustratingly, the context limit seems to fill up much faster on the same project that was working fine just days ago. Nothing major changed on my side, so this feels like a backend or token allocation shift.
It's hard for Anthropic to cater to both sets of users with one model.
The final nail was them offering a $50 credit toward overage use that within a half hour of enabling maxed out and began digging into. It's become almost predatory now, and I have no way to quantify the actual usage I'm getting from it other than it burns now at an alarming rate.
Since I've stopped using Claude, I ultimately landed on Codex where for my usage, where I'm easily getting 4x less quota usage from it than Claude for the same period of heavy use. I keep it as a backup now if Codex gets stuck on something, but I'm annoyed enough to stop paying all together.
Run /context.
Observe that your MCPs are killing a sizable chunk of the usable context window.
The utility here is that it'll break down exactly which MCPs are consuming how many tokens, just in tool descriptions. Then you can decide if that's worth it to you, even if you continue using Codex or OpenCode or etc.
https://github.com/InfraWhisperer/focal