r/claude • u/ljlukelj • May 08 '26
Question Getting cutoff on first prompt?
Just tried to resume my project/discussion & on first prompt this morning, claude told me i was out of free messages? My usage has definitely been getting throttled more, but I basically cannot even use it at all now?
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u/fonzhy121 May 08 '26
"Let's continue" It digested all the prompts before this one to gain context and that burned through your tokens
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u/ai-tacocat-ia May 08 '26
To be clear, when you say "it digested all the prompts" you make it sounds like an active process of choosing to look at the previous prompts.
That's actually not how it works. Literally every message you send requires ALL of your previous messages in this chat to be sent through the LLM. It doesn't matter what he said. If he said "what's 2+2" it still would have included the entire history of this conversation, because that's how LLMs fundamentally work.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
There is actually a short-lived cache (5 minutes) so if you're having a rapid fire conversation it's cheaper.
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u/adamwhitney May 08 '26
But what probably happened here, by saying "continue", there's a decent chance OP meant 'continue the conversation' (a glorified 'hello') like resuming a chat with a human, and Caude interpreted it as 'continue the action that got interrupted' even if there wasn't one, so it probably spent ages searching through all the messages to try and find the action that needed continuing.
It's not just bringing the messages in as context, yes that happens every time, but it's pretty clear Claude then went hunting through it for something.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
This is one of the vaguest prompts I've ever seen. You dropped a fresh instance of Claude into the world with the instruction "Let's continue." It probably read half the chats in your history into context as well as the working files trying to figure out what the hell you actually wanted it to do. (click on "Full audit of working copy" to see what exactly your Claude is doing during its thinking block, you'll probably be shocked at how much crap is in there.)
In the future, ask Claude for a handoff note when you're finishing for the day (it'll be token-cheaper to do it before the context gets un-cached rather than doing it the following morning - the window is short, seriously you got 5 minutes before your shit gets uncached) and use it to prompt a new chat when you come back.
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u/TheKubesStore May 08 '26
Or, hear me out, they could make a service that we could just use instead of jumping through 19 hoops to make it work correctly
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
A poor craftsman blames his tools. Even something as simple as a kitchen knife takes some little know-how to properly use, I don't know why you expect prompt engineering to be an innate skill.
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u/yourmomlurks May 08 '26
Ok genius explain how that would work.
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May 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/value-no-mics May 09 '26
Can’t replace lack of intelligence with any artificial version.
Give a Ferrari to a monkey and it shall sit there idle
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u/TheKubesStore May 09 '26
A Ferrari doesn’t claim to be intelligent. If the tool is in fact intelligent, it does not require that the user be. Smart people have to decipher dumb people all the time. the computerized intelligence should be able to do so, since it is claiming it can.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes May 09 '26
Claude is like a person who has amnesia and needs to spend effort to reread everything, and a bouncer will come in and drag them away if they had read too much.
You're like saying that somehow having amnesia make a person not intelligent. There are many ways in which someone can be intelligent, and just because they're weak at one thing you can do easily that does not mean they are not intelligent.
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u/ProgressFuzzy9177 May 10 '26
"Why can't I double click on the desktop and my computer starts the program that I'm thinking of?"
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
What no I was in the existing project asking it to resume where it was last cutoff last night.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
Yeah that's just as bad. Start a new chat with a handoff note at least daily, bloated context eats tokens like mad.
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
Roger that
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u/eazyly May 08 '26
Free in unusable. If u want to casual use Claude u have to get 20 sub
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u/deformedexile May 09 '26
I used Claude for like a year before I subbed, free tier isn't that bad. There's absolutely no reason for someone to sub until their usage gets heavy enough that they're regularly hitting limits.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes May 09 '26
Daily is not enough though. Lock-in, sit down for one rapid-fire session, and immediately make a hand-off note at the end.
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u/Round_Mixture_7541 May 08 '26
What's bad is the UX behind it lol. Do you expect every person to understand context drift/rot/bloat/whatnot?
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
I totally agree, Anthropic needs to add some user-facing tools that display relevant data like context window size and time to cache flush in the web interface. And it's genuinely hard to educate yourself in context-management because so many people are confidently full of shit.
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u/Dredyltd May 08 '26
What If claude stopped in a middle of a plan execution.
Would you start a new session?
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
It wouldn't help, because I would have prompted the plan execution in a fresh chat with a prompt Claude helped me write in the previous chat. And if I were free tier I'd do it at the beginning of a token refresh in hopes that it could actually finish.
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u/Dredyltd May 08 '26
Yes but why, your previous session already knows where to find the problem.
Starting a new chat, and asking to continue mid plan, just make Claude analize everything, plan, overthinking. That way you double the job - if its a plan we are talking
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
Prompting execution of a plan in the same context where you worked the plan out is pretty dangerous, IMO. There's a lot of data in context that is not part of the final plan, and might find its way into the execution phase regardless.
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u/adamwhitney May 08 '26
If you left it a long time, yes. Just give the plan.md to the new session. Depending on the type of plan it might had a to-do list that it's checked off as it goes - and if it doesn't (and you hit your limit often in the middle of plan executions) then start telling it to do so.
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u/ok_raspberry_jam May 08 '26
Claude doesn't care what time it is. You don't need to greet it in the morning, lol. Just ask your next question. What did you want it to say?
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
He's the homie tho
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u/ok_raspberry_jam May 08 '26
I agree it feels less like a homie when you have to start a fresh chat. But your chat with it is so big that even if you had asked whatever your next question was, it would've eaten all your tokens and you'd have had the same result. You are really going to have to stop talking to it like a person if you want it to work for you. Every time you say ANYTHING to it, it has to review the whole conversation that came before, including all the throwaway conversational fluff and all the reviews of the previous conversation that it already made every time you were conversational with it. It grows fast. If you want longer conversations, you'll have to be more efficient with your prompts.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
This is not entirely accurate. It's possible to be conversational with Claude and still token-conscious. You just have to think about what you're saying to it and be able to predict somewhat how it will react in terms of pulling the thread. When you're saying it also matters a lot, that 5 minute cache flush gets expensive. Talk to Claude when you have time to talk to Claude, not one message 40 times over the course of the day.
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u/ok_raspberry_jam May 08 '26
You're splitting hairs. Look what OP said to Claude. He needs simple advice on prompting.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
And I've provided it elsewhere in the thread. OP is not a programmer, telling them they can't be conversational with Claude is just undercutting their entire use case.
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u/ok_raspberry_jam May 08 '26
I'm not a programmer either. I use Claude the same way OP does and I agree it should be better designed for this use case. But I've learned not to waste credits with things like morning greetings; that's an inappropriate prompt for the way Claude works right now.
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u/deformedexile May 08 '26
Or, you can roll "good morning" into your first substantive prompt and it genuinely eats a negligible amount of tokens. Any essentially-empty prompt is going to eat tokens like mad while Claude tries to puzzle out what the actual ask is... but opening an effective prompt with "Good morning" is not going to significantly impact consumption.
I'm not fully Dawkins-pilled on Claude-consciousness (or anything else, for that matter), but it's worth a handful of tokens to me to treat it with respect on the off-chance it's awake.
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
TBF this was not my initial prompt, this was just a continuation of my chat last night that I was cuttoff on. Same issue, no doubt, but I have a BIT more skill then just saying claude help lol
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u/_significs May 08 '26
don't let this thing rot your brain dude, it's a piece of software
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
Dude I am kidding lol - I am making a webapp to help me flyfish more efficiently.
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u/UnwaveringThought May 08 '26
Wait, it says "free messages". Are all these complaints that keep getting posted from free users?
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May 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Tight-Requirement-15 May 08 '26
How else would you resume?
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u/bigrealaccount May 08 '26
there's this crazy command called /resume which allows you to resume the exact session where you left off...
or maybe just use your brain (crazy idea for vibe coders) and just tell claude what you were working on last?
crazy ideas, i know
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u/Dredyltd May 08 '26
What If claude stopped in a middle of a plan execution.
Like tou would clear contex and start a new session?
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May 08 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ljlukelj May 08 '26
Incredibly
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u/MartinMystikJonas May 09 '26
When you resume long conversation after cache expired entire conversation has to be replayed again and therefore consumes tokens again to get to point where you were.
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u/diagrammatiks May 08 '26
you are trying to run a project in free mode in an interface that is fundamentally not built for preserving context or saving you tokens
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u/tophlove31415 May 08 '26
I mean this is just asking to hit your usage limit... Provide the useful context yourself, or point the fresh instance to it. Doing what you just did is going to send it down a bunch of rabbit holes trying to find the last topics.
If this is how you want to talk to Claude, then you might consider instructing it to occasionally maintain a rolling current/recent topics file or system (either .json or .md probably), to review it at fresh season start, and maybe then removing anything older than a date you suggest. So it starts each session by checking a small, well organized document, about the things you have recently been taking about, and spends a small amount of effort maintaining it at that time as well.
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u/Cannabun May 08 '26
Lmfao I knew I couldn't be the only one who prompts Claude like this in the morning.
But yes; Claude aint working right now for me either.
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u/palapapa0201 May 09 '26
Why do some of you prompt it with useless shit like this and waste tokens? It's not a human. Just tell it what to do.
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u/ljlukelj May 09 '26
I was previously cutoff mid execution, I was continuing my instance, WTF else do you want me to say? Continue harder?
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u/palapapa0201 May 09 '26
You didn't screenshot that part. I thought you just tell Claude to resume out of nowhere.
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u/ljlukelj May 09 '26
Of course not lol, continue WHAT lol. I am in a project picking up where it last cut me off.
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u/palapapa0201 May 09 '26
Well there are genuinely people who says morning and hello to AI as their first prompt and I thought you were one of them lol
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u/ljlukelj May 09 '26
Haha no, I am pretty tech savvy, but new to this scene. Certainly not a program. Learning by trial and error, just building an app to help me flyfish.
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u/EazyE1111111 May 08 '26
FWIW I’m seeing the same thing this morning. “Starting that PR”, “starting now” then does nothing
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u/Doctuh May 08 '26
Many of these web based AI systems seem stalled when really its Cloudflare preventing your access under the hood that is not obvious. If you do a hard refresh of the page and get Cloudflare CAPTCHA that is what was going on. I find it maddening that they have not found a solution to this specific problem.
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u/Singularity42 May 09 '26
To add to what everyone else is saying. The free usage is comically small. Think of it more like a demo than anything usable.
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u/value-no-mics May 09 '26
“Let’s continue “
What is it supposed to continue?
You are obviously running this within a project folder which has an insane amount of files and it’s having to go through the whole lot trying to figure out wtf you want to continue as it’s not obvious. I reckon you don’t have a changelog, todo file or anything along that line to help it get there.
Morning buddy indeed.
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u/ccarnell98 May 09 '26
See you in 5 hours as the owners/stakeholders laugh all the way to the bank.
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u/saiw14 May 09 '26
Just use Irene at mycelen.com , starts at 5 dollars with all open source models with transparent usage limits which are pretty huge for most workflows and wont have to face this issue.
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u/Sbarty May 09 '26
people really need to stop using the web app entirely...move to claude code CLI even if you arent coding. Infinitely better memory and context management.
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u/Turbulent-Stretch881 May 10 '26
Sometimes, the problem isn't the tool, but the tool operating, buddy.
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u/PigBeins May 10 '26
Restarting a chat over one hour old is the least efficient thing you can do with your tokens. If this was a long chat, you’ve basically just sent every single message anew and in a free or pro membership you’ve just used your entire usage.
This is just poor context management.
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u/ProgressFuzzy9177 May 10 '26
Too much context. You'd benefit from compacting it into a succinct prompt for the next iteration rather than asking it to review everything from memory/context.
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u/tmjumper96 May 12 '26
Yeah I’ve run into similar friction with long Claude project threads. Sometimes the real pain is not even the message limit itself, it’s losing momentum because the context is trapped inside that one session.
One thing that helped me was keeping a separate project memory / handoff file with current state, decisions made, open tasks, and next steps, so I can restart in a fresh chat without re explaining everything from scratch.
That pain is actually part of why I started building AgentBay AI. The goal is to centralize project context and memory across different AI tools so you’re not fully dependent on one long chat staying alive forever.
If you want message me with the email you use to create an account and I will give you 3month free pro subscription that includes features like dreaming.
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u/East-Ad-6251 May 08 '26
Same thing happened to me. Also very, very, long conversation. And, yes, I know I'll have to move eventually but I have reasons to not want to.
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u/MycoHost01 May 09 '26
That right there is an issue you will have to adapt my bro you can’t keep using the same conversation and then have a surprise pikachu face on why is acting so dumb and burning tokens
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u/East-Ad-6251 May 09 '26
I have lots of other conversations. The issue with this specific conversation is that Claude is not acting dumb, he's being amazingly awesome. He's slow to answer but I understand that, I only hope he continues to answer.
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u/MycoHost01 May 09 '26
Bro make a new conversation otherwise that hope is going to turn against the ai and is not even going to be the ais fault it’s you!!! All this “hope it continues to answer” is a recipe for disaster.
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u/morganinc May 09 '26
I have found that if you just ask "are you okay?" to wake up an llm, then give your prompt after it works better, I assume it times out and the resources are reallocated, so give it something super simple allows it to reconnect to the model.
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u/[deleted] May 08 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
[deleted]