claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix Sudden 5-hour session window squeeze starting Apr 29, 2026 evening [19 comments, 12 participants]

Summary

Since the evening of April 29, 2026, the 5-hour session window depletes 5–10× faster than before for the same kind of work. A typical light editing session (a few scp, Read, small patches via Edit) burns ~20–25% of the session window in well under an hour. Sonnet sub-agents launched via Agent repeatedly hit "You've hit your limit" within 15–30 minutes of work — they used to run for hours.

The frustrating part is that the weekly quota is barely touched — W shows ~59% remaining with 23+ hours of headroom — yet the session-window cap blocks me from using that headroom. I have plenty of weekly budget, but the 5-hour window won't let me spend it.

Context

I'm aware of the April 23, 2026 post-mortem about restoring high reasoning effort and reverting the verbosity prompt. Those changes do explain some token-cost increase per turn. They do not explain the disproportionate ratio between session-window depletion and weekly-quota consumption that started on April 29 specifically — i.e. several days after the April 23 fix.

Reproduction signals

• S (5-hour session window) hits 20%+ within 30–60 minutes of light tool use.
• W (weekly) shows large remainder + many real-time hours of headroom.
• Multiple parallel Agent (Sonnet sub-agent) launches all hit limit within minutes — burning quota seemingly faster than total work would suggest.
• Started: 2026-04-29 evening (Europe/Kaliningrad timezone). Confirmed by independent users referencing the same date.

Ask

1. Please confirm whether anything changed in the session-window accounting on April 29 (UTC evening).
2. Either widen the session window proportionally to the new per-turn cost, or document the new ratio so users can plan around it.

Impact

Right now Claude Code, for which I subscribe primarily on Max tier, is significantly less usable than it was a week ago — not because of model quality (which is good), but because the cadence of forced waits has gone from "rare and predictable" to "every hour or so, no matter how lightly I work."

I do want this to keep working — that's why I'm reporting.

Mitigations I've applied so far:

• Lowered effortLevel from high to medium in ~/.claude/settings.json (~1.5× longer windows but at quality cost).
• Stopped launching Sonnet sub-agents in parallel (they cannibalize each other's quota).
• Splitting big tasks into ~30-minute Sonnet chunks instead of 90.

These help, but they're workarounds, not solutions.