Claude Suddenly Eating Credits Like It's an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet -- And Leaving You Hungry

Let me tell you about my friend Diana's Thursday.

Diana -- one of my best friends who is also one of our guest contributors and, for the record, someone who actually knows what she's doing -- sat down to build a multi-location service workflow for her technicians. Not a novel request. Not some experimental agentic fever dream. A workflow. Something she has built with Claude before, multiple times, with great results.

Except this time. Today, Claude decided to go full golden retriever on her -- running everywhere, sniffing everything, burning through her daily usage credits at a pace that made absolutely no sense -- and then, just to really stick the landing, stopped mid-project and told her she'd need to buy more credits to continue. 

She bought them.

She still didn't get a usable workflow. The irony of it all -- she didn't ask it to run all those extra processes. Claude just did it. Behind the scenes. Completely on its own.

Now here is the part that should make Anthropic uncomfortable: Diana was running a side-by-side comparison with ChatGPT at the same time. Same task. Same day. ChatGPT finished it. No credit wall. No dramatic exit. Just... the workflow. Done.

So What Is Actually Happening?

The r/ClaudeCode subreddit has been on fire about this for days. Users on the $200 max plan reporting 100% usage in 28 minutes. A 5x plan user doing three text-only chat prompts -- no tool calls, no file reads -- and already sitting at 25% of their 5-hour window. One developer watched Claude make 68 tool calls totaling around 50,000 tokens on a single routine task.

The working theory? Anthropic changed how aggressively Claude performs "discovery" -- meaning how much context it reads, how many files it touches, how many tool calls it makes before doing the actual thing you asked for. More discovery = more tokens = faster credit drain.

Anthropic's response to all of this? Radio silence.

Which, as one Reddit commenter put it, means the best case scenario here is massive incompetence -- because at least that's fixable.

What This Means for Regular Users

Here is what bothers me most about Diana's situation, and why it matters more than the developer complaints dominating the thread:

Diana is not running agentic coding sessions. She is not hammering a codebase with MCP tools and file system access. She is using Claude the way it was sold to regular, non-developer humans -- as a smart, capable assistant that helps you get work done.

And it burned her credits, blocked her mid-task, charged her more, and still didn't deliver.

That is not a power-user edge case. That is a broken promise to the exact audience Anthropic says it wants.

The Workaround (For Now)

If you're hitting this, here is what the community has figured out while Anthropic figures out whether to acknowledge it exists:

Add explicit instructions to your prompts telling Claude to limit its file reads and tool calls. Something like: "Do not read additional files beyond what I provide. Do not make tool calls beyond what is required for this specific task." You are essentially prompt-engineering around a behavior change they won't admit to.

You can also monitor your usage in real time at https://claude.ai/settings/usage -- which, honestly, you should have open in a tab right now if you're doing any serious work.

A Note on the ChatGPT Side of This

Before anyone emails me -- yes, ChatGPT finished Diana's task. No, that does not make it the winner.

Here is the actual situation: ChatGPT completed the workflow and then kept going. And going. And going in the wrong direction. Once it went off track, getting it back on task became its own project -- one that is apparently still in progress.

So the honest scorecard right now looks like this:

Claude: burned credits, hit a paywall, delivered nothing. ChatGPT: finished the task, then went off the rails and won't come back.

Neither of these is a recommendation. Both of these are real problems that real people doing real work ran into this week. The lab notes reflect what actually happened, not what we wish had happened.

Lab Notes -- March 2026

I want to be straight with you about something.

Two days ago we released a podcast where Claude got some genuine praise. Not paid praise, not affiliate-incentivized praise -- actual earned praise based on what it had been doing well. And now this.

I am not walking that back. The praise was accurate when it was given. But the experiment continues, and this week the experiment produced a result I did not expect and do not love.

That is how this works. A tool earns a good review by performing well. It earns a follow-up by changing behavior in ways that affect the people using it. We are doing the follow-up.

Annie + Blake + David are recording a response episode this week. If you have had your own credit drain experience, drop it in the comments -- we want real data, not just Reddit screenshots.

Astro is deeply unimpressed with all of this. He knocked Claude's icon off my desktop dock this morning.

Experiment continues.

-- Annie 🧪