In March 2026, Anthropic acknowledged that Claude Code users were hitting usage limits faster than expected . One developer's GitHub report put a five-hour session at 19 minutes. A Hacker News commenter described the fast version: "it launched 102 agents and blew my $120 quota in 6 minutes."

Part of that spike traced to Claude Code itself: the same GitHub thread reported two prompt-caching bugs inflating token use by 10 to 20 times, and Anthropic had trimmed session limits at peak hours around the same time. The headline incident was partly a bug. The structural point survives without it. A bug drained one engineer's quota in minutes while he watched. A DIY agentic test suite does the same thing on purpose, unattended, hundreds of times a day. A developer burning a quota is sitting there watching it.…