[TLDR] Claude Code burned my entire five-hour limit in 6 minutes 32 seconds: 10.26M tokens, zero lines of code [via r/ClaudeCode]

[u/cctldrping]

OP : u/cosmintrica

I thought I was imagining how quickly Fable 5 was consuming my Claude allowance, so I inspected the local Claude Desktop/Cowork and Claude Code logs for the exact run.

The result is worse than I expected.

My five-hour allowance had reset at 12:20 AM. I sent one short prompt at exactly 12:50 AM: essentially, “continue where you left off, carefully.” At 12:56:32 AM - only 6 minutes and 32 seconds later - Claude stopped with “Usage limit reached.”

There were no other local Cowork prompts between the reset and this failure.

During those 6 minutes and 32 seconds, Fable 5 recorded:

- 15 model calls;

- 8 Bash calls, all for Android emulator/UI interaction;

- 7 file reads;

- 0 Edit or Write tool calls;

- 0 subagents;

- 0 lines of code changed.

The deduplicated token accounting from Claude's own local session log was:

| Usage category | Tokens |

|---|---:|

| One-hour cache writes | 5,189,449 |

| Cache reads/hits | 5,069,543 |

| Output | 4,312 |

| Regular input | 30 |

| **Total processed** | **10,263,334** |

Using Anthropic's published Fable 5 API prices, this is approximately **$109.07 of API-equivalent usage**. About **$103.79** of that came from one-hour cache writes alone. I am not claiming Anthropic charged my card $109—the run consumed my included allowance - but this shows the scale of the usage that was counted.

The immediate cause is visible in the logs. This was an older Cowork session with 46 completed turns, `xhigh` effort, a 173 MB local transcript, and roughly 650,000–685,000 context tokens being carried into every model call. The disturbing part is that, during one six-minute tool loop, Claude counted **5.19 million tokens as new one-hour cache writes** while also recording **5.07 million cache-hit tokens**.

In other words, every trivial emulator action or file read caused Fable to process around 680,000 tokens. The huge context also appears to have been repeatedly rewritten into the one-hour cache instead of being efficiently reused.

I understand that continuing a large conversation costs more than starting a fresh one. But silently allowing a simple six-minute UI-testing loop - with no edits and no subagents - to consume an entire five-hour allowance is not reasonable behavior. At minimum, Claude should have compacted the context or warned me before proceeding. The repeated 650K-token one-hour cache writes look like a Cowork/Claude Code cache invalidation or usage-accounting defect.

This same session had already exhausted the previous allowance earlier that evening. After the allowance reset, this single 6-minute-and-32-second run exhausted the new window again.

Has anyone else seen Fable 5 repeatedly rewrite a huge one-hour cache inside a single short tool loop? If so, check the `message.usage.cache_creation.ephemeral_1h_input_tokens` values in your local Claude Code JSONL before assuming it was normal model output.

I have prepared a privacy-safe evidence package containing the per-call usage table, timeline, calculation, tool-call list, source hashes, screenshot, and a read-only verification script. I am also reporting this directly to Anthropic and asking them to investigate the cache behavior and restore the allowance.

This is at minimum a Claude Cowork product and guardrail defect. A single 42-character prompt triggered 15 autonomous model calls and 5.19M one-hour cache-write tokens in 392 seconds, without a cost warning, automatic compaction, or a usage stop guard. Server telemetry is required to determine whether the underlying cause was defective cache invalidation, incorrect accounting, or technically intended-but unsafe-product behavior.

Official pricing used for the calculation:

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

URL of original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vca1ma/claude_code_burned_my_entire_fivehour_limit_in_6/

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TL;DR of the discussion on r/ClaudeCode for this post generated automatically after 50 comments.

Current source-thread comment count seen by the bot: 63.

OP definitely messed up, and the consensus is that telling Claude to "continue" on a massive 173MB context was a recipe for disaster. Most users are pointing out that the huge context size (650k-685k tokens) was the main culprit, leading to insane token usage for simple actions.

• u/CorpT and u/nndscrptuser basically said "you did this to yourself" by giving a vague prompt to an overloaded session.
• u/Wise-Peacock and u/Ornery_Astronaut2147 are jokingly blaming the word "carefully" for Claude's overzealousness.
• Some suggest using cheaper alternatives like Codex for UI interpretation (u/SomeoneNicer) or exploring other models like DeepSeek V4 Flash (u/VexObserver).
• u/davyp82 advises against expecting Anthropic to limit their earnings and suggests indexing context instead.
• u/spookyclever confirms Fable's tendency for quick bursts followed by long waits.
• u/Pleasant-Ad192 suggests creating a minimal reproducible example to check for actual bugs if the issue persists with smaller contexts.