Extreme session limit consumption for simple responses (Claude Pro plan)

Problem

On a Claude Pro plan (5-hour session limit), trivially short responses are consuming enormous percentages of the session limit:

• Writing and deploying a ~100-line bash script via SSH: 27% of session limit
• A plain text response (19 lines, zero tool calls): 10% of session limit
• Another short follow-up answer: additional 11%

For context: last month, comparable full work sessions consumed ~2% total.

Environment

• Plan: Claude Pro
• Tool: Claude Code CLI
• Model: claude-sonnet-4-6
• OS: Linux (Ubuntu 24.04)
• Date: 2026-04-07

Steps to reproduce

1. Start a fresh Claude Code session (0% usage)
2. Ask Claude to write and deploy a bash monitoring script (~100 lines) via SSH to a remote host
3. Claude runs ~8 bash commands, some with large outputs (one log fetch returned 63KB)
4. Observe session limit jump: 0% → 27%
5. Send a short follow-up question (one sentence)
6. Receive a 19-line plain text answer with zero tool calls
7. Observe: another 10% consumed
8. Send another short follow-up
9. Observe: another 11% consumed — just for a text answer

Expected behavior

A 19-line plain text response with no tool calls should consume well under 1% of a 5-hour session limit.

Actual behavior

Single short text responses with no tool calls are consuming 10–11% of the 5-hour session limit, making Claude Pro effectively unusable for any non-trivial work session within a single day.

This appears to be either a billing/accounting bug or a dramatic unannounced pricing change for claude-sonnet-4-6.