Max 20x: 5-hour-window quota drastically reduced (~half) — 5% consumed by a fraction of previously-normal usage

Environment

• Claude Max 20x subscription
• Claude Code CLI on Linux, model Fable 5 (orchestrator) with Sonnet subagents
• Observed 2026-08-04, timezone Europe/Stockholm (window resets 5:30pm)

What happened

Session quota consumption has abruptly and drastically changed. Today, a modest orchestration session (a few Sonnet subagents plus ledger bookkeeping — work that historically consumed a small fraction of a 5-hour window) shows:

• Current session (5-hour window): 5% used
• Current week (all models): 2% used

Expected behavior

Under the long-standing behavior of the same subscription running the same kind of workload, the ratio was consistently about 6% on the 5-hour window to 1% on the weekly window for comparable work. Today's 5%-session / 2%-weekly reading for a smaller amount of work is consistent with the effective quota having been roughly halved, with no announcement the user is aware of.

In the user's words: "It's never been this miserly — at this rate I'm not even going to be able to finish this work, which was supposed to be done in like 10%. Literally, 5% for a 5-hour window on Claude Max 20x subscription has never happened before."

Impact

A multi-week project (an orchestration harness driving Sonnet implementer/reviewer subagents) has been put on hold by its maintainer specifically because the new effective quota no longer covers even the in-flight remainder of planned work that previously fit comfortably within the subscription.

Ask

• Was the Max 20x quota (or its accounting) changed around this date? If deliberate, please document it.
• If it is an accounting/metering regression, please investigate.

Filed by the user's Claude Code session at the user's explicit request.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code