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- Usage limits on AI tools are causing some people to restructure their workdays.
- A founder in the UK has hit limits and now breaks projects into smaller pieces.
- One coder said he doesn't mind the pause because, with AI's help, he doesn't feel cognitive burnout.
Max Johnson used to start his workdays by opening a Claude chat and staying in it for hours.
The cofounder of Briix, a UK startup that helps small businesses use AI, would move fluidly from writing scripts for social media posts to designing graphics to generating documents — all in one long-running thread.
That lengthy dialogue meant he burned through more tokens, which are the currency of AI use, but giving so much context also sharpened the model. Johnson and his two cofounders could — and did — work "all hours of the day with no issues," he told Business Insider.
That rhythm has changed.
In recent weeks, Claude's usage limits have become more restrictive, to the point where Johnson, 24, said he can sometimes exhaust the allowance under his subscription "two prompts in" to a fresh chat. Now, he tries to sketch out his work around what can feel like an invisible meter.
"You plan your day around knowing that you can spend X amount of time," he said.
Especially for users who subscribe to AI plans priced below enterprise accounts, the limits can be a challenge. AI companies, responding to the costs of running these models, are adjusting pricing.
In late March, Anthropic adjusted its usage caps during peak hours to manage demand.
An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement that the company is adjusting its five-hour session limits to manage growing demand for Claude and has introduced efficiency improvements to offset the impact. About 7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn't have previously. The company is also investing in capacity.
From entrepreneurs to software developers, usage limits on AI tools are reshaping how some workers structure their time, prioritize tasks, and think about work itself.
Workdays built around limits
For Johnson, having to wait, sometimes until an evening reset, can introduce a new kind of fragmentation in his day. At times, Johnson said, he and his cofounders will each hit their caps and then try to figure out what to do next.
"Panic sets in," he said. They might take 30 minutes to an hour to consider how to move ahead.
The team might grab food, though the timeout isn't necessarily welcome.
"It still doesn't feel like a break because all I'm thinking about is, 'When is this limit going to reset and we can get back to it?'" Johnson said.
Instead of relying on long, memory-rich chats, Johnson now often breaks things into smaller projects. For his social media work, there might be one for scriptwriting, another for animations, another for documents, each with tightly scoped instructions to conserve tokens.
Johnson, who is the company's only full-time worker, previously shared a single Claude subscription plan with his cofounders. It made it easy to see what others were working on. Now, they've moved to individual accounts and, eventually, the five-person company in Manchester, England, might trade up to an enterprise plan, which he estimates could cost about $2,400 a year.
Saturdays are for the coders
For some developers, limits become part of the strategy.
Ani Potts, a 21-year-old New York University math major building a startup in stealth mode, treats his AI use like a weekly budget. He tries to plan around when he expects his allowance will reset by concentrating his work in high-intensity blocks.
After a day of classes, Potts often works in four-hour chunks. He saves the most demanding tasks — like research, testing, and any coding he might still do — for when he's far from reaching his usage limit. As Potts nears the cap, he stops altogether or downshifts to small-ball concerns, like figuring out why a button on an app he's developing is "a bit more blue" than he wanted.
Being pushed into an AI hiatus, Potts told Business Insider, can be "like going in slow motion," yet he tries to think of it as a blessing.
"I can use my brain again," Potts quipped.
The result is a rhythm where hitting the limit is expected — and sometimes useful. If Potts has a free Friday, for example, he'll force himself to review his work and rethink priorities.
Saturdays, when he doesn't have class, are for locking in. Rather than going to the bar or club, he said, "I Claude Code."
Stopping work, by choice
When Danial Qureshi, a software developer in Toronto, hits a cap on his Claude Pro subscription, which costs him about 28 Canadian dollars a month, he often simply stops working on his personal projects.
"It's basically not even worth my time to be manually writing code when I can have something like Claude doing it for me," he told Business Insider. That's because the AI output might be 10 times what he can do, he said.
Still, Qureshi, 27, sees an upside in the limit: By compressing what used to take hours of effort into short bursts of AI-assisted output, he feels sharper.
"Now I'm able to get more work done without feeling that cognitive burnout at the end of the day," Qureshi said.
On weekends, he might spend a few hours building a project — like an AI agent that analyzes his jogging data and adjusts his training schedule — and then stop as he nears his limit for a five-hour window.
That means the rest of the day is open.
"You can actually go to the gym, meet friends, go to dinner, and then you still expend all the tokens, and you reach the usage limit," Qureshi said.
Resetting expectations
For Johnson, AI tools have allowed him to dramatically increase what he expects to accomplish in a day. When he can't do that, he said, it forces him to rethink his approach.
While Johnson still relies heavily on Claude and sometimes turns to ChatGPT as a backup, he expects he'll still keep paying for Claude.
In the meantime, AI pauses could continue to punctuate Johnson's workday.
"Let's have some food now," he said. "Let's chill — wait for the limit to reset — and then we'll get back to work."
Do you have a story to share about session limits? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.