If you came here from the reel, this is your full cheat sheet for stretching your Claude usage so you stop hitting limits and waiting hours for them to reset.
These are the exact habits I use to get way more out of one subscription. Save this page, come back to it whenever you feel like Claude is "running out" on you 🌱
the basicsClaude doesn't just charge you per message. It charges you per token, and tokens are basically every word in your chat plus every word Claude has to re-read every time you send a new message.
Long chats = Claude re-reading a novel before answering = your limit melting fast.
The whole game is: use the smallest model that does the job, keep your chats short, and make Claude stop re-reading stuff it doesn't need.
That's it. Three habits.
Opus burns through your weekly limit about 5x faster than Sonnet. If you default to Opus for everything, you'll hit your cap by Wednesday.
The rule I follow: Sonnet for 90% of the work. Opus only for the actually hard stuff.
| Task | Model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Drafting captions, emails, DMs | Sonnet | Fast, cheap, plenty smart |
| Summarising a doc or transcript | Sonnet | Pure text-in, text-out |
| Brainstorming hooks or content ideas | Sonnet | Volume matters more than depth |
| Rewriting or tightening copy | Sonnet | Sonnet handles tone really well |
| Researching a topic | Sonnet | Use web search, not raw model size |
| Strategy decisions (pricing, positioning, offer) | Opus | Worth the tokens, you only decide once |
| Long-form writing (sales pages, course modules) | Opus | Better structure on long outputs |
| Debugging code that broke twice already | Opus | Sonnet missed it, escalate |
| Multi-step planning across a whole project | Opus | Holds more in its head |
| Anything you're going to ship to clients | Opus final pass | Sonnet draft, Opus polish |
In the Claude app you can switch models from the dropdown at the top of the chat. In Claude Code you switch with /model.
Every message in a long chat makes Claude re-read everything that came before. By message 40, Claude is re-reading 40 messages every single time you hit send. That's where your tokens go.
Two ways to fix it.
When a chat starts feeling slow or you can tell it's getting long, paste this:
Summarise this entire conversation into bullet points I can paste into a fresh chat. Include: the goal, key decisions made, current state, and what's next. Keep it under 300 words.If you're in Claude Code, just type /compact and Claude does the summary handoff for you automatically inside the same session. No copy-paste needed.
Use /compact whenever:
| Situation | Do this |
|---|---|
| Same project, same goal, just long | /compact or summary handoff |
| Switching to a totally different topic | Start a fresh chat |
| Claude is making the same mistake repeatedly | Start a fresh chat with a cleaner brief |
| You're about to add a giant document | Start fresh, don't pile it on top |
This is the one most people get wrong.
If you're working on Instagram captions and then suddenly ask Claude to help you write a sales email, don't do it in the same chat. Every message after the switch is dragging the entire caption thread along with it. Pure token waste.
Rule: new topic = new chat.
A "topic" for me is anything that wouldn't share context with the thing before it. Captions and emails are different topics. Strategy and execution are different topics. Two different clients are different topics.
This one is for people using Claude Code in a terminal. Drop this single line into your CLAUDE.md file at the root of your project:
no filler, three to six word sentences, direct answers only.You can layer extra rules in the same file:
no filler, three to six word sentences, direct answers only.
do not summarise what you just did.
no apologies, no preamble.
ask before installing new packages.CLAUDE.md, and it loads automatically every time you open a chat in that folder. Set it once, save tokens forever.Print this, screenshot it, stick it on your wall. Run through it any time Claude feels like it's eating your limit.
/compact if the chat passed an hour or one full phase of workCLAUDE.md to my main project foldersIs the task a quick draft, summary, or brainstorm?
→ Sonnet, fresh chat, send.
Is it a strategy call or a high-stakes write-up?
→ Opus, fresh chat, give it real context.
Is the chat already long but you want to keep going?
→ /compact or summary handoff into a fresh chat.
Are you about to switch topics?
→ Stop. New chat. Always.
These aren't in the reel but they save me even more.
That's the full system. Three habits in the reel, one bonus, and a checklist you can actually use 🌱