I keep getting rate limited on Claude during work sessions, what should I do?

Claude rate limits usually happen because long chats, large codebases, and Opus-heavy workflows consume tokens very quickly within Anthropic’s rolling 5-hour windows.

Recent changes also made weekday peak-hour usage drain faster for some users, especially during heavy coding sessions.

Keep work sessions shorter and more modular by splitting projects into smaller chats focused on one task, feature, or repo at a time.

Developers consistently report that fresh chats with concise summaries use far fewer tokens than maintaining one massive conversation for hours.

Use Sonnet for debugging, refactors, and routine coding, then switch to Opus only for architecture or difficult reasoning tasks.

Claude Code usage is shared across chat and coding tools, so reducing unnecessary Opus usage can significantly extend your session limits.

This is the information we have, but if you have more insights from your experience, please share in the comments.