AI & Development

• № 020 AI & Development

  56x Leverage: What Claude Code’s Max Plan Actually Costs at Today’s API Rates

  We've spent the past several weeks dissecting Claude Code's cache management bugs, building fixes, and documenting hidden costs. There's still one question we owe a clean answer to: what does

  29 Apr 2026

  1,592 words
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• № 020 AI & Development

  The Invisible Tax: Hidden Quota Burns and Phantom Rate Limits in Claude Code

  Update (April 24, 2026): Anthropic published a post-mortem on April 23 acknowledging three issues: a reasoning effort default change (March 4–April 7), a caching bug that continuously cleared thinking on

  23 Apr 2026

  1,599 words
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• № 020 AI & Development

  The Bugs Go Deeper: Silent Context Degradation in Claude Code

  In our cache investigation series, we documented how prompt cache bugs were causing 10-20x cost inflation on Max plans. We built a fetch interceptor to fix them. We thought we’d

  21 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  What Debugging Claude Code’s Cache Taught Us About AI Tooling Economics

  Update (April 17, 2026): This post was drafted April 7. In the 10 days since, the investigation expanded significantly: The interceptor now fixes 8+ cache bugs (not just the original

  18 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  Images That Won’t Die and Directories That Shouldn’t Be There

  Opus 4.7 update (April 16, 2026): This post is more urgent than when we wrote it. Opus 4.7 introduces high-resolution image support (2576px, up from 1568px) and a new tokenizer

  16 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  The Undocumented TTL Downgrade: How Exceeding Your Quota Makes Everything Worse

  Two Ways to Lose Your Cache: The TTL Mechanisms Nobody Told You About In Part 3, we described the quota monitoring we built into our fetch interceptor — reading anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-utilization

  14 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  How to Get 99.5% Cache Hit Rate on Your Claude Code Subscription

  How to Get 99.5% Cache Hit Rate on Your Claude Code Subscription VSITS — April 2026 We just finished a 61-hour Claude Code session on a Max 5x plan. 1,610

  14 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  What Does 5x Actually Mean?

  What Does 5x Actually Mean? VSITS LLC — April 2026 "That '5x' is utterly meaningless because you don't know what it's 5x of." — bakugo, Hacker News This is the

  13 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  The Three-Layer Gate: What Actually Happens When You Cross Your Claude Code Quota

  The Three-Layer Gate: What Actually Happens When You Cross Your Claude Code Quota VSITS LLC — April 2026 This post is a follow-up to Friday's "The 5-Minute Baseline", which documented

  13 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  The 5-Minute Baseline: What We Found in Claude Code’s Tools Array

  Update (2026-04-13): Our original recommendation to pin Claude Code to v2.1.81 is now outdated. Anthropic has partially fixed the resume-scatter bug in v2.1.90 and further improved cache stability in v2.1.104.

  11 Apr 2026

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• № 020 AI & Development

  Building a Fetch Interceptor to Fix Claude Code’s Cache — Without Touching Claude Code

  In Part 2, we mapped out three bugs that break Claude Code's prompt caching: resume block scatter, fingerprint instability, and non-deterministic tool ordering. Each one independently busts the cache. Together,

  11 Apr 2026

  1,473 words
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• № 020 AI & Development

  How Claude Code’s Prompt Cache Actually Works — And Three Ways It Breaks

  In Part 1, we showed that Claude Code sessions were burning through quota at 26-28% per turn — because the prompt cache was being rebuilt from scratch on every API

  9 Apr 2026

  1,383 words
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