Claude Code updates 5-hour and weekly limits after slowdown complaints

• ClaudeDevs said on Friday that Anthropic had reset everyone's Claude Code 5-hour and weekly rate limits.
• The reset landed two days after ClaudeDevs' weekly-limit announcement, which said weekly limits were 50% higher through July 13 and stacked on top of a 2x increase to 5-hour limits from the prior week.
• Paid-user frustration was already visible: in levelsio's complaint, a $200 per month subscriber said Claude Code was so slow it could push them to Codex.
• Switching pressure was not isolated to one post, because thekitze joked about buying a fourth Codex subscription while steipete's repost claimed even a COO had moved from Claude Cowork to Codex.

Anthropic had already posted the 50% weekly bump and then the blanket reset, but neither post explained what caused the slowdown or whether the reset reflected a permanent policy change. Meanwhile, levelsio's screenshot showed a Claude Code session still "Misting..." after more than a minute, and Aakash Gupta's walkthrough pointed the other way, toward a fast-expanding Claude workflow stack that many users still were not using.

The official change on Friday was short: Anthropic reset both the rolling 5-hour bucket and the weekly bucket for all users, according to ClaudeDevs. The post did not attach a root cause, a product-status note, or a new long-term limit policy.

That made the move read like immediate pressure relief rather than a documented rollout. The only concrete operating detail in the evidence is that the reset covered both counters at once, per ClaudeDevs.

The most specific complaint in the evidence came from levelsio's post, which said Claude Code was "soooooo slooooooooooooowwwww" despite a $200 monthly plan and included a screenshot showing a response still in progress after 1 minute 12 seconds.

The image also surfaced two interface details during the slowdown: a tip for the /btw side-question command, and a visible permissions toggle, both in

.

Codex showed up in the reaction posts as the obvious alternative. In thekitze's post, the user said they were about to sign up for a fourth Codex subscription because it was still cheaper than hiring people.

A separate signal came from steipete's repost, which amplified a claim that even a COO had switched from Claude Cowork to Codex. thekitze's reply to ClaudeDevs pushed the comparison into meme form minutes after the reset.

The reset landed in the middle of a broader capacity loosening. Two days earlier, ClaudeDevs said Claude Code weekly limits were up 50% through July 13 for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise users.

The thread attached four operational details:

• It applies across the CLI, IDE extensions, desktop, and web, according to ClaudeDevs' thread.
• The temporary increase is already applied, with nothing to opt into, per the announcement thread.
• It runs through July 13 at 6 PM PDT, as ClaudeDevs' details put it.
• It stacks on top of the earlier 2x increase to 5-hour limits, per ClaudeDevs.

A follow-on summary from om_patel5 added one more claim that Anthropic itself did not include in the official thread: peak-hours throttling had been removed for Pro and Max. That post did not cite a separate source, but it shows how users were interpreting the bundle of changes in real time.

The odd contrast in this mini-drama is that the product surface was still expanding fast while the immediate public conversation was about speed and limits. Aakash Gupta claimed Anthropic had shipped 74 features in 52 days and listed a stack that included Cowork for file-based work, Dispatch for phone-launched tasks, Code Web for browser-based VS Code, Skills for on-demand procedures, MCP connectors, subagents, and a self-improving prompt loop.

That thread matters here because it describes the upside Anthropic is trying to sell while the complaint posts focus on the floor: can a paid Claude Code session stay responsive enough that users do not open Codex instead.