Forgotten Agent Ran 1,555 Sessions a Day and Ate My Claude Quota
The author's Claude Max quota drained in 10 minutes, and he nearly blamed a faulty meter. Digging through Claude Code's local logs, he found a forgotten background agent from a YC batch project spawning 1,555 short-lived sessions a day, with 91% of usage generated by machines rather than by him. The post explains why the limits feel broken: the 5-hour cap is a rolling window that background sessions can already fill, and every fresh session pays a cache-warmup cost roughly 12 times higher than re-reading from cache. The author turned his two-day investigation into tare, an open-source Claude Code skill that deduplicates log entries (naive counts overstate tokens by about 86%) and answers with a cause instead of a raw spreadsheet. It runs entirely locally, makes zero network calls, and can produce a scrubbed HTML usage report that can be shared without leaking prompts or file paths. Useful for anyone whose Claude Code quota keeps disappearing and for teams auditing agent-side spending.