What the heck? I'm paying serious money for Claude Pro Max and you're on a union break?!?! Claude can't hear me, he's smoking a cigarette outside and going on a 2 hour lunch.
Sigh.
I tried using OpenClaw and an Anthropic key with a $25 limit so I didn't get torched by token spendage. (I did try the OAuth token trick, but Claude's boss had figured that out and shut down that little loophole.) Six budget reloads later, the lobster still had trouble impressing me. It was likely because I was running it on a Raspberry Pi and I wouldn't give it the keys to all my worldly goods and knowledge. Still, it was a good experience, and I learned a lot about agents.
And then I tried Cowork. Late to the game, since the Windows release came later than the Mac, but I have had fun having it do things for me. I personally prefer to run Claude (and Copilot for that matter, but that is another rant) at the CLI, since the big beautiful UI can be a bit whacky. At least in the early days, what with the local VM losing touch and the need to update nearly every few hours.
I've had it plan a trip to Ireland, build a career development app which guides my studies that I happily ignore, and a whole bunch of other little one-off projects.
Then it came time to get serious: let's build a business.
And it was great. We built a cheap static website, a marketing plan, some legal docs that need real lawyer review in my state, some cool automation tools and code examples. Even Cowork was getting better.
However, Cowork seemed to have trouble with my machine, running WSL and PowerShell, Docker and Brave, etc. It would write all the code and docs I wanted, but it made me have to execute the scripts and do all the code pushes, which leads to a bunch of "Claude wants to <do something it should already be able to do> Approve or Deny?" prompts.
The constant need to hit approve, even though I had already approved it a thousand times before, led to the idea of "flogging," which is me having to mash Enter over and over again.
Then came Dispatch, a cool feature that allows me to run Cowork from my phone, or from a special session on my machine.
I found that Dispatch can run things in Bash and PowerShell, and doesn't need a bunch of extra permission prompts.
Cue evil genius laugh...
The trap is that I can keep working Claude while I am out of the home office, and I can even put my home machine to sleep via a PowerShell command. I don't even have to remember my PowerShell; Claude figures it out and puts itself to sleep like a baby humming to itself. But if I keep flogging, I run up against the usage limits, because Claude has to constantly reprocess the session and keep the commands fresh. So in a single day of work, Claude took two union breaks.
I wish I had that powerful a union.
I suppose the good part is that I have to go out and touch grass, or in my case, mow and apply dandelion killer to my just-short-of-an-acre yard. Me and John Deere, we be rolling like gangsters...
I think it's just a strategy to get me to jump to the next cost tier before this thing starts paying for itself. I'm on to you, Claude...
Update: While publishing this very post, Claude hit its usage limit again mid-sync. Dammit, that was only 90 minutes this session.