Claude Code Is Having Its Cursor Moment

Remember a few months ago when Cursor launched their $200/month plan? They marketed it as essentially unlimited usage with "20x more than Pro." Users burned through their limits in hours, sometimes minutes. Reddit exploded. Cursor's CEO had to issue an apology within 18 days and offer refunds.

Everyone said they'd take their money to Anthropic instead. Claude Code's $200 Max plan had generous limits, direct access to Claude models without markup, and seemed like the obvious alternative.

Well, guess what happened.

Anthropic just pulled the same move

Over the last couple of weeks, Anthropic introduced aggressive rate limits on Claude Code. Users on the $200/month Max plan started hitting their weekly limit by Wednesday.

At some point Anthropic formally announced weekly rate limits, claiming they'd only affect 5% of users. The problem is that 5% includes a lot of professional developers who actually need to use the tool for work. The company cited users running Claude Code "continuously in the background, 24/7" and account sharing as reasons.

I just got rate limited as well. Neither am I running Claude Code 24/7, nor am I "vibe coding" or sharing my account with anyone else. All I'm doing is developing software professionally, working with Claude Code, Codex CLI and Cursor all at the same time, in an interactive manner, so nothing "runs in the background".

Reddit is now full of the exact same complaints that drove people away from Cursor: "I just cancelled my Pro plan; this is a joke with those limits now." "Even basic prompts are getting cut off after a couple of exchanges." "The 20x plan is now more like 5x."

Sound familiar?

The cycle continues

So where are people going now? OpenAI's Codex-CLI has become the new recommendation. At $20/month for Plus or $200/month for Pro, it includes all of ChatGPT's features plus coding tools. Early reports suggested more generous limits than Claude Code.

But here's the thing: A GitHub issue documents that ChatGPT Plus users are already hitting Codex CLI usage limits, some of them extremely quickly, sometimes after just 1-2 requests. Some users report needing to wait 3-5 days for their limits to reset. The pattern is repeating.

Solution

The problem isn't specific to Cursor or Claude Code or Codex-CLI. It's that AI coding tools cost way more to run than the subscription prices can sustainably support. Companies launch with generous limits to attract users, then scale back when the infrastructure costs hit.

Cursor tried it. Failed. Users fled to Claude Code.

Claude Code tried it. Failed. Users are fleeing to Codex-CLI.

Codex-CLI is already showing the same warning signs.

Until AI inference gets dramatically cheaper or prices go up across the board, this cycle will keep repeating.

The only real solution right now is creating just another $200/month account and switching between accounts when rate limits hit.