The end of the 5-hour limit
I could not have asked for a better weekend present: Anthropic is removing the 5-hour limit.
Until now Claude counted your usage in windows of 5 hours. Once a window was full, everything stopped until the next one began. For a chat that hardly matters. For my agents it does. At night they write course lessons, edit videos, keep tickets up to date and prepare work for the morning. Those jobs take hours, and they sometimes stalled halfway on that limit.
That limit is now going, in stages. What remains is the weekly limit, which I can spread over the week the way the work needs it.
For anyone who works with autonomous agents, this is the right direction. You steer on what a week costs, not on a stopwatch that goes off in the middle of the work. It is also how I describe it in my books: give agents a budget and a goal, and let them finish the job.
Tonight I celebrate. Tomorrow the agents simply carry on.