it is a window that starts with usage and continues for five hours.

When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.

The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.

That said, if your 5 hour window quota is 15% of your weekly quota, this means you can be using 30% or more a day of the weekly quota.

> When I was doing an evaluation using a lower paid tier of Claude, I would have a service send a "hello" ping 4 hours before I started my work day, to reduce my first work-hours session window to 1 hour.

> The goal was to have this be more of a "thinking" session for planning the next larger block of work, and then being able to use a lower cost model for implementation.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like

when you send your first message, the timer will start.

In all of them I've seen it's a window that starts when you haven't been using it in a while and begin work OR when your previous window expired. The window starts with a set number of tokens and cuts you off when they're used, it is fully reset at the end of the window (it's not a sliding window).

When you haven't used any tokens for an extended amount of time it reverts to the point where whenever you send your first token is when the window begins.

Hm, it seems like it'd make sense to automate a script to send one small prompt at, say, 7 or 8am so that you get your reset around noon instead of having to wait until 5h or more into the workday.

I never quite understood why they picked 5h, it seems oddly arbitrary

Some third party harnesses allow you to do this, definitely makes sense.