Cover image for I was maxing my Claude 5-hour limit daily and still wasting weekly quota every night, so I built a tool that spends it while I sleep

rohanprichard

Like a lot of you I hit the 5-hour cap most days. What actually annoyed me was realizing the weekly limit doesn't line up with that. Even capping out daily, I ended every week with quota unused. It expires overnight even after I paid for it.

So I built claude-overnight. I queue questions during the day, /queue how do sqlite WAL checkpoints work? right inside Claude Code, and a scheduler runs them at night once my limits reset, through claude -p on the subscription. Morning brings markdown reports and a digest of what ran and what happened.

Every job saves its claude session, so overnight resume <id> reopens the conversation that wrote the report. You can argue with it about its conclusions over coffee. Or overnight followup <id> "go deeper on X" and it continues tomorrow night.

Coding tasks work too. They run in a throwaway git worktree on an overnight/* branch, only against repos I've explicitly trusted, so the agent never touches my working tree. Morning review is just git diff main..overnight/whatever.

Since people will ask how it reads limits when there's no official API: Claude Code stores an OAuth token locally (Keychain on Mac, ~/.claude/.credentials.json elsewhere), and GET https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage with that token plus an anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20 header returns your 5h and weekly utilization with reset times. Same trick the menubar trackers use. It's undocumented and the response shape already changed once while I was building this, so the tool survives without it.

The design constraint I cared most about: don't eat my own morning quota. It won't start above 20% of the 5h window, stops at 60%, skips entirely past 80% weekly, rechecks between jobs.

In the morning it opens a page in the browser with the whole batch on it — what ran, how long it took, the resume command for each one, and every report rendered inline so you're not clicking through files half-awake.

Check it out at https://github.com/rohanprichard/claude-overnight

Curious what you'd queue overnight, honestly. Let me know!