Claude Says No

I strongly suspect Claude’s Mac app is written by Claude.

That’s not a compliment.

There’s the non-native GUI, though of course that doesn’t tell you much in this day and age. It’s obviously just Chromium or something similar (hell, you can right-click on some things and they still have the “Inspect Element” contextual menu item, which does indeed open a very Chrome-looking web inspector).

There’s its general everyday bugginess – it frequently resets the scroll position of conversations to some arbitrary point miles back in time, for example. Or just abruptly removes focus from the text field while you’re in the middle of typing (doesn’t move it anywhere else, just defocuses). It smells, in a nutshell.

But the “vibe coding” stench really wafts in when you consider that [cynically] their most important user flow – the upsell – doesn’t even work.

I hit my usage limit for the week. So, I went into Settings, Billing, etc and upgraded to the “Max” level. I’d been thinking about this anyway, so I didn’t have any animosity around it – I’d just been wondering if it was worth it; if I’d use the extra quota.

Having done that successfully, I exit Settings, and go to resume my work – only to see my Code conversations are all still claiming I’ve hit the usage limit. And the input text field is disabled.

Ugh. Great. Bugs.

I go back into Settings to double-check – but no, I have in fact upgraded my account and do have plenty of quota left.

I restart the app, of course, but that doesn’t help. I click a whole bunch of buttons – I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say there is no way to get the damn app to realise I have my entire quota left.

So I go to the Help menu and click the promisingly-titled “Get Support”. Which merely opens a page on Claude’s website, “How to get support“. Pro tip: if your product or website needs such a page, you’ve already failed at customer support.

That page tells me to go back to the app because the only avenue I have for communicating with…