Claude Warmup

claude-warmup

Manipulate Claude Code's 5-hour usage window into resetting when you actually need it.
Edit (2026-04-01): You can apply the same concept and achieve the exact same goal in a "native" way by using a Claude Code Web scheduled task. It works flawlessly! The "Why" section below is still useful for visualizing why you'd do this at all.
Edit (2026-04-30): Anthropic seems to have changed the anchor behavior. The 5-hour window now starts at the exact minute of your first message, not floored to the clock hour. A cron at 6:00 AM now anchors a window from 6:00 AM to 11:00 AM. Pick a round-minute cron time so the reset lands cleanly.

Why

Claude Code gives you a token budget that resets every 5 hours. The window starts when you send your first message.

You get the same amount of tokens either way. That's not the problem. The problem is _when_ the reset happens.

Say you start working at 8:30 AM. Your window opens at 8:30 AM and runs until 1:30 PM. You're coding hard, burning through tokens, and by 11 AM you hit the limit. Now what? Your window doesn't reset until 1:30 PM. That's two and a half hours of sitting around in the middle of your morning.

Now say a cron job sends a throwaway "hi" at 6:00 AM while you're still asleep. The window opens at 6:00 AM and runs until 11:00 AM. You still start working at 8:30, you still burn through tokens by 11. But now the window resets _right when you need it_. No gap. Your next message starts a fresh window through 4 PM.

You're not getting more tokens. You're just shifting the reset so it lands when you'd naturally take a break instead of when you're in the middle of something.

This won't help you with your _weekly_ usage limits though.

Example schedule:
Bonus: a third fresh window starts at 4pm.

How it works

A…