Peak Hours¶
Since 2026-03-27, Anthropic drains Claude session limits faster during a fixed weekday window. Sidekick surfaces this state so heavy work can be timed for off-peak hours — without adding another browser tab to your day.
What peak hours are¶
| When | Weekdays 13:00 – 19:00 UTC (06:00 – 12:00 PDT, 09:00 – 15:00 EDT, 14:00 – 20:00 BST) |
| What changes | 5-hour session limits drain faster than normal |
| What doesn't | Weekly limits are unchanged |
| Who's affected | Free, Pro, Max, Team subscriptions |
| Who's not | Enterprise (dedicated capacity), pure API-key billing (no session-limit concept) |
Per Anthropic, roughly 7% of Pro users may hit session limits during peak hours that they would not have hit before the change.
Where Sidekick shows it¶
The indicator only appears when your active inference provider is Claude Max (or your CLI session provider is claude-code). OpenCode, Codex, and raw-API-key users never see a peak-hours pill and Sidekick never calls the upstream source on their behalf.
VS Code extension¶
- Dashboard card — a subtle orange pill appears in the Agent Hub dashboard only while peak hours are active. Off-peak renders nothing.
- Status bar — a 🟠 glyph is appended to the existing session status bar item during peak. Hover for the countdown to off-peak.
- Optional transition notification — disabled by default; enable
sidekick.peakHours.notifyOnTransitionto get a one-time toast when the window opens or closes.
CLI¶
sidekick peak— dedicated one-shot check. Human-readable by default, JSON with--json.sidekick status— the Claude and OpenAI health blocks are followed by a peak-hours block when the active provider isclaude-code.sidekick quota— shows a one-line peak summary underneath the 5-hour / 7-day quota bars for Claude subscriptions.
Settings¶
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
sidekick.peakHours.enabled |
true |
Master toggle. When off, the service does not poll and the UI stays quiet. |
sidekick.peakHours.notifyOnTransition |
false |
Emit a one-time VS Code toast when peak starts or ends. |
Data source and privacy¶
Peak-hours state comes from promoclock.co — a free, independent tracker maintained by @onursendere and not affiliated with Anthropic. Sidekick fetches https://promoclock.co/api/status once every 15 minutes only while the dashboard is open and your active inference provider is Claude Max. No identifying information is sent; only a GET with your normal HTTP headers.
If the endpoint is unreachable, Sidekick silently falls back to showing nothing — it never surfaces a stale or guessed state.
To disable network calls to promoclock.co entirely, set sidekick.peakHours.enabled to false.