THIS GUY LOST $200 IN ONE DAY BECAUSE THE STRING 'HERMES.md' WAS IN HIS GIT COMMITS HERMES.md is a real convention used in AI agent projects…

THIS GUY LOST 200 IN ONE DAY BECAUSE THE STRING "HERMES.md" WAS IN HIS GIT COMMITS HERMES.md is a real convention used in AI agent projects. it's a system prompt specification file. not some obscure edge case he's on claude max 20x at 200 a month. yesterday claude code hit him with "you're out of extra usage" out of nowhere his dashboard showed 13% weekly usage. 0% current session. 86% of his plan was sitting there untouched but 200.98 in extra usage already burned through what should have been covered by his subscription he tried logout & login, different models, fresh installs and nothing worked anthropic support sent the ai bot (four rounds of the same scripted response). eventually they just gave up on him so he started binary searching repos and commits manually on his own time until he found the trigger the string "HERMES.md" in a recent git commit message uppercase, with the .md extension, anywhere in your commit history that's it claude code includes recent commits in its system prompt and something server side flags HERMES.md and quietly routes you off your max plan onto API rate billing > AGENTS.md? fine > README.md? fine > HERMES without .md? fine > lowercase hermes.md? fine > uppercase HERMES.md? you're getting charged API rates he reported it. anthropic support acknowledged the bug three times, called it an "authentication routing issue", thanked him for finding it then refused to refund the 200 so the man pays 200 a month for max, lost another 200 to a billing bug they confirmed, did anthropic's QA work for free on his weekend, and got a "thank you for your patience" in return check your commit history before claude code quietly drains your account too

Source: Jeremy Howard (X) | 2026-04-26

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