Getting maximum usage out of AI Pro/Ulitmate
Hi. I started out purchasing AI Pro and then upgraded to AI Ultimate when I ran out of credits very quickly. I'm finding I've run out of credits again after maybe 2 days work. I've dumped about $30 into the little $5 “top ups” as well. I clearly need to rethink how I'm using this tool, and that's the purpose of this post. To get help, not to complain lol. Because this is pretty incredible stuff, and is the future of programming.
I'm a noob with using the PyCharm AI Assistant. My goal was to get it to do most of the work on a personal project that I'm doing. I'm using the Claude Agent, because I heard Claude was the best python coder of the popular AI providers. I started out with a discussion, telling it what I wanted to do and strategizing how to do it. We had a bit of back and forth, and then Claude determined mysql database structure, and the basics of program flow, the python files it would create, and away we went. When there were errors, I would copy chunks out of the log and paste them into the chat, and Claude would figure out the errors, and fix them. After we got the basics working, I made modifications and improvements, all of which it figured out. Most of all of this work was done on one long conversation.
I've since read some possibly dated posts about not using one long chat because it forces all of the chat history to be reevaluated and therefore eating up credits. Aside from that, I'm looking for tips on how to improve my workflow so I don't eat up my monthly AI Ultimate quota in a couple of days. If there is a good white paper on how to properly use this tool efficiently, that would be great. I haven't really found anything like that yet. Also, why should I use Junie? Is that better or more efficient?
I'm hoping there is a white paper somewhere. I don't want to dump my AI Assistant training on the community. But in the absence of that, maybe you can point out my most egregious departures from efficient usage. Oh, and one more thing: I see there's some kind of tracker of your monthly usage? Where do I find that little guy?
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I've already found a good start point on more efficient usage, using the AI Chat bot: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/articles/SUPPORT-A-2448
I've also found my AI Assistant usage widget. There is an AI Chat graphic on the top toolbar to the right that when clicked will show the usage (in case others had this problem too).
Thank you for contacting JetBrains Support. I completely understand your frustration with how quickly AI credits are being used during the self‑review operation. Agentic actions like “Self‑Review with AI” are quite resource‑intensive and, with the updated quota model introduced in August 2025, they can draw a noticeably larger amount of credits in a short time.
As of August 25th, we’ve updated the AI quotas for all plans. The monthly limits are now lower than before and are calibrated to better match our actual infrastructure and LLM provider costs. At the moment, the AI Ultimate plan includes 35 AI Credits per 30 days, and you can buy extra top-up credits if you need more and want to avoid interruptions.
We’ve described this change in detail, along with the reasoning behind it, in our public FAQ HERE (https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/faq-new-ai-quota/):
To stretch your quota further, you can, for example:
• Prefer a more economical model such as Gemini Flash instead of Claude 4 where it fits your use case.
• Use local models, which do not consume cloud AI quota.
• Consider GPT‑5, which can be more cost‑efficient than Claude 4 while still providing similar quality.
• Keep in mind that Junie is more quota‑intensive than the standard AI Assistant.
You can find out more on tracking your quota usage via this link: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/articles/SUPPORT-A-2447/How-to-track-the-progress-of-cloud-quota-usage