Om Patel@om_patel5
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
