Yay, more room for stray cats.
Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
141–150 of 706 posts
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…
Agreed, and it drives me bonkers when people talk about AI coding as if it represents some a single technique, process, or tool.
Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.
We don’t even fully agree on the best practices for writing code without AI.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#143The fracturing of all the models offered across providers is annoying. The number of different models and the fact a given model will have different capabilities from different providers is ridiculous.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#1441M context windows are not created equal. I doubt Claude's recall is as good as Gemini's 1M context recall. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/t...
Good analysis here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878999
> the model that’s best at details in long context text and code analysis is still Gemini.
> Gemini Pro and Flash, by comparison, are far cheaper
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…
Well put. It really does come down to nuance. I find Claude is amazing at writing React / Typescript. I mostly let it do it's own thing and skim the results after. I have it write Storybook components so I can visually confirm things look how I want. If something isn't quite right I'll take a look and if I can spot the problem and fix it myself, I'll do that. If I can't quickly spot it, I'll write up a prompt describing what is going on and work through it with AI assistance.
Overall, React / Typescript I heavily let Claude write the code.
The flip side of this is my server code is Ruby on Rails. Claude helps me a lot less here because this is my primary coding background. I also have a certain way I like to write Ruby. In these scenarios I'm usually asking Claude to generate tests for code I've already written and supplying lots of examples in context so the coding style matches. If I ask Claude to write something novel in Ruby I tend to use it as more of a jumping off point. It generates, I read, I refactor to my liking. Claude is still very helpful, but I tend to do more of the code writing for Ruby.
Overall, helpful for Ruby, I still write most of the code.
These are the nuances I've come to find and what works best for my coding patterns. But to your point, if you tell someone "go use Claude" and they have have a preference in how to write Ruby and they see Claude generate a bunch of Ruby they don't like, they'll likely dismiss it as "This isn't useful. It took me longer to rewrite everything than just doing it myself". Which all goes to say, time using the tools whether its Cursor, Claude Code, etc (I use OpenCode) is the biggest key but figuring out how to get over the initial hump is probably the biggest hurdle.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
3X if not 10X if you are starting a new project with Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS for a fullstack website development, that solves an everyday problem. Yeah I just witnessed that yesterday when creating a toy project. For my company's codebase, where we use internal tools and proprietary technology, solving a problem that does not exist outside the specific domain, on a codebase of over 1000 files? No way. Even locat…
Your first week of AI usage should be crawling your codebase and generating context.md docs that can then be fed back into future prompts so that AI understands your project space, packages, apis, and code philosophy. I guarantee your internal tools are not revolutionary, they are just unrepresented in the ML model out of the box
How do you keep the context.md updated as the code changes?
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know if there's a way to force Claude code to do that exclusively? I've found a few env vars online but they don't seem to actually work
You can "force" it by just paying them $200 (which is nothing compared to the value)
is Opus that much better than Sonnet? My sub is $20 a month, so I guess I'd have to buy that I'm going to get a 10x boost, which seems dubious
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…
I agree.
I experience a productivity boost, and I believe it’s because I prevent LLMs from making design choices or handling creative tasks. They’re best used as a "code monkey", fill in function bodies once I’ve defined them. I design the data structures, functions, and classes myself. LLMs also help with learning new libraries by providing examples, and they can even write unit tests that I manually check. Importantly, no code I haven’t read and accepted ever gets committed.
Then I see people doing things like "write an app for ....", run, hey it works! WTF?
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of now it's not integrated into Claude Code. "We’re also exploring how to bring long context to other Claude products". I'm sure they already know about this issue and are trying to think of solutions before letting users incur more costs on their monthly plans.
Seems to be for me, I came to look at HN because I saw it was the default in CC
where do you see it in CC?
Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context
#150Peer of this post currently also on HN front page, comparing perf for Claude vs Gemini, w/ 1M tokens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44878999