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Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#151

Post by verall »

flowerthoughts wrote: post #134
benterix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not clear if the value actually exists here. 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. I will give it another run in 6-8 months though.

What type of work do you do? And how do you measure value? Last week I was using Claude Code for web development. This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. Sure, it made mistakes, but the net was still very positive in terms of efficiency.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver.

I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project?

I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house build system, tons of legacy code laying around maybe maybe not used).

So no shade - I'm just really curious what kind of project you were able get such good results writing ESP32 FW and kernel drivers for :)

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#153

Post by rcanepa »

jbellis wrote: post #55

Just completed a new benchmark that sheds some light on whether Anthropic's premium is worth it. (Short answer: not unless your top priority is speed.) https://brokk.ai/power-rankings

I recently switched to the $200 CC subscription and I think I will stay with it for a while. I briefly tested whatever version of ChatGPT 5 comes with the free Cursor plan and it was unbearably slow. I could not really code with it as I was constantly getting distracted while waiting for a response. So, speed matters a lot for some people.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#154

Post by quikoa »

wiremine wrote: post #130
cambaceres wrote: post #76

Earlier 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…

It's not just about the programmer and his experience with AI tools. The problem domain and programming language(s) used for a particular project may have a large impact on how effective the AI can be.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#155

Post by croes »

jeremy_k wrote: post #145
wiremine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 describ…

Do you only skim the results or do you audit them at some point to prevent security issues?

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#156

Post by lukebechtel »

verall wrote: post #151
flowerthoughts wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of work do you do? And how do you measure value? Last week I was using Claude Code for web development. This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. Sure, it made mistakes, but the net was still very positive in terms of efficiency.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project? I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house bu…

Maintaining project documentation is:

(1) Easier with AI

(2) Critical for letting AI work effectively in your codebase.

Try creating well structured rules for working in your codebase, put in .cursorrules or Claude equivalent... let AI help you... see if that helps.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#157

Post by hinkley »

aliljet wrote: post #16

This is definitely one of my CORE problem as I use these tools for "professional software engineering." I really desperately need LLMs to maintain extremely effective context and it's not actually that interesting to see a new model that's marginally better than the next one (for my day-to-day). However. Price is king. Allowing me to flood the context window with my code base is great, but given that the price has su…

Sounds to me like your problem has shifted from how much the AI tool costs per hour to how much it costs per token because resetting a model happens often enough that the price doesn't amortize out per hour. That giant spike every ?? months overshadows the average cost per day.

I wonder if this will become more universal, and if we won't see a 'tick-tock' pattern like Intel used, where they tweak the existing architecture one or more times between major design work. The 'tick' is about keeping you competitive and the 'tock' is about keeping you relevant.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#158

Post by squeaky-clean »

cambaceres wrote: post #76
benterix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not clear if the value actually exists here. 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. I will give it another run in 6-8 months though.

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.

I just want to point out that they only said agentic models were a negative, not AI in general. I don't know if this is what they meant, but I personally prefer to use a web or IDE AI tool and don't really like the agentic stuff compared to those. For me agentic AI would be a net positive against no-AI, but it's a net negative compared to other AI interfaces

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#159

Post by sdesol »

handfuloflight wrote: post #126
sdesol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked at Claud Code, so I don't know if they have analyzers or not that understands how to extract any type of data other than specific coding data that it is trained on. Based on the runtime for some tasks, I would not be surprised if it is going through all the files and asking "is this relevant" My tool is mainly targeted at massive code bases and enterprise as I still believe the most efficient way to…

Well you should look at it, because it's not going through all files. I looked at your product and the workflow is essentially asking me to do manually what Claude Code does auto. Granted, manually selecting the context will probably lead to lower costs in any case because Claude Code invokes tool calls like grep to do its search, so I do see merit in your product in that respect.

Looking at the code, it does have some sort of automatic discovery. I also don't know how scalable Claude Code is. I've spent over a decade thinking about code search, so I know what the limitations are for enterprise code.

One of the neat tricks that I've developed is, I would load all my backend code for my search component and then I would ask the LLM to trace a query and create a context bundle for only the files that are affected. Once the LLM has finished, I just need to do a few clicks to refine a 80,000 token size window down to about 20,000 tokens.

I would not be surprised if this is one of the tricks that it does as it is highly effective. Also, yes my tool is manual, but I treat conversations as durable asset so in the future, you should be able to say, last week I did this, load the same files and LLM will know what files to bring into context.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#160

Post by gdudeman »

rvnx wrote: post #87
gdudeman wrote: post #83

A tip for those who both use Claude Code and are worried about token use (which you should be if you're stuffing 400k tokens into context even if you're on 20x Max): 1. Build context for the work you're doing. Put lots of your codebase into the context window. 2. Do work, but at each logical stopping point hit double escape to rewind to the context-filled checkpoint. You do not spend those tokens to rewind to that po…

Thank you for the tips, do you know how to rollback latest changes ? Trying very hard to do it, but seems like Git is the only way ?

Git or my favorite "Undo all of those changes."
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