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Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

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

#221

Post by wijwp »

jpc0 wrote: post #202
oceanplexian wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in FAANG, have been for over a decade. These tools are creating a huge amount of value, starting with Copilot but now with tools like Claude Code and Cursor. The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building things.

> These tools are creating a huge amount of value... > The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building… “We’re so much more productive that we don’t have time to tell you how much more productive we are” Do you see how that sounds?

To be fair, AI isn't going to give us more time outside work. It'll just increase expectations from leadership.

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

#222

Post by joenot443 »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #37
aliljet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that?

https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot

This is a good piece. Clearly it's a pretty complex problem and the intuitive result a layman engineer like myself might expect doesn't reflect the reality of LLMs. Regex works as reliably on 20 characters as it does 2m characters; the only difference is speed. I've learned this will probably _never_ be the case with LLMs, there will forever exist some level of epistemic doubt in its result.

When they announced Big Contexts in 2023, they referenced being able to find a single changed sentence in the context's copy of Great Gatsby[1]. This example seemed _incredible_ to me at the time but now two years later I'm feeling like it was pretty cherry-picked. What does everyone else think? Could you feed a novel into an LLM and expect it to find the single change?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35941920

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

#223

Post by nme01 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #161
verall wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work in FAANG, have been for over a decade. These tools are creating a huge amount of value, starting with Copilot but now with tools like Claude Code and Cursor. The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building things.

I also work for a FAANG company and so far most employees agree that while LLMs are good for writing docs, presentations or emails, they still lack a lot when it comes to writing a maintainable code (especially in Java, they supposedly do better in Go, don’t know why, not my opinion). Even simple refactorings need to be carefully checked. I really like them for doing stuff that I know nothing about though (eg write a script using a certain tool, tell me how to rewrite my code to use certain library etc) or for reviewing changes

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

#224

Post by jeremy_k »

croes wrote: post #155
jeremy_k wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What kind of security issues are you thinking about? I'm generating UI components like Selects for certain data types or Charts of data.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by jeremy_k »

k9294 wrote: post #162
jeremy_k wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For this very reason I switched for TS for backend as well. I'm not a big fun of JS but the productivity gain of having shared types between frontend and backend and the Claude code proficiency with TS is immense.

I considered this, but I'm just too comfortable writing my server logic in Ruby on Rails (as I do that for my day job and side project). I'm super comfortable writing client side React / Typescript but whenever I look at server side Typescript code I'm like "I should understand what this is doing but I don't" haha.

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

#227

Post by jacquesm »

mh- wrote: post #210
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days. Older person here: they absolutely did, all over the place in the early 90s. I remember people decrying projects that moved them to computers everywhere I went. Doctors offices, auto mechanics, etc. Then later, people did the same thing about the Internet (was written with a single word capital I by 2000, hav…

And not all of those people were wrong.

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

#228

Post by tptacek »

rs186 wrote: post #104
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.

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…

That's an interesting comment, because "locating the correct file to edit" was the very first thing LLMs did that was valuable to me as a developer.

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

#229

Post by spike021 »

gdudeman wrote: post #160
rvnx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

this usually gets the job done for me as well

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

#230

Post by izacus »

mstkllah wrote: post #199
dillydogg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read comments from the people singing their praises of the technology, it's hard not to think of the study that found AI tools made developers slower in early 2025. >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI t…

Ah, the very extensive study with 16 developers. Bulletproof results.

Yeah, we should listen to the one "trust me bro" dude instead.
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