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1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

claude.com

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Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#141

Post by conception »

koreth1 wrote: post #139
Frannky wrote: post #117

Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time. Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours. It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." The other crazy thing is that with today's tech, these…

I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and…

Branch first so you can just undo. I think this would have worked with sub agents and /loop maybe? Write all items to change to a todo.md. Have it split up the work with haiku sub agents doing 5-10 changes at a time, marking the todos done, and /loop until all are done. You’ll succeed I suspect. If the main claude instance compacts its context - stop and start from where you left off.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#142

Post by sarchertech »

Frannky wrote: post #117

Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time. Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours. It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." The other crazy thing is that with today's tech, these…

What kinds of things are you building? This is not my experience at all.

Just today I asked Claude using opus 4.6 to build out a test harness for a new dynamic database diff tool. Everything seemed to be fine but it built a test suite for an existing diff tool. It set everything up in the new directory, but it was actually testing code and logic from a preexisting directory despite the plan being correct before I told it to execute.

I started over and wrote out a few skeleton functions myself then asked it write tests for those to test for some new functionality. Then my plan was to the ask it to add that functionality using the tests as guardrails.

Well the tests didn’t actually call any of the functions under test. They just directly implemented the logic I asked for in the tests.

After $50 and 2 hours I finally got something working only to realize that instead of creating a new pg database to test against, it found a dev database I had lying around and started adding tables to it.

When I managed to fix that, it decided that it needed to rebuild multiple docker components before each test and test them down after each one.

After about 4 hours and $75, I managed to get something working that was probably more code than I would have written in 4 hours, but I think it was probably worse than what I would have come up with on my own. And I really have no idea if it works because the day was over and I didn’t have the energy left to review it all.

We’ve recently been tasked at work with spending more money on Claude (not being more productive the metric is literally spending more money) and everyone is struggling to do anything like what the posts on HN say they are doing. So far no one in my org in a very large tech company has managed to do anything very impressive with Claude other than bringing down prod 2 days ago.

Yes I’m using planning mode and clearing context and being specific with requirements and starting new sessions, and every other piece of advice I’ve read.

I’ve had much more luck using opus 4.6 in vs studio to make more targeted changes, explain things, debug etc… Claude seems too hard to wrangle and it isn’t good enough for you to be operating that far removed from the code.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#143

Post by roygbiv2 »

s900mhz wrote: post #115
roygbiv2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found compactation kills the whole thing. Important debug steps completely missing and the AI loops back round thinking it's found a solution when we've already done that step.

I find it useful to make Claude track the debugging session with a markdown file. It’s like a persistent memory for a long session over many context windows. Or make a subagent do the debugging and let the main agent orchestrate it over many subagent sessions.

Yeah I use a markdown to put progress in. It gets kinda long and convoluted a manual intervention is required every so often. Works though.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#144

Post by syntaxing »

It’s interesting because my career went from doing higher level language (Python) to lower language (C++ and C). Opus and the like is amazing at Python, honestly sometimes better than me but it does do some really stupid architectural decisions occasionally. But when it comes to embedded stuff, it’s still like a junior engineer. Unsure if that will ever change but I wonder if it’s just the quality and availability of training data. This is why I find it hard to believe LLMs will replace hardware engineers anytime soon (I was a MechE for a decade).

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#146

Post by coldtea »

saaaaaam wrote: post #62
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it ever useful to have a context window that full? I try to keep usage under 40%, or about 80k tokens, to avoid what Dex Horthy calls the dumb zone in his research-plan-implement approach. Works well for me so far. No vibes allowed: https://youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?is=adMmmKdVxraYO2yQ

That video is bizarre. Such a heavy breather.

What a weird and inconsequential thing to focus on...

He's just fucking closely miced with compression + speaking fast and anxious/excited speaking to an audience

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#147

Post by vips7L »

Frannky wrote: post #117

Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time. Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours. It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." The other crazy thing is that with today's tech, these…

Bullshit.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#148

Post by dcre »

koreth1 wrote: post #139
Frannky wrote: post #117

Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time. Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours. It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." The other crazy thing is that with today's tech, these…

I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and…

One tip I have is that once you have the diff you want to fix, start a new session and have it work on the diff fresh. They’ve improved this, but it’s still the case that the farther you get into context window, the dumber and less focused the model gets. I learned this from the Claude Code team themselves, who have long advised starting over rather than trying to steer a conversation that has started down a wrong path.

I have heard from people who regularly push a session through multiple compactions. I don’t think this is a good idea. I virtually never do this — when I see context getting up to even 100k, I start making sure I have enough written to disk to type /new, pipe it the diff so far, and just say “keep going.” I learned recently that even essentials like the CLAUDE.md part of the prompt get diluted through compactions. You can write a hook to re-insert it but it's not done by default.

This fresh context thing is a big reason subagents might work where a single agent fails. It’s not just about parallelism: each subagent starts with a fresh context, and the parent agent only sees the result of whatever the subagent does — its own context also remains clean.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#149

Post by koreth1 »

conception wrote: post #141
koreth1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and…

Branch first so you can just undo. I think this would have worked with sub agents and /loop maybe? Write all items to change to a todo.md. Have it split up the work with haiku sub agents doing 5-10 changes at a time, marking the todos done, and /loop until all are done. You’ll succeed I suspect. If the main claude instance compacts its context - stop and start from where you left off.

It actually did automatically break the work up into chunks and launched a bunch of parallel workers to each handle a smaller amount of work. It wasn't doing everything in a single instance.

The problem wasn't that it lost track of which changes it needed to make, so I don't think checking items off a todo list would have helped. I believe it did actually change all the places in the code it should have. It just made the wrong changes sometimes.

But also, the claim I was responding to was, "I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time." If I have to tell it how to organize its work and how to keep track of its progress and how to execute all the smaller chunks of work, then I may get good results, but the tool isn't as magical (for me, anyway) as it seems to be for some other people.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#150

Post by girvo »

hedora wrote: post #140
girvo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating: that is identical to the workflow I've landed on myself.

It's also identical to what Claude Code does if you put it in plan mode (bound to key), at least in my experience.

My annoyance with plan mode is where it sticks the .md file, kind of hides it away which makes it annoying to clear context and start up a new phase from the PLAN file. But that might just be a skill issue on my end
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