Live data from Hacker News

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

claude.com

251–260 of 565 posts

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

#251
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a PhD in a niche field and this can do my job ;) Not sure if this means I should get a more interesting job or if we are all going to be at the mercy of UBI eventually.

An economy, and likely a society, fails if everyone is at the mercy of a UBI.

But what's the alternative? Can any economy succeed with a >50% unemployment rate?

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

#252

Finally, I don't have to constantly reload my Extra Usage balance when I already pay $200/mo for their most expensive plan. I can't believe they even did that. I couldn't use 1M context at all because I already pay $200/mo and it was going to ask me for even more. Next step should be to allow fast mode to draw from the $200/mo usage balance. Again, I pay $200/mo, I should at least be able to send a single message wit…

I find it hard to understand that people consider $200 p/m a lot for what they are getting. Expensive compared to what? A netflix sub?

A 1hr of a senior dev is at least $100, depending where one lives. Since Claude saves me hours every day, it pays for itself almost instantly. I think the economic value of the Claude subscription is on the order of $20-40k a month for a pro.

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those things are smells imo, you should be very weary of any code output from a task that causes that much thrashing to occur. In most cases it’s better to rewind or reset and adapt your prompt to avoid the looping (which usually means a more narrowly defined scope)

Wary, not weary. Wary: cautious. Weary: tired.

This is really common, I think because there’s also “leery” - cautious, distrustful, suspicious.

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

#254

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…

It's so far the best model that answers my questions about Wolfram language. That being said it's the only use case for me. I won't subscribe to something that I can't use with third party harness.

I use a Claude sub with oh-my-pi, but I do so with lots of anxiety, knowing that I will be banned at any moment.

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

#255
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need to take a deep breath and calm down.

Perfectly calm mate. Maybe you should try to factually argue against my position? Probably not though. Your account was created 30 minutes ago and likely a bot.

My account was created 14 years ago. You need to calm down.

There is a reason discussions about agent use have been on Hacker News every other day, and it's not a grand conspiracy. Even in this submission, people have talked about how they have used Claude Code and its longer context window successfully as a tool for programming, even if they may be technically skilled to do it themselves. However, if you assume that every commenter is acting in bad faith, then there's no point in continuing.

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

#256

maybe i'm thinking too small, or maybe it's because i've been using these ai systems since they were first launched, but it feels wrong to just saturate the hell out of the context, even if it can take 1 million tokens. maybe i need to unlearn this habit?

I think your instinct is right. More context isn't free, even when the window supports it, and the model still has to attend to everything in there, and noise dilutes the signal. A cleaner, smaller context consistently gives better outputs than a bloated one, regardless of window size. For sure, the 1M window is great for not having to compact mid-task. But "I can fit more" and "I should put more in" are very different things. At least in my mind.

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

#257

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…

Undefined variable references? Did you not instruct it to run typescript after changes?

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

#258

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

Thanks for the video. His fix for "the dumb zone" is the RPI Framework: ● RESEARCH. Don't code yet. Let the agent scan the files first. Docs lie. Code doesn't. ● PLAN. The agent writes a detailed step-by-step plan. You review and approve the plan, not just the output. Dex calls this avoiding "outsourcing your thinking." The plan is where intent gets compressed before execution starts. ● IMPLEMENT. Execute in a fresh…

> RESEARCH. Don't code yet. Let the agent scan the files first. Docs lie. Code doesn't.

I find myself often running validity checks between docs and code and addressing gaps as they appear to ensure the docs don’t actually lie.

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

#259

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…

Same here. I don't understand how people leave it running on an "autopilot" for long periods of time. I still use it interactively as an assistant, going back and forth and stepping in when it makes mistakes or questionable architectural decisions. Maybe that workflow makes more sense if you're not a developer and don't have a good way to judge code quality in the first place.

There's probably a parallel with the CMSes and frameworks of the 2000s (e.g. WordPress or Ruby on Rails). They massively improved productivity, but as a junior developer you could get pretty stuck if something broke or you needed to implement an unconventional feature. I guess it must feel a bit similar for non-developers using tools like Claude Code today.

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

#260

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…

It’s still pretty poor writing powershell
Post reply on HN