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Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

claude.com

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Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#51

Post by DangitBobby »

mccoyb wrote: post #5

I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog post? It is your fault.") Oh yes, Claude will do all sorts of different things -- it depends on how you use it! You should totally learn all of these little finicky things ... because now…

Not sure how this level of cynicism is even remotely warranted. The post helps people who don't understand LLMs very well get the most out of Claude. Your incentives here are actually aligned with Anthropics since both of you want fewer tokens inputted and outputted per task completed.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#52

Post by pzo »

> Set your model and effort level before you start. Changing either one mid-conversation can bust your prompt cache, which can increase token cost.

I know we supposed to do this but is there any particular reason why such things cannot be supported? I thought its running on same model just different settings like reasoning. This would be super useful.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#53

Post by hackernudes »

kristjansson wrote: post #42
guessmyname wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Opened issue for this and it was automatically closed: […] Clarification: It wasn’t closed on submission though. It sat open ~17 days, a bot marked it stale, and it closed when nobody responded to the stale label. The two-phase thing is the part I didn’t know until recently: the stale label is basically asking “is this still relevant?”, and answering it makes the bot back off next time around. nixpkgs does the same…

the norms of issue trackers are strongly opposed to “bump”. these autoclose bots may yet change that

In this case there is a two phase staleness check. The bot marks it as stale and it is correct to "bump" it if you think it is still important. The nixpkgs repo works the same way. I think it backs off from adding stale again as it gets bumped.

I'm not saying it's a perfect solution but for projects that deal with large amounts of issues it's workable.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#54

Post by DangitBobby »

QuercusMax wrote: post #50
apercu wrote: post #37

I didn't read the whole thing, but I got my back up at the headline and my first reaction is now even the "AI" companies are telling you that "you're holding it wrong". I mean, they told us "just talk naturally to the AI because it's so much smarter than all you meatbags" and now it's “for best results, please learn to manage context windows, prompt caching, cache invalidation, model switching, output verbosity and w…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair Anthropic has no incentive to make their products more efficient as long as they're selling them by the token.

They are selling to many customers by subscription.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#55

Post by DangitBobby »

apercu wrote: post #37

I didn't read the whole thing, but I got my back up at the headline and my first reaction is now even the "AI" companies are telling you that "you're holding it wrong". I mean, they told us "just talk naturally to the AI because it's so much smarter than all you meatbags" and now it's “for best results, please learn to manage context windows, prompt caching, cache invalidation, model switching, output verbosity and w…

There is no shortage of literature on how to communicate effectively with real people.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#57

Post by andai »

ahurmazda wrote: post #33

What’s the point of running /clear vs starting a brand new session. At least with the latter I have session history, no? Pardon my ignorance since Claude isn’t my primary driver

Not 100% sure what clear does, but starting a new session invalidates the cache*, whereas I assume clear only removes part of the context, so it should be cheaper and faster.

* In theory the system prompt is always the same and should therefore be cached, but in practice there's some dynamic strings in there so it doesn't work that way. (Unless they changed this recently.)

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#58

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

nathanyz wrote: post #20

This feels like the Anthropic version of "You're holding it wrong" (1) 1) https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Step 1: use a different LLM that isn't 10x slower and 2-5x more expensive for the same level of quality.

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#59

Post by mccoyb »

DangitBobby wrote: post #51
mccoyb wrote: post #5

I mean, it feels hard not to laugh at this type of blog post. My cynical interpretation is that this is a type of passing the buck to engineers in enterprise settings ("Stop spending tokens. Did you read the value maximization blog post? It is your fault.") Oh yes, Claude will do all sorts of different things -- it depends on how you use it! You should totally learn all of these little finicky things ... because now…

Not sure how this level of cynicism is even remotely warranted. The post helps people who don't understand LLMs very well get the most out of Claude. Your incentives here are actually aligned with Anthropics since both of you want fewer tokens inputted and outputted per task completed.

Perhaps my enterprise cynicism is not warranted, but my other comments refer to accurate descriptions of reality: Anthropic wants to place their opaque system between you and any computational task that you wish to perform. Do you contest this or think it is not accurate?

Why do you think that Anthropic wants fewer tokens inputted and outputted?

Re: Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

#60

Post by cube00 »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #28

Is it possible to have some kind of script to keep your cache warm, or auto compact or something. I sometimes just leave some goals or something running before I go to bed or out and I don’t want to pay the cache text when I come back.

If everyone does it they lose the memory savings they're getting by expiring the cache.
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