Live data from Hacker News

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

claude.com

161–170 of 565 posts

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

#161
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] with multiple agents working at the same time, each at that speed. Horizontal parallelising of tasks doesn't really require any modern tech. But I agree that Opus 4.6 with 1M context window is really good at lots of routine programming tasks.

Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence. Spent an hour or so unraveling the mess. My feeling are growing more and more conflicted about these tools. They are here to stay obviously. I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very li…

> I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very little) experience.

Well, (economic) progress means being able to do more with less. A Fordian-style conveyor belt factory can churn out cars with relatively unskilled labour.

Economising on human capital is economising on a scarce input.

We had these kinds of shifts before. Compare also how planes used to have a pilot, copilot and flight engineer. We don't have that anymore, but it used to be a place for people to learn. But pilot education has adapted.

Or check how spreadsheet software has removed a lot of the worst rote work in finance. That change happened perhaps in the 1980s. Finance has adapted.

> Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence.

Yes, these things do best when they have a (simulated) environment they can make mistakes in and that can give them clear and fast feedback.

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

#162

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…

You’re using it wrong. As soon as it starts going off the rails once you’ve repeated yourself, you drop the whole session and start over.

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

#163

can someone tell me how to make this instruction work in claude code "put high level description of the change you are making in log.md after every change" works perfectly in codex but i just cant get calude to do it automatically. I always have to ask "did you update the log".

use claude hooks - in .claude/settings.json you can have it run on different claude events like "PreToolUse" or "Stop" and in those events you pass in commands you want it to run.

You can have stuff like for the "stop" event, run foobar.sh and in foobar.sh do cool stuff like format your code, run tests, etc.

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

#164
post #150
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even worse, it just randomly blows away the plan file without asking for permission.

No idea what they were thinking when they designed this feature. The plan file names are randomly generated, so it could just keep making new ones forever for free (it would take a LONG time for the disk space to matter), but instead, for long plans, I have to back the plan file up if it gets stuck. Otherwise, I say "You should take approach X to fix this bug", it drops into plan mode, says "This is a completely unrelated plan", then deletes all record of what it was doing before getting stuck.

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

#165
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tol…

Curious what language and stack. And have people at your company had marginally more success with greenfield projects like prototypes? I guess that’s what you’re describing, though it sounds like it’s a directory in a monorepo maybe?

This was in Go, but my org also uses Typescript, and Elixir.

I’ve had plenty of success with greenfield projects myself but using the copilot agent and opus 4.5 and 4.6. I completely vibecoded a small game for my 4 year old in 2 hours. It’s probably 20% of the way to being production ready if I wanted to release it, but it works and he loves it.

And yes people have had success with very simple prototypes and demos at work.

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

#166
post #128

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…

Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book. They won’t admit it, but it’s absolutely true. It shows initiative in not only getting things right but also adding improvements that the original prompt didn't request that match the goals of the job.

I don’t know if Opus is AGI but on a broader note, that’s how we will get AGI. Not some consciousness like people are expecting. It’s just going to be chatbot that’s very hard to stump and starts making actual scientific breakthroughs and solving long standing problems.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

When Anthropic said they wouldn't sell LLMs to the government for mass surveillance or autonomous killing machines, and got labeled a supply chain risk as a result, OpenAI told the public they have the same policy as Anthropic while inking a deal with the government that clearly means "actually we will sell you LLMs for mass surveillance or autonomous killing machines but only if you tell us it's legal". If you alrea…

I appreciate both your taking an ethical stance on openai, and the way you're engaging in this thread. The parent was probably flame bait as you say, but other people in the thread might be genuinely curious.

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

#168

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…

Just yesterday I asked it to repeat a very simple task 10 times. It ended up doing it 15 times. It wasn't a problem per se, just a bit jarring that it was unable to follow such simple instructions (it even repeated my desire for 10 repetitions at the start!).

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 next line in the comment you’re responding to is

> Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours.

which matches my experience exactly. I consider it to be about as magical as the parent comment is claiming, but I wouldn’t call it totally automatic.

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

#170
post #130
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book. They won’t admit it, but it’s absolutely true. It shows initiative in not only getting things right but also adding improvements that the original prompt didn't request that match the goals of the job.

On the adding improvements and being helpful thing, isn't that part of the system prompt?

You could put whatever you wanted in the GPT-4 system prompt and it wasn't doing shit.
Post reply on HN