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

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

#181

Post by [deleted] »

interpol_p wrote: post #136
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 had Opus 4.6 running on a backend bug for hours. It got nowhere. Turned out the problem was in AWS X-ray swizzling the fetch method and not handling the same argument types as the original, which led to cryptic errors. I had Opus 4.6 tell me I was "seeing things wrong" when I tried to have it correct some graphical issues. It got stuck in a loop of re-introducing the same bug every hour or so in an attempt to fix t…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by andrewstuart »

vips7L wrote: post #180
andrewstuart wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s just clear this up …….. are you commenting with experience using the latest Claude, or are you commenting from personal beliefs. It’s fine for you to take a stand, but please understand your position is simply factually wrong if you think you can outprogram Claude for a range of common tasks. Being anti AI is fine, but if you deny facts of how far LLM programming has come then you lack credibility. The most eff…

I absolutely can out program Claude. I can factually guarantee that. You’re factually wrong in your belief that you think a statistical model that scientifically takes the average of programming is better than those of us that actually know what we’re doing. Programming is not hard. You’re just lazy.

Ok so you speak with certainty about the capabilities of something you don’t use and therefore have no experience of.

Childish and naive.

If you said you’ve been using Claude heavily and it’s never done better than you on your own, then your position would be credible.

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

#184

Post by eknkc »

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 find that Opus misses a lot of details in the code base when I want it to design a feature or something. It jumps to a basic solution which is actually good but might affect something elsewhere.

GPT 5.4 on codex cli has been much more reliable for me lately. I used to have opus write and codex review, I now to the opposite (I actually have codex write and both review in parallel).

So on the latest models for my use case gpt > opus but these change all the time.

Edit: also the harness is shit. Claude code has been slow, weird and a resource hog. Refuses to read now standardized .agents dirs so I need symlink gymnastics. Hides as much info as it can… Codex cli is working much better lately.

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

#185

Post by toraway »

interpol_p wrote: post #136
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 had Opus 4.6 running on a backend bug for hours. It got nowhere. Turned out the problem was in AWS X-ray swizzling the fetch method and not handling the same argument types as the original, which led to cryptic errors. I had Opus 4.6 tell me I was "seeing things wrong" when I tried to have it correct some graphical issues. It got stuck in a loop of re-introducing the same bug every hour or so in an attempt to fix t…

Haha, reminds me of an unbelievably aggravating exchange with Codex (GPT 5.4 / High) where it was unflinchingly gaslighting me about undesired behavior still occurring after a change it made that it was adamant simply could not be happening.

It started by insisting I was repeatedly making a typo and still would not budge even after I started copy/pasting the full terminal history of what I was entering and the unabridged output, and eventually pivoted to darkly insinuating I was tampering with my shell environment as if I was trying to mislead it or something.

Ultimately it turned out that it forgot it was supposed to be applying the fixes to the actual server instead of the local dev environment, and had earlier in the conversation switched from editing directly over SSH to pushing/pulling the local repo to the remote due to diffs getting mangled.

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

#186

Post by dcre »

convenwis wrote: post #5

Is there a writeup anywhere on what this means for effective context? I think that many of us have found that even when the context window was 100k tokens the actual usable window was smaller than that. As you got closer to 100k performance degraded substantially. I'm assuming that is still true but what does the curve look like?

Personally, even though performance up to 200k has improved a lot with 4.5 and 4.6, I still try to avoid getting up there — like I said in another comment, 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 feel like the dropoff starts around maybe 150k, but I could be completely wrong. I thought it was funny that the graph in the post starts at 256k, which convenient avoids showing the dropoff I'm talking about (if it's real).

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

#187

Post by vips7L »

andrewstuart wrote: post #183
vips7L wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely can out program Claude. I can factually guarantee that. You’re factually wrong in your belief that you think a statistical model that scientifically takes the average of programming is better than those of us that actually know what we’re doing. Programming is not hard. You’re just lazy.

Ok so you speak with certainty about the capabilities of something you don’t use and therefore have no experience of. Childish and naive. If you said you’ve been using Claude heavily and it’s never done better than you on your own, then your position would be credible.

Sure pal. Keep outsourcing your job. I’ll be here when you need help and are unemployed.

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

#188

Post by nullpoint420 »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #159
syntaxing wrote: post #144

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…

I've had a similar experience as a graphics programmer that works in C++ every day Writing quick python scripts works a lot better than niche domain specific code

Unfortunately, I’ve found it’s really good at Wayland and OpenGL. It even knows how to use Clutter and Meta frameworks from the Gnome Mutter stack. Makes me wonder why I learned this all in the first place.

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

#189

Post by jhatemyjob »

sarchertech wrote: post #142
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 tol…

Similar experience. I use these AI tools on a daily basis. I have tons of examples like yours. In one recent instance I explicitly told it in the prompt to not use memcpy, and it used memcpy anyway, and generated a 30-line diff after thinking for 20 minutes. In that amount of time I created a 10-line diff that didn't use memcpy.

I think it's the big investors' extremely powerful incentives manifesting in the form of internet comments. The pace of improvement peaked at GPT-4. There is value in autocomplete-as-a-service, and the "harnesses" like Codex take it a lot farther. But the people who are blown away by these new releases either don't spend a lot of time writing code, or are being paid to be blown away. This is not a hockey stick curve. It's a log curve.

Bigger context windows are a welcome addition. And stuff like JSON inputs is nice too. But these things aren't gonna like, take your SWE job, if you're any good. It's just like, a nice substitute for the Google -> Stack Overflow -> Copy/Paste workflow.

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

#190

Post by germinalphrase »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #155
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…

The replies to this really make me think that some people are getting left behind the AI age. Colleges are likely already teaching how to prompt, but a lot of existing software devs just don't get it. I encourage people who aren't having success with AI to watch some youtube videos on best practices.

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