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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

#191

Post by hvb2 »

eru wrote: post #161
travisgriggs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This always felt like a reason to throw it at coding. With its rigid syntax you'll know quickly and cheaply if what was written passes an absolute minimaal level of quality.

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

#192

Post by extr »

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…

You probably just don't have the hang of it yet. It's very good but it's not a mind reader and if you have something specific you want, it's best to just articulate that exactly as best you can ("I want a test harness for , which you can find "). You need to explain that you want tests that assert on observable outcomes and state, not internal structure, use real objects not mocks, property based testing for invariants, etc. It's a feedback loop between yourself and the agent that you must develop a bit before you start seeing "magic" results. A typical session for me looks like:

- I ask for something highly general and claude explores a bit and responds.

- We go back and forth a bit on precisely what I'm asking for. Maybe I correct it a few times and maybe it has a few ideas I didn't know about/think of.

- It writes some kind of plan to a markdown file. In a fresh session I tell a new instance to execute the plan.

- After it's done, I skim the broad strokes of the code and point out any code/architectural smells.

- I ask it to review it's own work and then critique that review, etc. We write tests.

Perhaps that sounds like a lot but typically this process takes around 30-45 minutes of intermittent focus and the result will be several thousand lines of pretty good, working code.

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

#193

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

hrishikesh-s wrote: post #138
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…

Opus-4.6 is so far ahead of the rest that I think Anthropic is the winner in winner-take-all

Codex doesn't seem that far behind. I use the top model available for api key use and its gotten faster this month even on the max effort level (not like a cheetah - more like not so damn painful anymore). Plus, it also forks agents in parallel - for speed & to avoid polluting the main context. I.e. it will fork explorer agents while investigating (kind of amusing because they're named after famous scientists).

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

#194

Post by sidrag22 »

dcre wrote: post #148
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…

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 pa…

subagents are huge, could execute on a massive plan that should easily fill up a 200k context window and be done atnaround 60k for the orchestration agent.

as a cheapass, being able to pass off the simple work to cheaper $ per token agents is also just great. I've got a handful of tasks I can happily delegate work to a haiku agent and anything requiring a bit of reasoning goes to sonnet.

Feel like opus is almost a cheatcode when i do get stuck, i just bust out a full opus workflow instead and it just destroys everything i was struggling with usually. like playing on easy mode.

as cool as this stuff is, kinda still wish i was just grandfathered into the plan with no weekly limit and only the 5 hour window limits, id just be happily hammering opus blissfully.

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

#195

Post by thatguymike »

vips7L wrote: post #187
andrewstuart wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s… not how the labour market works

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

#196

Post by eru »

kjohanson wrote: post #174
dcre wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Yeah, I start most of my sessions now with “read the diff between this branch and main”. Seems like it grounds and focuses it.

Slight tangent: you want to read the diff between your branch and the merge-base with origin/main. Otherwise you get lots of spurious spam in your diff, if main moved since you branched off.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by unshavedyak »

dyauspitr wrote: post #166
dzink wrote: 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.

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.

I'll be more likely to agree with anything being AGI if it doesn't have such obvious and common brittleness. These LLMs all go off the rails when the context window gets large. Their context is also easy to "poison", and so it's better to rollback conversations that went bad rather than trying to steer them back to the light.

There's probably more examples, but to me AGI must move beyond the above issues. Though frankly context window might just be a symptom of poor harness than anything, still - it illustrates my general issue with them being considered AGI as it stands today.

Claude 4.6 is getting crazy good though, i'll give you that.

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

#199

Post by 8note »

dominotw wrote: post #29

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".

whats the need? you have the session in a file as a dag. you can summarize to a log whenever you want. doesnt need to be as it goes.

earlier today i actually spent a bit of time asking claude to make an mcp to introspect that - break the session down into summarized topics, so i could try dropping some out or replacing the detailed messages with a summary - the idea being to compact out a small chunk to save on context window, rather than getting it back to empty.

the file is just there though, you can run jq against it to get a list of writes, and get an agent to summarize

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

#200

Post by AussieWog93 »

vips7L wrote: post #153

Friends, just write the code. It’s not that hard.

I hear what you're saying, but for a lot of people coding isn't something we can throw 40+ hours per week at.

My main job is running a small eComm business, and I have to both develop software automations for the office (to improve productivity long-term) while also doing non-coding day to day tasks. On top of this, I maintain an open source project after hours. I've also got a young family with 3 kids.

I'm not saying Claude is the damn singularity or anything, but stuff is getting done now that simply wasn't being addressed before.

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