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Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

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Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#201

Post by GodelNumbering »

verall wrote: post #151
flowerthoughts wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of work do you do? And how do you measure value? Last week I was using Claude Code for web development. This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. Sure, it made mistakes, but the net was still very positive in terms of efficiency.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project? I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house bu…

This is my experience too. Also, their propensity to jump into code without necessarily understanding the requirement is annoying to say the least. As the project complexity grows, you find yourself writing longer and longer instructions just to guardrail.

Another rather interesting thing is that they tend to gravitate towards sweep the errors under the rug kind of coding which is disastrous. e.g. "return X if we don't find the value so downstream doesn't crash". These are the kind of errors no human, even a beginner on their first day learning to code, wouldn't make and are extremely annoying to debug.

Tl;dr: LLMs' tendency to treat every single thing you give it as a demo homework project

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#202

Post by jpc0 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #161
verall wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project? I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house bu…

I work in FAANG, have been for over a decade. These tools are creating a huge amount of value, starting with Copilot but now with tools like Claude Code and Cursor. The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building things.

> These tools are creating a huge amount of value...

> The people doing so don’t have a lot of time to comment about it on HN since we’re busy building…

“We’re so much more productive that we don’t have time to tell you how much more productive we are”

Do you see how that sounds?

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#203

Post by moregrist »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #142
wiremine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…

Agreed, and it drives me bonkers when people talk about AI coding as if it represents some a single technique, process, or tool. Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days. We don’t even fully agree on the best practices for writing code without AI.

> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.

There were gobs of terrible road metaphors that spun out of calling the Internet the “Information Superhighway.”

Gobs and gobs of them. All self-parody to anyone who knew anything.

I hesitate to relate this to anything in the current AI era, but maybe the closest (and in a gallows humor/doomer kind of way) is the amount of exec speak on how many jobs will be replaced.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#204

Post by byryan »

cambaceres wrote: post #76
benterix wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not clear if the value actually exists here. Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. I will give it another run in 6-8 months though.

For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.

That makes sense, especially if your building web applications that are primarily "just" CRUD operations. If a lot of the API calls follow the same pattern and the application is just a series of API calls + React UI then that seems like something an LLM would excel at. LLM's are also more proficient in TypeScript/JS/Python compared to other languages, so that helps as well.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#205

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

rvnx wrote: post #87
gdudeman wrote: post #83

A tip for those who both use Claude Code and are worried about token use (which you should be if you're stuffing 400k tokens into context even if you're on 20x Max): 1. Build context for the work you're doing. Put lots of your codebase into the context window. 2. Do work, but at each logical stopping point hit double escape to rewind to the context-filled checkpoint. You do not spend those tokens to rewind to that po…

Thank you for the tips, do you know how to rollback latest changes ? Trying very hard to do it, but seems like Git is the only way ?

I haven't used it, but saw this the other day: https://github.com/RonitSachdev/ccundo

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#206

Post by photon_lines »

didibus wrote: post #129
photon_lines wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry -- I keep seeing this being used but I'm not entirely sure how it differs from most of human thinking. Most human 'reasoning' is probabilistic as well and we rely on 'associative' networks to ingest information. In a similar manner - LLMs use association as well -- and not only that, but they are capable of figuring out patterns based on examples (just like humans are) -- read this paper for context: https://ar…

You seem possibly more knowledgeable then me on the matter. My impression is that LLMs predict the next token based on the prior context. They do that by having learned a probability distribution from tokens -> next-token. Then as I understand, the models are never reasoning about the problem, but always about what the next token should be given the context. The chain of thought is just rewarding them so that the nex…

So - in the pre-training step you are right -- they are simple 'statistical' predictors but there are more steps involved in their training which turn them from simple predictors to being able to capture patterns and reason -- I tried to come up with an intuitive overview of how they do this in the write-up and I'm not sure I can give you a simple explanation here, but I would recommend you play around with Deep-Seek and other more advanced 'reasoning' or 'chain-of-reason' models and ask them to perform tasks for you: they are not simply statistically combining information together. Many times they are able to reason through and come up with extremely advanced working solutions. To me this indicates that they are not 'accidently' stumbling upon solutions based on statistics -- they actually are able to 'understand' what you are asking them to do and to produce valid results.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#207

Post by Workaccount2 »

sdesol wrote: post #137
photon_lines wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry -- I keep seeing this being used but I'm not entirely sure how it differs from most of human thinking. Most human 'reasoning' is probabilistic as well and we rely on 'associative' networks to ingest information. In a similar manner - LLMs use association as well -- and not only that, but they are capable of figuring out patterns based on examples (just like humans are) -- read this paper for context: https://ar…

I'm not sure if I would say human reasoning is 'probabilistic' unless you are taking a very far step back and saying based on how the person lived, they have ingrained biases (weights) that dictates how they reason. I don't know if LLMs have a built in scepticism like humans do, that plays a significant role in reasoning. Regardless if you believe LLMs are probabilistic or not, I think what we are both saying is cont…

Humans have a neuro-chemical system that performs operations with electrical signals.

That's the level to look at, unless you have a dualist view of the brain (we are channeling a super-natural forces).

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#208

Post by ath3nd »

wiremine wrote: post #130
cambaceres wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.

> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…

> How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.

The current freshest study focusing on experienced developers showed a net negative in the productivity when using an LLM solution in their flow:

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

My conclusion on this, as an ex VP of Engineering, is that good senior developers find little utility with LLMs and even them to be a nuisance/detriment, while for juniors, they can be godsend, as they help them with syntax and coax the solution out of them.

It's like training wheels to a bike. A toddler might find 3x utility, while a person who actually can ride a bike well will find themselves restricted by training wheels.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#209

Post by nomel »

sdesol wrote: post #72
alexchamberlain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how, and maybe some of the coding agents are doing this, but we need to teach the AI to use abstractions, rather than the whole code base for context. We as humans don't hold the whole codebase in our hear, and we shouldn't expect the AI to either.

LLMs (current implementation) are probabilistic so it really needs the actual code to predict the most likely next tokens. Now loading the whole code base can be a problem in itself, since other files may negatively affect the next token.

No, it doesn’t, nor do we. It’s why abstractions and documentations exist.

If you know what a function achieves, and you trust it to do that, you don’t need to see/hold its exact implementation in your head.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

#210

Post by mh- »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #142
wiremine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative. > For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that…

Agreed, and it drives me bonkers when people talk about AI coding as if it represents some a single technique, process, or tool. Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days. We don’t even fully agree on the best practices for writing code without AI.

> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days.

Older person here: they absolutely did, all over the place in the early 90s. I remember people decrying projects that moved them to computers everywhere I went. Doctors offices, auto mechanics, etc.

Then later, people did the same thing about the Internet (was written with a single word capital I by 2000, having been previously written as two separate words.)

https://i.imgur.com/vApWP6l.png

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