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

claude.com

201–210 of 565 posts

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

#201

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…

If you use eslint and tell it how to run lint in CLAUDE.md it will run lint itself and find and fix most issues like this.

Definitely not ideal, but sure helps.

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

#202
The stuff I built with Opus 4.6 in the past 2.5 weeks:

Full clone of Panel de Pon/Tetris attack with full P2P rollback online multiplayer: https://panel-panic.com

An emulator of the MOS 6502 CPU with visual display of the voltage going into the DIP package of the physical CPU: https://larsdu.github.io/Dippy6502/

I'm impressed as fuck, but a part of me deep down knows that I know fuck all about the 6502 or its assembly language and architecture, and now I'll probably never be motivated to do this project in a way that I would've learned all the tings I wanted to learn.

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

#203
post #164
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s not just me then! Hah good to know. It’s why I’ve started ignoring plan modes in most agent harnesses, and managing it myself through prompting and keeping it in the code base (but not committed)

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

#204

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 am starting to believe it’s not OPUS but developers getting better at using LLMs across the board. And not realizing they are just getting much better at using these tools.

I also thought it was OPUS 4.5 (also tested a lot with 4.6) and then in February switched to only using auto mode in the coding IDEs. They do not use OPUS (most of the times), and I’m ending up with a similar result after a very rough learning curve.

Now switching back to OPUS I notice that I get more out of it, but it’s no longer a huge difference. In a lot of cases OPUS is actually in the way after learning to prompt more effectively with cheaper models.

The big difference now is that I’m just paying 60-90$ month for 40-50hrs of weekly usage… while I was inching towards 1000$ with OPUS. I chose these auto modes because they don’t dig into usage based pricing or throttling which is a pretty sweet deal.

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

#205
post #170
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. I retract my sentiment :D

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

#206
post #192

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…

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 invarian…

Yes pretty much my workflow. I also keep all my task.md files around as part of the repo, and they get filled up with work details as the agent closes the gates. At the end of each one I update the project memory file, this ensures I can always resume any task in a few tokens (memory file + task file == full info to work on it).

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

#207
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course. That’s because the labor market prefers cost over quality. The labour market will always prefer cheap and fast code that works at first glance. That is how capitalism works. That has nothing to do with my capabilities. It has nothing to do with the fact that I will always outperform a shitty statistical model. It has everything to do with the fact that most of you are too lazy to think. It has everything to do with most of you sucking and being too lazy to your job.

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

#208
post #184

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…

Codex CLI is so much more pleasant to use than CC. I cancelled my CC subscription after the OpenCode thing, but somewhat ironically have recently found myself naturally trying the native Codex CLI client first more often over OpenCode.

Kinda funny how you don't actually need to use coercion if you put in the engineering work to build a product that's competitive on its own technical merits...

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

#209

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…

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.

One of the more subtle points that seems to be crucial is that it works a lot better when it can use the context as part of its own work rather than being polluted by unrelated details. Even better than restarting when it's off the rails is to avoid it as much as possible by proactively starting a new conversation as soon as anything in the history of the existing one stops being relevant. I've found it more effective to manually tell it most what's currently in the context in a fresh session skip the irrelevant bits even if they're fairly small than relying on it to figure out that it's no longer relevant (or give it instructions indicating that, which feels like a crapshoot whether it's actually going to prune or just bloat things further with that instruction just being added into the mix).

To echo what the parent comment said, it's almost frustrating how effective it can be at certain tasks that I wouldn't ever have the patience for. At my job recently I needed to prototype calling some Python code via WASM using the Rust wasmtime engine, and setting up the code structure to have the bytes for the WASM component, the arguments I wanted to pass to the function, and the WIT describing the interface for the function, it was able to fill in all of the boilerplate needed so that the function calls worked properly within a minute or two on the first try; reading through all the documentation and figuring out how exactly which half dozen assorted things I had to import and hook up together in the correct order would have probably taken me an hour at minimum.

I don't have any particular insight on whether or not these tools will become even more powerful over time, and I still have fairly strong concerns about how AI tools will affect society (both in terms of how they're used and the amount of in energy used to produce them in the first place), but given how much the tech industry tends to prioritize productivity over social concerns, I have to assume that my future employment is going to be heavily impacted by my willingness to adopt and use these tools. I can't deny at this point that having it as an option would make me more productive than if I refuse to use it, regardless of my personal opinions on it.

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

#210

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…

> PRD

Is it Baader-Meinhof or is everyone on HN suddenly using obscure acronyms?

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