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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

#271

Post by cruffle_duffle »

firasd wrote: post #106

A big problem with the chat apps (ChatGPT; Claude.ai) is the weird context window hijinks. Especially ChatGPT does wild stuff.. sudden truncation; summarization; reinjecting 'ghost snippets' etc I was thinking this should be up to the user (do you want to continue this conversation with context rolling out of the window or start a new chat) but now I realized that this is inevitable given the way pricing tiers and li…

> btw every 10 minutes just make a new row in a markdown table that summarizes every 10 min chunk

Why make it time based instead of "message based"... like "every 10 messages, summarize to blah-blah.md"?

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

#272

Post by jama211 »

abc_lisper wrote: post #248
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…

I doubt there is much art to getting LLM work for you, despite all the hoopla. Any competent engineer can figure that much out. The real dichotomy is this. If you are aware of the tools/APIs and the Domain, you are better off writing the code on your own, except may be shallow changes like refactorings. OTOH, if you are not familiar with the domain/tools, using a LLM gives you a huge legup by preventing you from gett…

I dunno, first time I tried an LLM I was getting so annoyed because I just wanted it to go through a css file and replace all colours with variables defined in root, and it kept missing stuff and spinning and I was getting so frustrated. Then a friend told me I should instead just ask it to write a script which accomplishes that goal, and it did it perfectly in one prompt, then ran it for me, and also wrote another script to check it hadn’t missed any and ran that.

At no point when it was getting f stuck initially did it suggest another approach, or complain that it was outside its context window even though it was.

This is a perfect example of “knowing how to use an LLM” taking it from useless to useful.

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

#273

Post by sixothree »

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…

I've been using Serena MCP to keep my context smaller. It seems to be working because claude uses it pretty much exclusively to search the codebase.

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

#274

Post by delegate »

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…

Easy. You're 3x more productive for a while and then you burn yourself out.

Or lose control of the codebase, which you no longer understand after weeks of vibing (since we can only think and accumulate knowledge at 1x).

Sometimes the easy way out is throwing a week of generated code away and starting over.

So that 3x doesn't come for free at all, besides API costs, there's the cost of quickly accumulating tech debt which you have to pay if this is a long term project.

For prototypes, it's still amazing.

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

#275

Post by ericmcer »

benterix wrote: post #29
aliljet wrote: post #16

This is definitely one of my CORE problem as I use these tools for "professional software engineering." I really desperately need LLMs to maintain extremely effective context and it's not actually that interesting to see a new model that's marginally better than the next one (for my day-to-day). However. Price is king. Allowing me to flood the context window with my code base is great, but given that the price has su…

> 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.

Agreed, daily Cursor user.

Just got out of a 15m huddle with someone trying to understand what they were doing in a PR before they admitted Claude generated everything and it worked but they weren't sure why... Ended up ripping about 200 LoC out because what Claude "fixed" wasn't even broken.

So never let it generate code, but the autocomplete is absolutely killer. If you understand how to code in 2+ languages you can make assumptions about how to do things in many others and let the AI autofill the syntax in. I have been able to swap to languages I have almost no experience in and work fairly well because memorizing syntax is irrelevant.

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

#276

Post by sixothree »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #4
tankenmate wrote: post #3

This is definitely good to have this as an option but at the same time having more context reduces the quality of the output because it's easier for the LLM to get "distracted". So, I wonder what will happen to the quality of code produced by tools like Claude Code if users don't properly understand the trade off being made (if they leave it in auto mode of coding right up to the auto compact).

What do you recommend doing instead? I've been using Claude Code a lot but am still pretty novice at the best practices around this.

/clear often is really the first tool for management. Do this when you finish a task.

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

#278

Post by dev0p »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #271
firasd wrote: post #106

A big problem with the chat apps (ChatGPT; Claude.ai) is the weird context window hijinks. Especially ChatGPT does wild stuff.. sudden truncation; summarization; reinjecting 'ghost snippets' etc I was thinking this should be up to the user (do you want to continue this conversation with context rolling out of the window or start a new chat) but now I realized that this is inevitable given the way pricing tiers and li…

> btw every 10 minutes just make a new row in a markdown table that summarizes every 10 min chunk Why make it time based instead of "message based"... like "every 10 messages, summarize to blah-blah.md"?

Probably it's more cost effective and less error prone to just dump the message log rather than actively rethink the context window, costing resources and potentially losing information in the process. As the models gets better, this might change.

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

#279

Post by theshrike79 »

F7F7F7 wrote: post #50
TheDong wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the AI produce a plan that spans multiple files (like "01 create frontend.md", "02 create backend.md", "03 test frontend and backend running together.md"), and then create a fresh context for each step if it looks like re-using the same context is leading it to confusion. Also, commit frequently, and if the AI constantly goes down the wrong path ("I can't create X so I'll stub it out with Y, we'll fix it later")…

Inventivatbly the files become a mess of their own. Changes and learnings from one part of the plan often dont result in adaptation to impacted plans down chain. In the end you have a mish mash of half implemented plans and now you’ve lost context too. Which leads to blowing tokens on trying to figure out what’s been implemented, what’s half baked, and what was completely ignored. Any links to anyone who’s built some…

I use Gemini-cli (free 2.5 pro for an undetermined time before it self-lobotomises and switches to lite) to keep the specs up to date.

The actual tasks are stored in Github issues, which Claude (and sometimes Gemini when it feels like it) can access using the `gh` CLI tool.

But it's all just project management, if what the code says drifts from what's in the specs (for any reason), one of them has to change.

Claude does exactly what the documentation says, it doesn't evaluate the fact that the code is completely different and adapt - like a human would.

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

#280

Post by zarzavat »

cmdli wrote: post #252
weego wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar role and place with this. My biggest take so far: If you're a disciplined coder that can handle 20% of an entire project's (project being a bug through to an entire app) time being used on research, planning and breaking those plans into phases and tasks, then augmenting your workflow with AI appears to be to have large gains in productivity. Even then you need to learn a new version of explaining it 'ou…

My experience has been entirely the opposite as an IC. If I spend the time to delve into the code base to the point that I understand how it works, AI just serves as a mild improvement in writing code as opposed to implementing it normally, saving me maybe 5 minutes on a 2 hour task. On the other hand, I’ve found success when I have no idea how to do something and tell the AI to do it. In that case, the AI usually do…

Both modes of operation are useful.

If you know how to do something, then you can give Claude the broad strokes of how you want it done and -- if you give enough detail -- hopefully it will come back with work similar to what you would have written. In this case it's saving you on the order of minutes, but those minutes add up. There is a possibility for negative time saving if it returns garbage.

If you don't know how to do something then you can see if an AI has any ideas. This is where the big productivity gains are, hours or even days can become minutes if you are sufficiently clueless about something.

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