Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by jacobr1 » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

daymanstep wrote: post #282

ericmcer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> I have been able to swap to languages I have almost no experience in and work fairly well because memorizing syntax is irrelevant. I do wonder whether your code does what you think it does. Similar-sounding keywords in different languages can have completely different meanings. E.g. the volatile keyword in Java vs C++. You don't know what you don't know, right? How do you know that the AI generated code does what y…

Beyond code-gen I think some techniques are very underutilized. One can generate tests, generate docs, explain things line by line. Explicitly explaining alternative approaches and tradeoffs is helpful too. While, as with everything in this space, there are imperfection, I find a ton of value in looking beyond the code into thinking through the use cases, alternative approaches and different ways to structure the same thing.

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

#292

Post by badlucklottery » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

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…

This is my experience as well.

LLM currently produce pretty mediocre code. A lot of that is a "garbage in, garbage out" issue but it's just the current state of things.

If the alternative is noob code or just not doing a task at all, then mediocre is great.

But 90% of the time I'm working in a familiar language/domain so I can grind out better code relatively quickly and do so in a way that's cohesive with nearby code in the codebase. The main use-case I have for AI in that case is writing the trivial unit tests for me.

So it's another "No Silver Bullet" technology where the problem it's fixing isn't the essential problem software engineers are facing.

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

#293

Post by parpfish » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

dennisy wrote: post #258

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…

Also another view is that developers below a certain level get a positive benefit and those above get a negative effect. This makes sense, as the models are an average of the code out there and some of us are above and below that average. Sorry btw I do not want to offend anyone who feels they do garner a benefit from LLMs, just wanted to drop in this idea!

i don't know if anybody else has experienced this, but one of my biggest time-sucks with cursor is that it doesn't have a way for me to steer it mid-process that i'm aware of.

it'll build something that fails a test, but i know how to fix the problem. i can't jump in a manually fix it or tell it what to do. i just have to watch it churn through the problem and eventually give up and throw away a 90% good solution that i knew how to fix.

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

#294

Post by jacobr1 » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #280

cmdli wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

An importantly the cycle time on this stuff can be much faster. Trying out different variants, and iterating through larger changes can be huge.

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

#295

Post by parpfish » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

jama211 wrote: post #266

chasd00 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to think about is many software devs have a very hard time with code they didn't write. I've seen many devs do a lot of work to change code to something equivalent (even with respect to performance and readability) only because it's not the way they would have done it. I could see people having a hard time using what the LLM produced without having to "fix it up" and basically re-write everything.

Yeah sometimes I feel like a unicorn because I don’t really care about code at all, so long as it conforms to decent standards and does what it needs to do. I honestly believe engineers often overestimate the importance of elegance in code too, to the point of not realising the slow down of a project due to overly perfect code is genuinely not worth it.

i dont care if the code is elegant, i care that the code is consistent.

do the same thing in the same way each time and it lets you chunk it up and skim it much easier. if there are little differences each time, you have to keep asking yourself "is it done differently here for a particular reason?"

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

#296

Post by bloomca » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

> 2. When NOT to use the truck... when talking or the bike is actually the better way to go.

Some people write racing car code, where a truck just doesn't bring much value. Some people go into more uncharted territories, where there are no roads (so the truck will not only slow you down, it will bring a bunch of dead weight).

If the road is straight, AI is wildly good. In fact, it is probably _too_ good; but it can easily miss a turn and it will take a minute to get it on track.

I am curious if we'll able to fine tune LLMs to assist with less known paths.

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

#297

Post by hirako2000 » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #280

cmdli wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

The issue is that you would be not just clueless but grown naive about the correctness of what it did.

Knowing what to do at least you can review. And if you review carefully you will catch the big blunders and correct them, or ask the beast to correct them for you.

> Claude, please generate a safe random number. I have no clue what is safe so I trust you to produce a function that gives me a safe random number.

Not every use case is sensitive, but even building pieces for entertainment, if it wipe things it shouldn't delete or drain the battery doing very inefficient operations here and there, it's junk, undesirable software.

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

#298

Post by draxil » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #283

ericmcer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> 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... But .. that's not the AI's fault. If people submit any PRs (including AI-generated or AI-assisted) without completely understanding them, I'd treat is as serious breach of professional conduct and (gently, for first-timers) stress tha…

But it's pretty much a given at this point that if you use agents to code for any length of time it starts to atrophy your ability to understand what's going on. So, yeah. it's a bit of a devils chalice.

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

#299

Post by FergusArgyll » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #184

eldenring wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serving a model efficiently at 1M context is difficult and could be much more expensive/numerically tricky. I'm guessing they were working on serving it properly, since its the same "model" in scores and such.

Thanks - still not clear what they did really. Some inference time hacks?

That would imply the model always had a 1m token context but they limited it in the api and app? That's strange because they can just charge more for every token past 250k (like google does, I believe).

But if not shouldn't it have to be completely retrained model? it's clearly not that - good question!

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

#300

Post by troupo » Tue, Aug 12, 2025, 8:01 PM UTC

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.

We don't. Because there's no hard data: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...

And when hard data of any kind does start appearing, it may actually point in a different direction: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

> We need to shift the conversation to techniques, and away from the tools.

No, you're asking to shift the conversation to magical incantation which experts claim work.

What we need to do is shift the conversation to measurements