Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 706 posts

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

#311

Post by troupo »

lukebechtel wrote: post #156
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…

Maintaining project documentation is: (1) Easier with AI (2) Critical for letting AI work effectively in your codebase. Try creating well structured rules for working in your codebase, put in .cursorrules or Claude equivalent... let AI help you... see if that helps.

And the chance of that working depends on the weather, the phase of the moon and the arrangement of bird bones in a druidic augury.

It's a non-deterministic system producing statistically relevant results with no failure modes.

I had Cursor one-shot issues in internal libraries with zero rules.

And then suggest I use StringBuilder (Java) in a 100% Elixir project with carefully curated cursor rules as suggested by the latest shamanic ritual trends.

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

#312

Post by firasd »

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"?

Sure. But you'd want to help out the LLM with a message count like this is message 40, this is message 41... so when it hits message 50 it's like ahh time for a new summary and call the memory_table function (cause it's executing the earlier standing order in your prompt)

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

#314

Post by Wowfunhappy »

rootnod3 wrote: post #20
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…

Flooding the context also means increasing the likelihood of the LLM confusing itself. Mainly because of the longer context. It derails along the way without a reset.

I keep reading this, but with Claude Code in particular, I consistently find it gets smarter the longer my conversations go on, peaking right at the point where it auto-compacts and everything goes to crap.

This isn't always true--some conversations go poorly and it's better to reset and start over--but it usually is.

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

#315

Post by logicprog »

dillydogg wrote: post #138
acedTrex wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to get it to generate code past 10ish lines that I am willing to accept. I read stuff like this and wonder how low yall's standards are, or if you are working on projects that just do not matter in any real world sense.

Whenever I read comments from the people singing their praises of the technology, it's hard not to think of the study that found AI tools made developers slower in early 2025. >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI t…

Here's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...

Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the data, it doesn't show what it claims to show regarding developer estimations, and the story of whether it speeds up or slows down developers is actually much more nuanced and precisely mirrors what the developers themselves say in the qualitative quote questionaire, and relatively closely mirrors what the more nuanced people will say here — that it helps with things you're less familiar with, that have scope creep, etc a lot more, but is less or even negatively useful for the opposite scenarios — even in the worst case setting.

Not to mention this is studying a highly specific and rare subset of developers, and they even admit it's a subset that isn't applicable to the whole.

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

#317

Post by TZubiri »

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…

"However. Price is king. Allowing me to flood the context window with my code base is great"

I don't vibe code, but in general having to know all of the codebase to be able to do something is a smell, it's spagghetti, it's lack of encapsulation.

When I program I cannot think about the whole database, I have a couple of files open tops and I think about the code in those files.

This issue of having to understand the whole codebase, complaining about abstractions, microservices, and OOP, and wanting everything to be in a "simple" monorepo, or a monolith; is something that I see juniors do, almost exclusively.

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

#318

Post by dillydogg »

logicprog wrote: post #315
dillydogg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read comments from the people singing their praises of the technology, it's hard not to think of the study that found AI tools made developers slower in early 2025. >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI t…

Here's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down- ... Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the dat…

This is very helpful, thank you for the resource

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

#319

Post by logicprog »

andrepd wrote: post #114
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.

Self-reports are notoriously overexcited, real results are, let's say, not so stellar. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Here's an in depth analysis and critique of that study by someone whose job is literally to study programmers psychologically and has experience in sociology studies: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...

Basically, the study has a fuckton of methodological problems that seriously undercut the quality of its findings, and even assuming its findings are correct, if you look closer at the data, it doesn't show what it claims to show regarding developer estimations, and the story of whether it speeds up or slows down developers is actually much more nuanced and precisely mirrors what the developers themselves say in the qualitative quote questionaire, and relatively closely mirrors what the more nuanced people will say here — that it helps with things you're less familiar with, that have scope creep, etc a lot more, but is less or even negatively useful for the opposite scenarios — even in the worst case setting.

Not to mention this is studying a highly specific and rare subset of developers, and they even admit it's a subset that isn't applicable to the whole.

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

#320

Post by jeremywho »

not_that_d wrote: post #304

My experience with the current tools so far: 1. It helps to get me going with new languages, frameworks, utilities or full green field stuff. After that I expend a lot of time parsing the code to understand what it wrote that I kind of "trust" it because it is too tedious but "it works". 2. When working with languages or frameworks that I know, I find it makes me unproductive, the amount of time I spend writing a goo…

My workflow is to use Claude desktop with the filesystem mcp server.

I give claude the full path to a couple of relevant files related to the task at hand, ie where the new code should hook into or where the current problem is.

Then I ask it to solve the task.

Claude will read the files, determine what should be done and it will edit/add relevant files. There's typically a couple of build errors I will paste back in and have it correct.

Current code patterns & style will be maintained in the new code. It's been quite impressive.

This has been with Typescript and C#.

I don't agree that what it has produced for me is hobby-grade only...

Post reply on HN