Live data from Hacker News

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

claude.com

321–330 of 565 posts

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

#321
post #128

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…

Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book. They won’t admit it, but it’s absolutely true. It shows initiative in not only getting things right but also adding improvements that the original prompt didn't request that match the goals of the job.

> Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book.

Not even close. There are still tons of architectural design issues that I'd find it completely useless at, tons of subtle issues it won't notice.

I never run agents by themselves; every single edit they do is approved by me. And, I've lost track of the innumerable times I've had to step in and redirect them (including Opus) to an objectively better approach. I probably should keep a log of all that, for the sake of posterity.

I'll grant you that for basic implementation of a detailed and well-specced design, it is capable.

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

#322

It’s interesting because my career went from doing higher level language (Python) to lower language (C++ and C). Opus and the like is amazing at Python, honestly sometimes better than me but it does do some really stupid architectural decisions occasionally. But when it comes to embedded stuff, it’s still like a junior engineer. Unsure if that will ever change but I wonder if it’s just the quality and availability of…

As someone who did Python professionally from a software engineering perspective, I've actually found Python to be pretty crappy really: unaware of _good_ idioms living outside tutorials and likely 90% of Python code out there that was simply hacked together quickly. I have not tested, but I would expect more niche ecosystems like Rust or Haskell or Erlang to have better overall training set (developer who care about…

I think its pretty good at Elixir, so that tracks.

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

#323
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a PhD in a niche field and this can do my job ;) Not sure if this means I should get a more interesting job or if we are all going to be at the mercy of UBI eventually.

An economy, and likely a society, fails if everyone is at the mercy of a UBI.

We don't really know yet, that's just speculation.

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

#324
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

til you can edit context. i keep a running log and /clear /reload log

double escape gets you to a rewind. not sure about much else. the conversation history is a linked list, so you can screw with it, with some care. I spend this afternoon building an MCP do break the conversation up into topics, then suggest some that aren't useful but are taking up a bunch of context to remove (eg iterations through build/edit just needs the end result) its gonna take a while before I'm confident its…

yea i thought session managment was some sort of secret sauce.

I keep a running log of important things and then i just clear context and reload that file into context.

would that work

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

#325
post #199

can someone tell me how to make this instruction work in claude code "put high level description of the change you are making in log.md after every change" works perfectly in codex but i just cant get calude to do it automatically. I always have to ask "did you update the log".

whats the need? you have the session in a file as a dag. you can summarize to a log whenever you want. doesnt need to be as it goes. earlier today i actually spent a bit of time asking claude to make an mcp to introspect that - break the session down into summarized topics, so i could try dropping some out or replacing the detailed messages with a summary - the idea being to compact out a small chunk to save on conte…

i dont work in just one session though. some tasks take me days and many sessions. also what happens when your session compacts. I am not sure what you are suggesting here. what do you do with these summarized topics from your session.

Also i want ci to resume my task from log and do code review with that context.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-harnesses-fo...

"Read the git logs and progress files to get up to speed on what was recently worked on."

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

#326
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't figured out how to make use of tasks running that long yet, or maybe I just don't have a good use case for it yet. Or maybe I'm too cheap to pay for that many API calls.

I mean if you don't have your company paying for it I wouldn't bother... We are talking sessions of 500-1000 dollars in cost.

Right. At Opus 4.6 rates, once you're at 700k context, each tool call costs ~$1 just for cache reads alone. 100 tool calls = $100+ before you even count outputs. 'Standard pricing' is doing a lot of work here lol

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Opus is not an acronym.

I know, but its certainly a new paradigm.

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

#328
post #309
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use OpenCode (open source Claude Code implementation), you can configure compaction yourself : https://opencode.ai/docs/en/config/#compaction

Not sure if it's a common knowledge but I've learned not that long ago that you can do "/compact your instructions here", if you just say what you are working on or what to keep explicitly it's much less painful. In general LLMs for some reason are really bad at designing prompts for themselves. I tested it heavily on some data where there was a clear optimization function and ability to evaluate the results, and I e…

You can also put guidance for when to compact and with what instructions into Claude.md. The model itself can run /compact, and while I try to remember to use it manually, I find it useful to have “If I ask for a totally different task and the current context won’t be useful, run /compact with a short summary of the new focus”

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

#329
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only someone not using their brain could equate Claude to using their intelligence.

Let’s just clear this up …….. are you commenting with experience using the latest Claude, or are you commenting from personal beliefs. It’s fine for you to take a stand, but please understand your position is simply factually wrong if you think you can outprogram Claude for a range of common tasks. Being anti AI is fine, but if you deny facts of how far LLM programming has come then you lack credibility. The most eff…

As someone mentioned on this thread, I can also easily out-engineer Claude Opus, lol its not even close.

Note that I'm not talking about the low-level grunt work (and even with that, its just that it is tedious and time-consuming, but if I had enough time to read through all the docs and stuff, I will almost always produce grunt code of much higher quality).

But I'm more talking about architecture, the stuff of proper higher level engineering. I use Claude Opus all the time, and I cannot even count how many times I've had to redirect its approach that was obviously betraying a complete lack of seeing the big picture, or some egregiously smelly architectural approach.

Also, expressive typing. I use mostly TypeScript, and it will often give up when I try to push it beyond a certain point, and resort to using "any". Then I have to step and do the job myself.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the video. His fix for "the dumb zone" is the RPI Framework: ● RESEARCH. Don't code yet. Let the agent scan the files first. Docs lie. Code doesn't. ● PLAN. The agent writes a detailed step-by-step plan. You review and approve the plan, not just the output. Dex calls this avoiding "outsourcing your thinking." The plan is where intent gets compressed before execution starts. ● IMPLEMENT. Execute in a fresh…

How is that Plan strategy not "outsourcing your thinking" because that's exactly what it sounds like. AI does the heavy lifting and you are the editor.

Is a VP of engineering “outsourcing their thinking” by having an org that can plan and write software?
Post reply on HN