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

331–340 of 706 posts

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

#331

Post by whatever1 »

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…

If you have to review what the LLM wrote then there is no productivity gain.

Leadership asks for vibe coding

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

#332

Post by iamnotagenius »

pmxi wrote: post #170

The reason I initially got interested in Claude was because they were the first to offer a 200K token context window. That was massive in 2023. However, they didn't keep up once Gemini offered a 1M token window last year. I'm glad to see an attempt to return to having a competitive context window.

they all degrade well before 1M tokens.

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

#333

Post by johnisgood »

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…

> but for enterprise level code it is not there

It is good for me in Go but I had to tell it what to write and how.

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

#335

Post by fsloth »

flowerthoughts wrote: post #328
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…

I predict microservices will get a huge push forward. The question then becomes if we're good enough at saying "Claude, this is too big now, you have to split it in two services" or not. If LLMs maintain the code, the API boundary definitions/documentation and orchestration, it might be manageable.

Why microservices? Monoliths with code-golfed minimal implementation size (but high quality architecture) implemented in strongly typed language would consume far less tokens (and thus would be cheaper to maintain).

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

#336

Post by lucasfdacunha »

sixothree wrote: post #273
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.

Could you elaborate a bit on how that works? Does it need any changes in how you use Claude?

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

#337

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#338

Post by vanviegen »

parpfish wrote: post #295
jama211 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Exactly! And besides that, new code being consistent with its surrounding code used to be a sign of careful craftsmanship (as opposed to spaghetti-against-the-wall style coding), giving me some confidence that the programmer may have considered at least the most important nasty edge cases. LLMs have rendered that signal mostly useless, of course.

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

#339

Post by howinator »

I could be wrong, but I think this pricing is the first to admit that cost scales quadratically with number of tokens. It’s the first time I’ve seen nonlinear pricing from an LLM provider which implicitly mirrors the inference scaling laws I think we're all aware of.

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

#340

Post by senko »

whatever1 wrote: post #331
senko wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you have to review what the LLM wrote then there is no productivity gain. Leadership asks for vibe coding

> If you have to review what the LLM wrote then there is no productivity gain.

I do not agree with that statement.

> Leadership asks for vibe coding

Leadership always asks for more, better, faster.

Post reply on HN