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

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

#341

Post by furyofantares »

pjerem wrote: post #277
furyofantares wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd been on Codex for a while and with Codex 5.2 I: 1) No longer found the dumb zone 2) No longer feared compaction Switching to Opus for stupid political reasons, I still have not had the dumb zone - but I'm back to disliking compaction events and so the smaller context window it has, has really hurt. I hope they copy OpenAI's compaction magic soon, but I am also very excited to try the longer context window.

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

OpenAI has some magic they do on their standalone endpoint (/responses/compact) just for compaction, where they keep all the user messages and replace the agent messages or reasoning with embeddings.

> This list includes a special type=compaction item with an opaque encrypted_content item that preserves the model’s latent understanding of the original conversation.

Some prior discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737630#46739209 regarding an article here https://openai.com/index/unrolling-the-codex-agent-loop/

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

#342

Post by Filligree »

brookst wrote: post #330
greenchair wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes.

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

#343

Post by marginalia_nu »

Frannky wrote: post #117

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…

My experience is that it gets you 80-90% of the way at 20x the speed, but coaxing it into fixing the remaining 10-20% happens at a staggeringly slow speed.

All programming is like this to some extent, but Claude's 80/20 behavior is so much more extreme. It can almost build anything in 15-30 minutes, but after those 15-30 minutes are up, it's only "almost built". Then you need to spend hours, days, maybe even weeks getting past the "almost".

Big part of why everyone seems to be vibe coding apps, but almost nobody seems to be shipping anything.

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

olalonde wrote: post #210
Frannky wrote: post #117

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…

> PRD Is it Baader-Meinhof or is everyone on HN suddenly using obscure acronyms?

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by nvarsj »

olalonde wrote: post #210
Frannky wrote: post #117

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…

> PRD Is it Baader-Meinhof or is everyone on HN suddenly using obscure acronyms?

Seems commonly used in Big Tech - first time I heard it was in my current job. Now it's seared into my brain since it's used so much. Among many other acronyms which I won't bore you with.

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

#346

Post by geggo98 »

prtmnth wrote: post #114
auggierose wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I get it. For me a 2x Max would be ideal and usually enough. Now, guess why they are not offering that?

Same here. I'd love a 2x Max plan! More than enough usage for my needs.

Just make two plans and switch, when one of them is exhausted.

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

#347

Post by auggierose »

geggo98 wrote: post #346
prtmnth wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'd love a 2x Max plan! More than enough usage for my needs.

Just make two plans and switch, when one of them is exhausted.

Yes, I hear that is what people do. Annoying though.

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

#348

Post by virtualritz »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20
dimitri-vs wrote: post #3

The big change here is: > Standard pricing now applies across the full 1M window for both models, with no long-context premium. Media limits expand to 600 images or PDF pages. For Claude Code users this is huge - assuming coherence remains strong past 200k tok.

Is it ever useful to have a context window that full? I try to keep usage under 40%, or about 80k tokens, to avoid what Dex Horthy calls the dumb zone in his research-plan-implement approach. Works well for me so far. No vibes allowed: https://youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?is=adMmmKdVxraYO2yQ

I haven't hit the "dumb zone" any more since two months. I think this talk is outdated.

I'm using CC (Opus) thinking and Codex with xhigh on always.

And the models have gotten really good when you let them do stuff where goals are verifiable by the model. I had Codex fix a Rust B-rep CSG classification pipeline successfully over the course of a week, unsupervised. It had a custom STEP viewer that would take screenshots and feed them back into the model so it could verify the progress resp. the triangle soup (non progress) itself.

Codex did all the planning and verification, CC wrote the code.

This would have not been possible six months ago at all from my experience.

Maybe with a lot of handholding; but I doubt it (I tried).

I mean both the problem for starters (requires a lot of spatial reasoning and connected math) and the autonomous implementation. Context compression was never an issue in the entire session, for either model.

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

#349

Post by ricardobeat »

syntaxing wrote: post #144

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…

It is really good at writing C++ for Arduino, can one-shot most programs.

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

#350

Post by ramesh31 »

dcre wrote: post #148
koreth1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and…

One tip I have is that once you have the diff you want to fix, start a new session and have it work on the diff fresh. They’ve improved this, but it’s still the case that the farther you get into context window, the dumber and less focused the model gets. I learned this from the Claude Code team themselves, who have long advised starting over rather than trying to steer a conversation that has started down a wrong pa…

>"This fresh context thing is a big reason subagents might work where a single agent fails. It’s not just about parallelism: each subagent starts with a fresh context, and the parent agent only sees the result of whatever the subagent does — its own context also remains clean."

This is the true power of agent teams: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams

You maintain very low context usage in the main thread; just orchestration and planning details, while each individual team member remains responsible for their own. Allows you to churn through millions of output tokens in a fraction of the time.

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