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Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

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

#361

Post by j45 »

fpauser wrote: post #329
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…

Same conclusion here. Also good for analyzing existing codebases and to generate documentation for undocumented projects.

It's quite good at this, I have been tying in Gemini Pro with this too.

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

#362

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

siwatanejo wrote: post #41
alexchamberlain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how, and maybe some of the coding agents are doing this, but we need to teach the AI to use abstractions, rather than the whole code base for context. We as humans don't hold the whole codebase in our hear, and we shouldn't expect the AI to either.

I do think AIs are already using abstractions, otherwise you would be submitting all the source code of your dependencies into the context.

I think they're recognising patterns, which is not the same thing.

Abstractions are stable, they're explicit in their domains, good abstractions cross multiple domains, and they typically come with a symbolic algebra of available operations.

Math is made of abstractions.

Patterns are a weaker form of cognition. They're implicit, heavily context-dependent, and there's no algebra. You have to poke at them crudely in the hope you can make them do something useful.

Using LLMs feels more like the latter than the former.

If LLMs were generating true abstractions they'd be finding meta-descriptions for code and language and making them accessible directly.

AGI - or ASI - may be be able to do that some day, but it's not doing that now.

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

#363

Post by abc_lisper »

jama211 wrote: post #272
abc_lisper wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dunno, first time I tried an LLM I was getting so annoyed because I just wanted it to go through a css file and replace all colours with variables defined in root, and it kept missing stuff and spinning and I was getting so frustrated. Then a friend told me I should instead just ask it to write a script which accomplishes that goal, and it did it perfectly in one prompt, then ran it for me, and also wrote another s…

Which one did you use and when was this? I mean, no body gets anything working right the first time. You got to spend a few days atleast trying to understand the tool

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

#364

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

The bigger problem I'm seeing is engineers that become over reliant on vibe coding tools are starting to lose context on how systems are designed and work.

As a result, their productivity might go up on simple "ticket like tasks" where it's basically just simple implementation (find the file(s) to edit, modify it, test it) but when they start using it for all their tasks suddenly they don't know how anything works. Or worse, they let the LLM dictate and bad decisions are made.

These same people are also very dogmatic on the use of these tools. They refuse to just code when needed.

Don't get me wrong, this stuff has value. But I just hate seeing how it's made many engineers complacent and accelerated their ability to add to tech debt like never before.

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

#365

Post by Miraste »

pornel wrote: post #306
jacobr1 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sam…

I've wasted time debugging phantom issues due to LLM-generated tests that were misusing an API. Brainstorming/explanations can be helpful, but also watch out for Gell-Mann amnesia. It's annoying that LLMs always sound smart whether they are saying something smart or not.

Yes, you can't use any of the heuristics you develop for human writing to decide if the LLM is saying something stupid, because its best insights and its worst hallucinations all have the same formatting, diction, and style. Instead, you need to engage your frontal cortex and rationally evaluate every single piece of information it presents, and that's tiring.

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

#366

Post by dbreunig »

tankenmate wrote: post #3

This is definitely good to have this as an option but at the same time having more context reduces the quality of the output because it's easier for the LLM to get "distracted". So, I wonder what will happen to the quality of code produced by tools like Claude Code if users don't properly understand the trade off being made (if they leave it in auto mode of coding right up to the auto compact).

The team at Chroma is currently looking into this and should have some figures.

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

#367

Post by sarmasamosarma »

gwd wrote: post #357
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…

> How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now. The question is, for those people who feel like things are going faster, what's the actual velocity? A month ago I showed it a basic query of one resource I'd rewritten to use a "query builder" API. Then I showed it the "legacy" query of another resource, and asked it to do something similar. It managed to get very clo…

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

#368

Post by arwhatever »

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.

Won’t this cause [insert LLM] to lose context around the semantics of messages passed between microservices?

You could then put all services in 1 repo, or point LLM at X number of folders containing source for all X services, but then it doesn’t seem like you’ll have gained anything, and at the cost of added network calls and more infra management.

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

#369

Post by johnisgood »

sdesol wrote: post #358
johnisgood wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've been able to create a very advanced search engine for my chat app that is more than enterprise ready. I've spent a decade thinking about search, but in a different language. Like you, I needed to explain what I knew about writing a search engine in Java for the LLM, to write it in JavaScript using libraries I did not know and it got me 95% of the way there. It is also incredibly important to note that the 5% tha…

Thanks for your reply, I am in the same boat, and it works for me, like it seems to work for you. So as long as we are effective with it, why not? Of course I am not doing things blindly and expect good results.

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

#370

Post by gdudeman »

yahoozoo wrote: post #281
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 thought double escape just clears the text box?

With an empty text box, double escape shows you a list of previous inputs from you. You can go back and fork at any one of those.
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