Am I crazy or wasn’t this announced like 2 weeks ago?
Or was that a different company or not GA. It’s all becoming a blur.
1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
381–390 of 565 posts
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#382This is great news. The 1M context is much easier to work with than compacting all the time and seems to perform and remember quite well despite the insane amount of data.
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#383The 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.
If it's not coding, even with 200k context it starts to write gibberish, even with the correct information in the context. I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
Context decay is noticeable within 3 messages, nearly every time. Maybe not substantial, but definitely noticeable.
It’s lead to me starting new chats with bigger and bigger starting ‘summary, prompts to catch the model up while refreshing it. Surely there’s a way to automate that technique.
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#384The 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.
If it's not coding, even with 200k context it starts to write gibberish, even with the correct information in the context. I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
I feel like few weeks ago i suddenly had a week where even after 3 messages it forgot what we did. Seems fixed now.
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kinds of things are you building? This is not my experience at all. Just today I asked Claude using opus 4.6 to build out a test harness for a new dynamic database diff tool. Everything seemed to be fine but it built a test suite for an existing diff tool. It set everything up in the new directory, but it was actually testing code and logic from a preexisting directory despite the plan being correct before I tol…
Similar experience. I use these AI tools on a daily basis. I have tons of examples like yours. In one recent instance I explicitly told it in the prompt to not use memcpy, and it used memcpy anyway, and generated a 30-line diff after thinking for 20 minutes. In that amount of time I created a 10-line diff that didn't use memcpy. I think it's the big investors' extremely powerful incentives manifesting in the form of…
Most devs aren't very good. That's the reality, it's what we've all known for a long time. AI is trained on their code, and so these "subpar" devs are blown away when they see the AI generate boring, subpar code.
The second you throw a novel constraint into the mix things fall apart. But most devs don't even know about novel constraints let alone work with them. So they don't see these limitations.
Ask an LLM to not allocate? To not acquire locks? To ensure reentrancy safety? It'll fail - it isn't trained on how to do that. Ask it to "rank" software by some metric? It ends up just spitting out "community consensus" because domain expertise won't be highly represented in its training set.
I love having an LLM to automate the boring work, to do the "subpar" stuff, but they have routinely failed at doing anything I consider to be within my core competency. Just yesterday I used Opus 4.6 to test it out. I checked out an old version of a codebase that was built in a way that is totally inappropriate for security. I asked it to evaluate the system. It did far better than older models but it still completely failed in this task, radically underestimating the severity of its findings, and giving false justifications. Why? For the very obvious reason that it can't be trained to do that work.
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's not coding, even with 200k context it starts to write gibberish, even with the correct information in the context. I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
Context decay is noticeable within 3 messages, nearly every time. Maybe not substantial, but definitely noticeable. It’s lead to me starting new chats with bigger and bigger starting ‘summary, prompts to catch the model up while refreshing it. Surely there’s a way to automate that technique.
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Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#387The 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.
If it's not coding, even with 200k context it starts to write gibberish, even with the correct information in the context. I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
The question that comes to mind for me after reading your comment is how can a question about a game require that much context?
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#388It’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…
Can you recommend some books that teach these idioms? I know not everything is in books but I suspect a bit of it is
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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…
Add a REFLECT phase after IMPLEMENT. I’m finding it’s extremely useful to ask agents for implementation notes and for code reviews. These are different things, and when I ask for implementation notes I get very different output than the implementation summary it spits out automatically. I ask the agent to surface all design choices it had to make that we didn’t explicitly discuss in the plan, and then check in the plan + impl notes in order to help preload context for the next thing.
My team has been adopting a separation of plan & implement organically, we just noticed we got better output that way, plus Claude now suggests in plan mode to clear context first before implementing. We are starting to do team reviews on the plan before the implement phase. It’s often helpful to get more eyeballs on the plan and improve it.
Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
#390The 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.
If it's not coding, even with 200k context it starts to write gibberish, even with the correct information in the context. I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
Fwiw put a copy of the game folder in a directory and tell claude to extract game files and dissasemble the game in preparation for questions about the game.
As an example of doing this in a session with jagged alliance 3 (an rpg) https://pastes.io/jagged-all-69136
Claude extracting game archives and dissasembling leads to far more reliable results than random internet posts.