Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

anthropic.com

401–410 of 706 posts

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

#401
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that?

Here's a paper from MIT that covers how this could be resolved in an interesting fashion: https://hanlab.mit.edu/blog/streamingllm The AI field is reusing existing CS concepts for AI that we never had hardware for, and now these people are learning how applied Software Engineering can make their theoretical models more efficient. It's kind of funny, I've seen this in tech over and over. People discover new thing, the…

The fact that this is happening is where the tremendous opportunity to make money as an experienced Software Engineer currently lies.

For instance, a year or two ago, the AI people discovered "cache". Imagine how many millions the people who implemented it earned for that one.

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

#402

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…

The other day I caught it changing the grammar and spelling in a bunch of static strings in a totally different part of a project, for no sane reason.

I've seen it do this as well. Odd things like swapping the severity level on log statements that had nothing to do with the task.

Very careful review of my commits is the only way forward, for a long time.

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

#403

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…

It is very useful for small tasks like fixing network problems, or writing regexp patterns based on a few examples.

Here's how YOU can save $200/mo!

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

#404

What I've found with LLMs is they're basically a better version of Google Search. If I need a quick "How do I do..." or if I need to find a quick answer to something its way more useful than Google and the fact that I can ask follow up questions is amazing. But for any serious deep work it has a long way to go.

I feel exactly the same way. why skim and sift 15 different stackoverflow posts when an LLM can pick out exactly the info I need? I don't need to spin up an entire feature in a few seconds. I need help understanding where something is broken; what are some opinions o best practice; or finding out what a poorly written snippet is doing. context still v important for this though and I appreciate cranking that capacity.…

The action of sifting through through poop to find gold actually positively develops my critical thinking skill. I, too, went through a phase of just asking LLM for a specific concept instead of Googling it and weave through dozens of wiki pages or niche mailing list discussions. It did improve my productivity but I feel like it dulls my brain. So recently I have to tone that down and force myself to go back to the old way. Maybe too much of a good thing is bad.

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

#405
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My system is to create detailed feature files up to a few hundred lines in size that are immutable, and then have a status.md file (preferably kept to about 50 lines) that links to a current feature that is used as a way to keep track of the progress on that feature. Additionally I have a Claude Code command with instructions referencing the status.md, how to select the next task, how to compact status.md, etc. Every…

Care to elaborate on how you use the status.md file? What exactly you put in there, and what value does it bring?

When I initially have it built from a feature file, it pulls in the most pertinent high level details from that and creates a supercharged task list that is updated w/ implementation details as the feature progresses.

As it links to the feature file as well, that is pulled into the context, but status.md is there to essentially act as a 'cursor' to where it is in the implementation and provide extended working memory - that Claude itself manages - specific to that feature. With that you can work on bite sized chunks of the feature each with a clean context. When the feature is complete it is trashed.

I've seen others try to achieve similar things by making CLAUDE.md or the feature file mutable but that IME is a bad time. CLAUDE.md should be lean with the details to work on the project, and the feature file can easily be corrupted in an unintended way allowing things to go wayward in scope.

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

#406
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of work do you do? And how do you measure value? Last week I was using Claude Code for web development. This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. Sure, it made mistakes, but the net was still very positive in terms of efficiency.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project? I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house bu…

Ironically, AI mirrors human developers in that it's far more effective when working in a well written, well documented code base. It will infer function functionality from function names. If those are shitty, short, or full of weird abbreviations, it'll have a hard time.

Maybe it's a skill issue, in the sense of having a decent code base.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a notification when I opened it, indicating that the default had changed, and I can see it on /model. Only on a max (20x) account, not there on a Pro one.

thanks, FYI I'm on a max 20x also and I don't see it!

maybe a staggered release?

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

#409
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This week, I used it to write ESP32 firmware and a Linux kernel driver. I'm not meaning to be negative at all, but was this for a toy/hobby or for a commercial project? I find that LLMs do very well on small greenfield toy/hobby projects but basically fall over when brought into commercial projects that often have bespoke requirements and standards (i.e. has to cross compile on qcc, comply with autosar, in-house bu…

This is my experience too. Also, their propensity to jump into code without necessarily understanding the requirement is annoying to say the least. As the project complexity grows, you find yourself writing longer and longer instructions just to guardrail. Another rather interesting thing is that they tend to gravitate towards sweep the errors under the rug kind of coding which is disastrous. e.g. "return X if we don…

In my experience in a Java code base, it didn't do any of this, and did a good job with exceptions.

And I have to disagree that these aren't errors that beginners or even intermediates make. Who hasn't swallowed an error because "that case totally, most definitely won't ever happen, and I need to get this done"?

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

#410

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…

Also another view is that developers below a certain level get a positive benefit and those above get a negative effect. This makes sense, as the models are an average of the code out there and some of us are above and below that average. Sorry btw I do not want to offend anyone who feels they do garner a benefit from LLMs, just wanted to drop in this idea!

It’s also really good for me as a very senior engineer with serious ADHD. Sometimes I get very mentally blocked, and telling Claude Code to plan and implement a feature gives me a really valuable starting point and has a way of unblocking me. For me it’s easier to elaborate off of an existing idea or starting point and refactor than start a whole big thing from zero on my own.
Post reply on HN