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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

#411

Post by swat535 »

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.

You always have to review the code, whether it's written by another person, yourself or an AI.

I'm not sure how this translates into the loss of productivity?

Did you mean to say that the code AI generates is difficult to review? In those cases, it's the fault of the code author and not the AI.

Using AI like any other tool requires experience and skill.

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

#412

Post by brulard »

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…

For me it was like this for like a year (using Cline + Sonnet & Gemini) until Claude Code came out and until I learned how to keep context real clean. The key breakthrough was treating AI as an architect/implementer rather than a code generator.

Most recently I ask first CC to create a design document for what we are going to do. He has instructions to look into the relevant parts of the code and docs to reference them. I review it and few back-and-forths we have defined what we want to do. Next step is to chunk it into stages and even those to smaller steps. All this may take few hours, but after this is well defined, I clear the context. I then let him read the docs and implement one stage. This goes mostly well and if it doesn't I either try to steer him to correct it, or if it's too bad, I improve the docs and start this stage over. After stage is complete, we commit, clear context and proceed to next stage.

This way I spend maybe a day creating a feature that would take me maybe 2-3. And at the end we have a document, unit tests, storybook pages, and features that gets overlooked like accessibility, aria-things, etc.

At the very end I like another model to make a code review.

Even if this didn't make me faster now, I would consider it future-proofing myself as a software engineer as these tools are improving quickly

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

#413

Post by rootusrootus »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #399
rootusrootus wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are suggesting that LLMs are proving quite good at taking over the low skilled work that probably 90% of devs spend the majority of their time doing, I totally agree. It is the simplest explanation for why many people think they are magic, while some people find very little value. On the occasion that I find myself having to write web code for whatever reason, I'm very happy to have Claude. I don't enjoy codin…

What a supremely arrogant comment.

I often have such thoughts about things I read on HN but I usually follow the site guidelines and keep it to myself.

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

#414

Post by dboreham »

chamomeal wrote: post #393
pqs wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a programmer, but I need to write python and bash programs to do my work. I also have a few websites and other personal projects. Claude Code helps me implement those little projects I've been wanting to do for a very long time, but I couldn't due to the lack of coding experience and time. Now I'm doing them. Also now I can improve my emacs environment, because I can create lisp functions with ease. For me, t…

LLMs totally kick ass for making bash scripts

Strong agree. Bash is so annoying that there have been many scripts that I wanted to have, but just didn't write (did the thing manually instead) rather than go down the rabbit hole of Bash nonsense. LLMs turn this on its head. I probably have LLMs write 1-2 bash scripts a week now, that I commit to git for use now and later.

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

#415

Post by Whatarethese »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #373

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.

This is my primary use of AI. Looking for a new mountain bike and using AI to list and compare parts of the bike and which is best for my use case scenario. Works pretty well so far.

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

#416

Post by porksoda »

moregrist wrote: post #203
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and it drives me bonkers when people talk about AI coding as if it represents some a single technique, process, or tool. Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days. We don’t even fully agree on the best practices for writing code without AI.

> Makes me wonder if people spoke this way about “using computers” or “using the internet” in the olden days. There were gobs of terrible road metaphors that spun out of calling the Internet the “Information Superhighway.” Gobs and gobs of them. All self-parody to anyone who knew anything. I hesitate to relate this to anything in the current AI era, but maybe the closest (and in a gallows humor/doomer kind of way) is…

Remember the ones who loudly proclaimed the internet to be a passing fad, not useful for normal people. All anti LLM rants taste like that to me.

I get why they thought that - it was kind of crappy unless you're one who is excited about the future and prepared to bleed a bit on the edge.

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

#417

Post by LinXitoW »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #35
aliljet wrote: post #16

This is definitely one of my CORE problem as I use these tools for "professional software engineering." I really desperately need LLMs to maintain extremely effective context and it's not actually that interesting to see a new model that's marginally better than the next one (for my day-to-day). However. Price is king. Allowing me to flood the context window with my code base is great, but given that the price has su…

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.

They already do, or at least Claude Code does. It will search for a method name, then only load a chunk of that file to get the method signature, for example.

It will use the general information you give it to make educated guesses of where things are. If it knows the code is Vue based and it has to do something with "users", it might seach for "src/*/User.vue.

This is also the reason why the quality of your code makes such a large difference. The more consistent the naming of files and classes, the better the AI is at finding them.

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

#418

Post by brulard »

delegate wrote: post #274
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…

Easy. You're 3x more productive for a while and then you burn yourself out. Or lose control of the codebase, which you no longer understand after weeks of vibing (since we can only think and accumulate knowledge at 1x). Sometimes the easy way out is throwing a week of generated code away and starting over. So that 3x doesn't come for free at all, besides API costs, there's the cost of quickly accumulating tech debt w…

You conflate efficient usage of AI with "vibing". Code can be written by AI and still follow the agreed-upon structures and rules and still can and should be thoroughly reviewed. The 3x absolutely does not come for free. But the price may have been paid in advance by learning how to use those tools best.

I agree the vibe-coding mentality is going to be a major problem. But aren't all tools used well and used badly?

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

#419

Post by CuriouslyC »

logicchains wrote: post #192

With that pricing I can't imagine why anyone would use Claude Sonnet through the API when Gemini 2.5 Pro is both better and cheaper (especially at long-context understanding).

Claude is a good deal with the $20 subscription giving a fair amount of sonnet use with Code. It's also got a very distinct voice as far as LLMs go, and tends to produce cleaner/clearer writing in general. I wouldn't use the API in an application but the subscription feels like a pretty good deal.

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

#420

Post by itissid »

My experience with Claude code beyond building anything bigger than a webpage, a small API, a tutorial on CSS etc has been pretty bad. I think context length is a manageable problem, but not the main one. I used it to write a 50K LoC python code base with 300 unit tests and it went ok for the first few weeks and then it failed. This is after there is a CLAUDE.md file for every single module that needs it as well as detailed agents for testing, design, coding and review.

I won't going into a case by case list of its failures, The core of the issue is misaligned incentives, which I want to get into:

1. The incentives for coding agent, in general and claude, are writing LOTS of code. None of them — O — are good at the planning and verification.

2. The involvement of the human, ironically, in a haphazard way in the agent's process. And this has to do with how the problem of coding for these agents is defined. Human developers are like snow flakes when it comes to opinions on software design, there is no way to apply each's preference(except paper machet and superglue SO, Reddit threads and books) to the design of the system in any meaningful way and that makes a simple system way too complex or it makes a complex problem simplistic.

  - There is no way to evolve the plan to accept new preferences except text in CLAUDE.md file in git that you will have to read through and edit.

  - There is no way to know the near term effect of code choices now on 1 week from now. 

  - So much code is written that asking a person to review it in case you are at the envelope and pushing the limit feels morally wrong and an insane ask. How many of your Code reviews are instead replaced by 15-30 min design meetings to instead solicit feedback on design of the PR — because it so complex — and just push the PR into dev? WTF am I even doing I wonder.

  - It does not know how far to explore for better rewards and does not know it better from local rewards, Resulting in commented out tests and deleting arbitrary code, to make its plan "work".
In short code is a commodity for CEOs of Coding agent companies and CXOs of your company to use(sales force has everyone coding, but that just raises the floor and its a good thing, it does NOT lower the bar and make people 10x devs). All of them have bought into this idea that 10x is somehow producing 10x code. Your time reviewing and unmangling and mainitaining the code is not the commodity. It never ever was.
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