Live data from Hacker News

Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context

anthropic.com

431–440 of 706 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it the same way. One approach that's worked well for me is to start a project and first ask it to analyse and make a plan with phases for what needs to be done, save that plan into the project, then get it to do each phase in sequence. Once it completes a phase, have it review the code to confirm if the phase is complete. Each phase of work and review is a new chat. This way helps ensure it works on m…

I find that sometimes this works great and sometimes it happily tells you everything works and your code fails successfully and if you aren’t reading all the code you would never know. It’s kind of strange actually. I don’t have a good feeling when it will get everything correct and when it will fail and that’s what is disconcerting. I would be happy to be given advice on what to do to untangle when it’s good and whe…

Of course, everything needs to be verified - I'm just trying to figure out a process that enables it to work as effectively as it can on large code bases in a structured way. Committing each stage to git, fixing issues and adjusting the context still comes into play.

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

#432

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…

Many who say LLMs produce “enterprise-grade” code haven’t worked in mid-tier or traditional companies, where projects are held together by duct tape, requirements are outdated, and testing barely exists. In those environments, enterprise-ready code is rare even without AI.

For developers deeply familiar with a codebase they’ve worked on for years, LLMs can be a game-changer. But in most other cases, they’re best for brainstorming, creating small tests, or prototyping. When mid-level or junior developers lean heavily on them, the output may look useful.. until a third-party review reveals security flaws, performance issues, and built-in legacy debt.

That might be fine for quick fixes or internal tooling, but it’s a poor fit for enterprise.

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

#433
post #263

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. Every success story with AI coding involves giving the agent enough context to succeed on a task that it…

Bold claims. From my experience, even the top models continue to fail delivering correctness on many tasks even with all the details and no ambiguity in the input. In particular when details are provided, in fact. I find that with solutions likely to be well oiled in the training data, a well formulated set of *basic* requirements often leads to a zero shot, "a" perfectly valid solution. I say "a" solution because th…

> From my experience, even the top models continue to fail delivering correctness on many tasks even with all the details and no ambiguity in the input.

You may feel like there are all the details and no ambiguity in the prompt. But there may still be missing parts, like examples, structure, plan, or division to smaller parts (it can do that quite well if explicitly asked for). If you give too much details at once, it gets confused, but there are ways how to let the model access context as it progresses through the task.

And models are just one part of the equation. Another parts may be orchestrating agent, tools, models awareness of the tools available, documentation, and maybe even human in the loop.

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

#434

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 mostly agree, with the caveat that I would say it can certainly be useful when used appropriately as an “assistant”. NOT vibe coding blindly and hoping what I end up with is useful. “Implement x specific thing” (e.g. add an edit button to component x), not “implement a whole new epic feature that includes changes to a significant number of files”. Imagine meeting a house builder and saying “I want a house”, then leaving and expecting to come back to exactly the house you dreamed of.

I get why, it’s a test of just how intuitive the model can be at planning and execution which drives innovation more than 1% differences in benchmarks ever will. I encourage that innovation in the hobby arena or when dogfooding your AI engineer. But as a replacement developer in an enterprise where an uncaught mistake could cost millions? No way. I wouldn’t even want to be the manager of the AI engineering team, when they come looking for the only real person to blame for the mistake not being caught.

For additional checks/tasks as a completely extra set of eyes, building internal tools, and for scripts? Sure. It’s incredibly useful with all sorts of non- application development tasks. I’ve not written a batch or bash script in forever…you just don’t really need to much anymore. The linear flow of most batch/bash/scripts (like you mentioned) couldn’t be a more suitable domain.

Also, with a basic prompt, it can be an incredibly useful rubber duck. For example, I’ll say something like “how do you think I should solve x problem”(with tools for the codebase and such, of course), and then over time having rejected and been adversarial to every suggestion, I end up working through the problem and have a more concrete mental design. Think “over-eager junior know-it-all that tries to be right constantly” without the person attached and you get a better idea of what kind of LLM output you can expect including following false leads to test your ideas. For me it’s less about wanting a plan from the LLM, and more about talking through the problems I think my plan could solve better, when more things are considered outside the LLMs direct knowledge or access.

“We can’t do that, changing X would break Y external process because Z. Summarize that concern into a paragraph to be added to the knowledge base. Then, what other options would you suggest?”

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

#435
post #423

One of the most helpful usages of CC so far is when I simply ask: "Are there any bugs in the current diff" It analyzes the changes very thoroughly, often finds very subtle bugs that would cost hours of time/deployments down the line, and points out a bunch of things to think through for correctness.

maybe want to reify that as a claude code hook!

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

#436
post #357

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…

Pretty much. We are in an era of vibe efficiency.

If programmers really did get 3x faster. Why has software not improved any faster than it always has been.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine paying $20 a prompt?

If I can give it a detailed spec, walk away and do something else for 20 minutes, and come back to work that would have taken me 2 hours, then that's a steal.

You can just do this now though. In fact you could go a step further and set up the GitHub Action, then you can kick off Claude from the iOS GitHub app from the beach and review the PR when it's done.

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

#438

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.

I'm curious, what does it say on /model? For reference, my options are: ╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮ │ │ │ Select Model │ │ Switch between Claude models. Applies to this session and future Claude Code sessions. │ │ For custom model names, specify with --model. │ │ │ │ 1. Default (recommended) Opus 4.1 for up to 50% of usage limits, then use Sonnet 4 │…

me also

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

#439

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 depends on model but sonnet is more than capable for enterprise code

when you stuck at claude doing dumb shit, you didnt give the model enough context to know better the system

after following spec driven development, works with LLM in large code base make it so much easier than without it like its heaven and hell differences

but also it increase in token cost exponentially, so there's that

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

#440

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…

It's pretty simple, AI is now political for a lot of people. Some folks have a vested interest in downplaying it or over hyping it rather than impartially approaching it as a tool.

It’s also just not consistent. A manager who can’t code using it to generate a react todo list thinks it’s 100x efficiency while a senior software dev working on established apps finds it a net productivity negative.

AI coding tools seem to excel at demos and flop on the field so the expectation disconnect between managers and actual workers is massive.

Post reply on HN