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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

#541

Post by xwolfi »

ehnto wrote: post #532
onion2k wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine. I don't believe any human can understand a problem if they need to fit the entire problem blem domain in their head, and the scope of a domain that doesn't fit on a computer. You have to break it down into a manageable amount of information to tackle it in chunks. If a person can do that, so can an LLM prompted to do that by a person.

I disagree, I may not have the whole codebase in my head in one moment but I have had all of it in my head at some point, and it is still there, that is not true of an LLM. I use LLMs and am impressed by them, but they just do not approximate a human in this particular area. My ability to break a problem down does not start from listing the files out and reading a few. I have a high level understanding of the whole p…

You only worked on very small codebase then. When you work on giant ones, you Ctrl+F a lot, build a limited model of the problem space, and pray the unit tests will catch anything you might have missed...

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

#542

Post by airbreather »

ehnto wrote: post #532
onion2k wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine. I don't believe any human can understand a problem if they need to fit the entire problem blem domain in their head, and the scope of a domain that doesn't fit on a computer. You have to break it down into a manageable amount of information to tackle it in chunks. If a person can do that, so can an LLM prompted to do that by a person.

I disagree, I may not have the whole codebase in my head in one moment but I have had all of it in my head at some point, and it is still there, that is not true of an LLM. I use LLMs and am impressed by them, but they just do not approximate a human in this particular area. My ability to break a problem down does not start from listing the files out and reading a few. I have a high level understanding of the whole p…

you will have abstractions - black boxing, interface overviews etc, humans can only hold so much detail in current context memory, some say 7 items on average.

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

#543

Post by zarzavat »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #353
zarzavat wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both modes of operation are useful. If you know how to do something, then you can give Claude the broad strokes of how you want it done and -- if you give enough detail -- hopefully it will come back with work similar to what you would have written. In this case it's saving you on the order of minutes, but those minutes add up. There is a possibility for negative time saving if it returns garbage. If you don't know h…

Claude will point you in the right neighborhood but to the wrong house. So if you're completely ignorant that's cool. But recognize that its probably wrong and only a starting point. Hell, I spent 3 hours "arguing" with Claude the other day in a new domain because my intuition told me something was true. I brought out all the technical reason why it was fine but Claude kept skirting around it saying the code change w…

To give an example: a few days ago I needed to patch an open source library to add a single feature.

This is a pathologically bad case for a human. I'm in an alien codebase, I don't know where anything is. The library is vanilla JS (ES5 even!) so the only way to know the types is to read the function definitions.

If I had to accomplish this task myself, my estimate would be 1-2 days. It takes time to get read code, get orientated, understand what's going on, etc.

I set Claude on the problem. Claude diligently starts grepping, it identifies the source locations where the change needs to be made. After 10 minutes it has a patch for me.

Does it do exactly what I wanted it to do? No. But it does all the hard work. Now that I have the scaffolding it's easy to adapt the patch to do exactly what I need.

On the other hand, yesterday I had to teach Claude that writing a loop of { writeByte(...) } is not the right way to copy a buffer. Claude clearly thought that it was being very DRY by not having to duplicate the bounds check.

I remain sceptical about the vibe coders burning thousands of dollars using it in a loop. It's hardworking but stupid.

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

#544

Post by will_pseudonym »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #314
rootnod3 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flooding the context also means increasing the likelihood of the LLM confusing itself. Mainly because of the longer context. It derails along the way without a reset.

I keep reading this, but with Claude Code in particular, I consistently find it gets smarter the longer my conversations go on, peaking right at the point where it auto-compacts and everything goes to crap. This isn't always true--some conversations go poorly and it's better to reset and start over--but it usually is.

This is my exact experience as well. I wonder if I should switch to using Sonnet so that I can have more time before auto-compact gets forced on me.

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

#545

Post by umbra07 »

bgilly wrote: post #256
seperman wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. Why does Claude find more problems if we mention the code is written by another developer?

In my experience, Claude will criticize others more than it will criticize itself. Seems similar to how LLMs in general tend to say yes to things or call anything a good idea by default. I find it to be an entertaining reflection of the cultural nuances embedded into training data and reinforcement learning processes.

Interesting. In my experience, it's the opposite. Claude is too syncophantic. If you tell it that it was wrong, it will just accept your word at face value. If I give a problem to both Claude and Gemini, their responses differ and I ask Claude why Gemini has a different response - Claude will just roll over and tell me that Gemini's response was perfect and that it messed up.

This is why I was really taken by Gemini 2.0/2.5 when it first came out - it was the first model that really pushed back at you. It would even tell me that it wanted x additional information to continue onwards, unprompted. Sadly, as Google has neutered 2.5 over the last few months, its independent streak has also gone away, and its only slightly more individualistic than Claude/OpenAI's models.

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

#546

Post by melagonster »

onion2k wrote: post #348
ants_everywhere wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really desperately need LLMs to maintain extremely effective context The context is in the repo. An LLM will never have the context you need to solve all problems. Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine. There's a tradeoff just like in humans where getting a specific task done requires removing distractions. A context window that contains everything makes focus harder. For a long time context windows we…

Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine. I don't believe any human can understand a problem if they need to fit the entire problem blem domain in their head, and the scope of a domain that doesn't fit on a computer. You have to break it down into a manageable amount of information to tackle it in chunks. If a person can do that, so can an LLM prompted to do that by a person.

Sure, this is why AGI looks possible sometimes. But companies should not require their users to create AGI for them.

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

#548

Post by nhaehnle »

wiremine wrote: post #130
cambaceres wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X. Since so many claim the opposite, I’m curious to what you do more specifically? I guess different roles/technologies benefit more from agents than others. I build full stack web applications in node/.net/react, more importantly (I think) is that I work on a small startup and manage 3 applications myself.

> 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…

I just find it hard to take the 3x claims at face value because actual code generation is only a small part of my job, and so Amdahl's law currently limits any productivity increase from agentic AI to well below 2x for me.

(And I believe I'm fairly typical for my team. While there are more junior folks, it's not that I'm just stuck with powerpoint or something all day. Writing code is rarely the bottleneck.)

So... either their job is really just churning out code (where do these jobs exist, and are there any jobs like this at all that still care about quality?) or the most generous explanation that I can think of is that people are really, really bad at self-evaluations of productivity.

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

#549

Post by ec109685 »

sdesol wrote: post #500
ec109685 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It greps around the code like an intern would. You have to have patience and be willing to document workflows and correct when it gets things wrong via CLAUDE.md files.

Honestly, grepping isn't a bad strategy if there is enough context to generate focused keywords/patterns to search. The "let Claude Code think for 10 minutes or more", makes a lot more sense now, as this brute force method can take some time.

Yeah and it’s creative with its grepping.

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

#550

Post by akhosravian »

xwolfi wrote: post #541
ehnto wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I may not have the whole codebase in my head in one moment but I have had all of it in my head at some point, and it is still there, that is not true of an LLM. I use LLMs and am impressed by them, but they just do not approximate a human in this particular area. My ability to break a problem down does not start from listing the files out and reading a few. I have a high level understanding of the whole p…

You only worked on very small codebase then. When you work on giant ones, you Ctrl+F a lot, build a limited model of the problem space, and pray the unit tests will catch anything you might have missed...

And when you work on a really big codebase you start having multiple files and have to learn tools more advanced than ctrl-f!!
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