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1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

claude.com

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Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#71

Post by celestialcheese »

mattfrommars wrote: post #56
vessenes wrote: post #7

This is super exciting. I've been poking at it today, and it definitely changes my workflow -- I feel like a full three or four hour parallel coding session with subagents is now generally fitting into a single master session. The stats claim Opus at 1M is about like 5.4 at 256k -- these needle long context tests don't always go with quality reasoning ability sadly -- but this is still a significant improvement, and…

Random: are you personally paying for Claude Code or is it paid by you employer? My employer only pays for GitHub copilot extension

Both. Employer pays for work max 20x, i pay for a personal 10x for my side projects and personal stuff.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#72

Post by ricksunny »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20
dimitri-vs wrote: post #3

The 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.

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

Since I'm yet to seriously dive into vibe coding or AI-assisted coding, does the IDE experience offer tracking a tally of the context size? (So you know when you're getting close or entering the "dumb zone")?

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#74

Post by roygbiv2 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #59
SkyPuncher wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've recently become a convert. For me, it's less about being able to look back -800k tokens. It's about being able to flow a conversation for a lot longer without forcing compaction. Generally, I really only need the most recent ~50k tokens, but having the old context sitting around is helpful.

Also, when you hit compaction at 200k tokens, that was probably when things were just getting good. The plan was in its final stage. The context had the hard-fought nuances discovered in the final moment. Or the agent just discovered some tiny important details after a crazy 100k token deep dive or flailing death cycle. Now you have to compact and you don’t know what will survive. And the built-in UI doesn’t give you…

I've found compactation kills the whole thing. Important debug steps completely missing and the AI loops back round thinking it's found a solution when we've already done that step.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#75

Post by aragonite »

Do long sessions also burn through token budgets much faster?

If the chat client is resending the whole conversation each turn, then once you're deep into a session every request already includes tens of thousands of tokens of prior context. So a message at 70k tokens into a conversation is much "heavier" than one at 2k (at least in terms of input tokens). Yes?

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#76

Post by stevula »

ricksunny wrote: post #72
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20

Earlier 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

Since I'm yet to seriously dive into vibe coding or AI-assisted coding, does the IDE experience offer tracking a tally of the context size? (So you know when you're getting close or entering the "dumb zone")?

Most tools do, yes.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#77

Post by furyofantares »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20
dimitri-vs wrote: post #3

The 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.

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

I'd been on Codex for a while and with Codex 5.2 I:

1) No longer found the dumb zone

2) No longer feared compaction

Switching to Opus for stupid political reasons, I still have not had the dumb zone - but I'm back to disliking compaction events and so the smaller context window it has, has really hurt.

I hope they copy OpenAI's compaction magic soon, but I am also very excited to try the longer context window.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#78

Post by quux »

ricksunny wrote: post #72
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20

Earlier 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

Since I'm yet to seriously dive into vibe coding or AI-assisted coding, does the IDE experience offer tracking a tally of the context size? (So you know when you're getting close or entering the "dumb zone")?

OpenCode does this. Not sure about other tools

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#79

Post by nujabe »

ricksunny wrote: post #72
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #20

Earlier 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

Since I'm yet to seriously dive into vibe coding or AI-assisted coding, does the IDE experience offer tracking a tally of the context size? (So you know when you're getting close or entering the "dumb zone")?

> Since I'm yet to seriously dive into vibe coding or AI-assisted coding

Unless you’re using a text editor as an IDE you probably have already

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#80

Post by dathery »

aragonite wrote: post #75

Do long sessions also burn through token budgets much faster? If the chat client is resending the whole conversation each turn, then once you're deep into a session every request already includes tens of thousands of tokens of prior context. So a message at 70k tokens into a conversation is much "heavier" than one at 2k (at least in terms of input tokens). Yes?

That's correct. Input caching helps, but even then at e.g. 800k tokens with all of them cached, the API price is $0.50 * 0.8 = $0.40 per request, which adds up really fast. A "request" can be e.g. a single tool call response, so you can easily end up making many $0.40 requests per minute.
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