Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Projects which allow attaching a bunch of files to fill up the 200k context. I wrote up a script to dump a bunch of code and documentation files to markdown as context and I add them to a bunch of Claude projects on a per topic basis. For example, I'm currently working on a Rust/Qt desktop app so I have a project with the whole Qt6 book attached to ask questions about Qt, a project with my SQL schema and ORM/S…
I was under the impression that with LLMs, in order to get high-quality answers, it's always best to keep context short. Is that not the case anymore? Does Claude under this usage paradigm not struggle with very long contexts in ways as for example described in the "lost in the middle" paper ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03172 )?
The more context you give the llm, the better.
The key takeaway from that paper is to keep your instructions/questions/direction in the beginning or at the end of the context. Any information can go anywhere.
Not to be too dismissive, it's a good paper, but we're one year further and in practice this issue seems to have been tackled by training on better data.
This can differ a lot depending on what model you're using, but in the case of claude sonnet 3.5, more relevant context is generally better for anything except for speed.
It does remain true that you need to keep your most important instructions at the beginning or at the end however.