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What do you mean by usable context window? Sonnet 4 is 968k and gpt5 is 368k. Are you saying the context window on sonnet is useless?

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Sonnet long context performance sucks. https://fiction.live/stories/Fiction-liveBench-Feb-21-2025/o...

I can confirm Sonnet is good for vibe coding but makes an absolute mess of large and complex codebases, while GPT5 tends to be pretty respectful.

I never implied it's useless. I don't have scientific data to back this up either, this is just my personal "feeling" from a couple hundred hours I've spent working with these models this year: GPT-5 seems a bit better at top-down architectural work, while Sonnet is better at the detail coding level. In terms of usable context window, again from personal experience so far, to me GPT-5 has somewhat of an edge.

Agreed. My experience is GPT5 is significantly better at large-scale planning & architecture (at least for the kind of stuff I care about which is strongly typed functional systems), and then Sonnet is much better at executing the plan. GPT5 is also better at code reviews and finding subtle mistakes if you prompt it well enough, but not totally reliable. Claude Code fills its context window and re-compacts often enough that I have to plan around it, so I'm surprised it's larger than GPT's.

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