> 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.
No vibes allowed: https://youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?is=adMmmKdVxraYO2yQ
What I'm doing mostly these days is maintaining a goal.md (project direction) and spec.md (coding and process standards, global across projects). And new macro tasks development, I've one under work that is meant to automatically build png mockup and self review.
At home I use roo code, at work kiro. Tbh as long as it has task delegation I'm happy with it.
These things eat into my supervision budget:
* LLM loses the plot and I have to nudge (like you) * Thinking hard to better specify prompts (like you) * Reviewing all changes (I do not vibe code except for spikes or other low-risk areas) * Manual thing I have to do (for things I have not yet automated with a agent-authored scripts) * Meetings * etc
So, yes, my supervision budget is a bottleneck. I can only run 5-8 agents at a time because I have only so much time in the day.
Compare that vs a single agent at high reasoning/effort: I am sitting waiting for it to think. Waiting for it to find the code area I'm talking about takes time. Compiling, running tests, fixing compile errors. A million other things.
Any time I find myself sitting and waiting, this is a signal to me to switch to a different session.
I am heavily involved in developing those, and then routinely let opus run overnight and have either flawless or nearly flawless product in the morning.
https://www.claudecodecamp.com/p/how-prompt-caching-actually...
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.
Now you have to compact and you don’t know what will survive. And the built-in UI doesn’t give you good tools like deleting old messages to free up space.
I’ll appreciate the 1M token breathing room.
Or make a subagent do the debugging and let the main agent orchestrate it over many subagent sessions.
He's just fucking closely miced with compression + speaking fast and anxious/excited speaking to an audience
Unless you’re using a text editor as an IDE you probably have already
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.
Big refactorings guided by automated tests eat context window for breakfast.
if you're a one-model shop you're losing out on quality of software you deliver, today. I predict we'll all have at least two harness+model subscriptions as a matter of course in 6-12 months since every model's jagged frontier is different at the margins, and the margins are very fractal.
This is direct comparison. I spent months subscribed to both of their $200/mo plans. I would try both and Opus always filled up fast while Codex continued working great. It's also direct experience that Codex continues working great post-compaction since 5.2.
I don't know about Gemini but you're just wrong about Codex. And I say this as someone who hates reporting these facts because I'd like people to stop giving OpenAI money.
When I am using codex, compaction isn’t something I fear, it feels like you save your gaming progress and move on.
For Claude Code compaction feels disastrous, also much longer
In general LLMs for some reason are really bad at designing prompts for themselves. I tested it heavily on some data where there was a clear optimization function and ability to evaluate the results, and I easily beat opus every time with my chaotic full of typos prompts vs its methodological ones when it is writing instructions for itself or for other LLMs.
In that way we could erase prompts and responses that didn't yield anything useful or derailed the model.
Why can't we do that?
also, i don't want to make a full parent post
1M tokens sounds real expensive if you're constantly at that threshold. There's codebases larger in LOC; i read somewhere that Carmack has "given to humanity" over 1 million lines of his code. Perhaps something to dwell on
> This list includes a special type=compaction item with an opaque encrypted_content item that preserves the model’s latent understanding of the original conversation.
Some prior discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737630#46739209 regarding an article here https://openai.com/index/unrolling-the-codex-agent-loop/
That said, 120k is pleeenty if you’re just building front-end components and have your API spec on hand already.
His fix for "the dumb zone" is the RPI Framework:
● RESEARCH. Don't code yet. Let the agent scan the files first. Docs lie. Code doesn't.
● PLAN. The agent writes a detailed step-by-step plan. You review and approve the plan, not just the output. Dex calls this avoiding "outsourcing your thinking." The plan is where intent gets compressed before execution starts.
● IMPLEMENT. Execute in a fresh context window. The meta-principle he calls Frequent Intentional Compaction: don't let the chat run long. Ask the agent to summarize state, open a new chat with that summary, keep the model in the smart zone.
No idea what they were thinking when they designed this feature. The plan file names are randomly generated, so it could just keep making new ones forever for free (it would take a LONG time for the disk space to matter), but instead, for long plans, I have to back the plan file up if it gets stuck. Otherwise, I say "You should take approach X to fix this bug", it drops into plan mode, says "This is a completely unrelated plan", then deletes all record of what it was doing before getting stuck.
Open a new chat with Opus, thinking mode is off. Because no need when we have detailed plan.
Now the plan file is always reachable, so when the context limit is narrowing, mostly around 50%, I ask Claude to update the plan with the progress, and move to a new chat @pointing the plan file and it continue executing without any issue.
Working on my first project with it… so far so good.
I find myself often running validity checks between docs and code and addressing gaps as they appear to ensure the docs don’t actually lie.
But Codex to plan big features and Claude to review the feature plan (often finds overlooked discrepancies) then review the milestones and plan implementation of them in planning mode, then clear context and code. Works great.
It's faster because it has already read most relevant files, still has the caveats / discussion from the research phase in its context window, etc.
With the context clear the plan may be good / thorough but I've had one too many times that key choices from the research phase didn't persist because halfway through implementation Opus runs into an issue and says "You know what? I know a simpler solution." and continues down a path I explicitly voted down.
Or is thinking about source code line by line the only valid form of thinking in the world?
We all have limited context windows, the world’s always worked that way, just seemed odd to (mis)read someone saying there’s something wrong with focusing on when you add the greatest value and trusting others to do the same.
But it’s the same process, which should tell you what’s really going on here. It’s about status, not functionality, and you don’t gain status without controlling other humans.
My team has been adopting a separation of plan & implement organically, we just noticed we got better output that way, plus Claude now suggests in plan mode to clear context first before implementing. We are starting to do team reviews on the plan before the implement phase. It’s often helpful to get more eyeballs on the plan and improve it.
youtu.be/rmvDxxNubIg?is=adMmmKdVxraYO2yQSo this…
?is=
Think you got A/B tested. Flipping the parameter breaks a lot of RegEx. Interesting!
Also, only the domain is shorter
To me, the fact that the tracking code is visible and separate from the video code is evidence of the complete opposite of your conclusion - it’s evidence the ad business does not get to override either engineering nor what’s left of privacy control. Ad execs would surely prefer that the tracking code is not visible nor manually removeable.
Pleasant? I could not care less about the pleasantness of the video code, but a shortened URL in this case would not be more pleasant, and it would be functionally worse, and barely shorter; all you’d be able to trim is the “?si=“. I’m baffled by this thread.
I'm using CC (Opus) thinking and Codex with xhigh on always.
And the models have gotten really good when you let them do stuff where goals are verifiable by the model. I had Codex fix a Rust B-rep CSG classification pipeline successfully over the course of a week, unsupervised. It had a custom STEP viewer that would take screenshots and feed them back into the model so it could verify the progress resp. the triangle soup (non progress) itself.
Codex did all the planning and verification, CC wrote the code.
This would have not been possible six months ago at all from my experience.
Maybe with a lot of handholding; but I doubt it (I tried).
I mean both the problem for starters (requires a lot of spatial reasoning and connected math) and the autonomous implementation. Context compression was never an issue in the entire session, for either model.
I tried to ask questions about path of exile 2. And even with web research on it gave completely wrong information... Not only outdated. Wrong
I think context decay is a bigger problem then we feel like.
The people I work with who complain about this type of thing horribly communicate their ask to the llm and expect it to read their minds.
I’ve had thing like a system that has a collection of procedural systems. I would say “replace the following set of defaults that are passed all around for system X (list of files) and in the managed (file) by a config” and it would do that but I’d suddenly see it be like “wait mu and projection distance are also present in system Y and Z. Let me replace that by a config too with the same values”. When system Y and Z uses a different set of optimized values, and that was clearly outside of the scope.
Never had that kind of mistakes happen when dealing with small contexts, but with larger contexts (multiple files, long “thinking” sequences) it does happen sometimes.
Definitely some times when I though “oh well my bad, I should have clarified NOT to also change that other part”, all the while thinking that no human would have thought to change both
It’s lead to me starting new chats with bigger and bigger starting ‘summary, prompts to catch the model up while refreshing it. Surely there’s a way to automate that technique.
Usually things go smoothly but sometimes I have situations like: “please add feature X, needs to have ABCD.” -> does ABC correct but D wrong -> “here is how to fix D” -> fixes D but breaks AB -> “remember I also want AB this way, you broke it” -> fixes AB but removes C and so on
It could almost be used as a benchmark good models are in math, memory, updated information etc
As an example of doing this in a session with jagged alliance 3 (an rpg) https://pastes.io/jagged-all-69136
Claude extracting game archives and dissasembling leads to far more reliable results than random internet posts.
I've found doing this for games to be far more reliable than trying to find internet posts explaining it. I haven't played POE but if it's anything like any other RPG system Claude will do a great job at this.
Or even one with DRM?
Right?
Or?
The place it may fail is obfuscation and server side logic. But generally client side logic, especially in a game with a scripted language backing it, is super easy for claude ot pick apart.
Seriously coding agents make messing with games super easy.
It'll remain a human job for quite a while too. Separability is not a property of vector spaces, so modern AIs are not going to be good at it. Maybe we can manage something similar with simplical complexes instead. Ideally you'd consult the large model once and say:
> show me the small contexts to use here, give me prompts re: their interfaces with their neighbors, and show me which distillations are best suited to those tasks
...and then a network of local models could handle it from there. But the providers have no incentive to go in that direction, so progress will likely be slow.
In my experience the model will assume the web results are the answer even if the search engine returns irrelevant garbage.
For example you ask it a question about New Jersey law and the web results are about New York or about "many states" it'll assume the New York info or "many states" info is about New Jersey.
(Note that I'm using it in more of a hands-on pair-programming mode, and not in a fully-automated vibecoding mode.)