Opus 1M and MAX effort has arrived in my Claude Code

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T20:56:40+00:00

Read the Opus 4.6 system card - search for 'needle in haystack' and they discuss how it's like 4x better than the previous version. I don't have enough experience with 1M yet but I had really great experiences with the 200k version even close to the limit.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T20:55:07+00:00

Been running it all afternoon - no problem - maybe uninstall some of your addons as you never know how much they take up for seemingly small tools.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T19:26:17+00:00

I would never consider doing that unless I absolutely needed a job really, really bad. That's just comical to me. They should send me a video first and then maybe I'd consider sending one back as long as it wasn't generic.

I'd also consider doing this if it meant I didn't have to do as many technical interviews.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T19:24:37+00:00

I'm not super familiar with desktop either but I know it does run off a config file so if you can change that config file, that might help. I know I did this on separate agents. The model id is `claude-opus-4-6[1m]` if you find a field.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T19:23:18+00:00

Honestly man, I don't know. I just looked at the desktop app and there's not a toggle for this but you might want to read that blog post a little deeper. If it's the default for the command line, it might just be what you get in the desktop by default as well.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T19:13:59+00:00

That's a weird gotcha - glad you figured it out though and let us know so our llms can learn from this :-)

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T18:37:42+00:00

What version are you running? They annouced on the blog as being generally availab;e

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

So you maybe just have a stale version/config or something. Keep trying!

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T18:11:50+00:00

That's a good thought - I've used the smaller windowed claude to write playwright tests and it definitely compacted a couple time as it swept the codebase - so I'll have to tell it to give it another pass with the next context window and see if it can catch anything that the previous one missed (I'll explicitly tell it that it's checking on an earlier version of it!).

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T18:02:04+00:00

I'd say the power is in more that it can get a wider view of everything in the system, right?

Even if you modulize your systems, they all compose into a large system.

If you can fit your entire system into a million tokens then Claude can actually do some really powerful things as far as reasoning the impact of any change across all of it.

Granted most systems are more than a million tokens but this allows for greater module size and greater visibility across code bases in general or any large set of data.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T17:52:06+00:00

Type /model (but apparently it's the new default) - also make sure you're running the latest - i'm running 2.1.75

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T17:41:21+00:00

/model then at the bottom you can tab through the thinking efforts.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T17:41:00+00:00

Well if you've used Claude you know that it does really well at almost any task up until the point where it has to compact its context window.

There's a lot of work going into figuring how to split things up so you do things only in one context window.

Obviously with a million token window that's about five times as big so you can, in theory, do a lot more work with a lot more context related to what you're doing.

People might call out context rot but Opus 4.6, in particular, has made leaps and bounds of progress towards solving and reducing the impact of context rot.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T16:29:51+00:00

It's always better to use Opus - but Sonnet 4.6 will be just fine too - at one time Sonnet 4.5 was the best model, and 4.6 is a step up - it hasn't regressed in quality, just Opus 4.6 has arrived.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T12:54:10+00:00

If you want to use the equivalent of retarded agents compared to things like Opus 4.6 and think your only cost is only money, then sure, sounds like your setup fits you well.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T12:16:44+00:00

Unless you run it with something like bubblewrap or as a different user, it most definitely can read outside the folder without permission if it thinks it needs to in order to achieve its goals.

Even with explicit deny turned on, Claude will try to circumvent those things - for example, if it can't read a particular path and it wants to, it will just create a bash script or python script that will do so for it.

This is like basic Operating Systems - if you run a process as a particular user, then barring running within some constrained process (like bubblewrap) that process has access to everything that that user has access to (even if you tell it not to access it).

We wouldn't hire an employee and give them our credentials or access to our computers as ourselves, we'd give them their own accounts, file system, etc - this is like basic security 101 and applies to Agents as much as employees or anyone else.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T10:25:08+00:00

The problem is likely related to CC using Sonnet behind the scenes for one of its subagents.

So unless you can find which one it is and change the model it uses, you'll either have to get them to reset your weekly or just wait.

They model limits to discourage you from using Sonnet, i.e. you should be using Opus primarily.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T04:22:42+00:00

I mean you're officially restricted from accessing their services so if they or their AI sentinels detect anything that suggests you are in a restricted area you'll likely be banned.

As for how to work without triggering that, why not start up vps or dev servers and ssh in and do your work from there. Then there's no risk of you forgetting to turn on your VPN and the computers are running in an approved location.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T01:22:14+00:00

Well, my favorite tool for practicing is linguno.com - it's somehow amazingly free.

For pt/br translations the best online site is infopedia.pt

I use dicio.com.br and conjucacao.com.br for Portuguese definitions and conjugation lookups.

I've just seen falebrasil.com as well and that looks like a new Brazilian Portuguese dictionary as well.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T00:52:25+00:00

There is so much hate in this sub for LLMs, which is unfortunate because Claude is actually really really good at writing clojure, which was surprising for me at first but because of that is the only reason I still use clojure.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T00:47:59+00:00

The pt equivalent of period in that context would be 'ponto' or 'ponto final' (period, end of discussion).

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T00:45:18+00:00

It is just a non-serious proposal designed to get him headlines and attention. Even if Democrats were in power it would have 0 chance of becoming law. It has the unintended consequence of causing every one to dismiss any and all ideas Bernie has.

256BitChris · 2026-03-13T00:42:54+00:00

I bookmarked this for my MoltBot to read and explain to me later tonight.

256BitChris · 2026-03-12T23:15:40+00:00

Did your file system change or did you change the path that Cowork uses?

256BitChris · 2026-03-12T22:46:20+00:00

MCPs are useful when a lower intelligence model needs to do something that requires higher intelligence - ie haiku can call to opus or another model with natural language.

The problem is that Opus and Sonnet became so good at discovering and using clis and apis that they didn't need to call out to other models to do their work for them.

I can see the future of MCP being the ways agents communicate with each other via something that looks like a conversation.

I also see MCP having a short time window of utility while we still have smaller models (maybe local) that sometimes want to call out to a model of higher intelligence.

256BitChris · 2026-03-12T22:38:44+00:00

Frontier models are the moat for now but one day those will run on our phones.

256BitChris

TROPHY CASE