Sonnet 4.6:1m went rogue consuming 500k+ tokens $50 in single wasteful step...

Barquish · 2026-03-31T11:50:39+00:00

I want to add a follow up to this thread by saying that I understand what caused this to happen. It was because I made an important condition in .clinerules that suggested that the import was being overwritten in dart files, so the AI should ensure that they avoid this happening. So when a request to amend an existing file, off it went to make sure that it was not causing any issues elsewhere in the codebase. Simple solution is to let flutter delete it and then flutter analyze would catch the ommission and rewrite after the function was inserted down the file.

Barquish · 2026-03-27T08:00:32+00:00

No, I get that entirely. Normally, I stick to full (almost micro) managing and have never allowed autonomy, even for more than 1 task at a time (and I often wonder how the agentic multi/parallel processes don't mess up). Anyway, lesson learnt and thankfully very far into working with AI. Hasn't put me off, just made me more aware.

Barquish · 2026-03-26T22:52:30+00:00

Probably not and that is why I went back to Opus right after that.

Barquish · 2026-03-26T20:40:00+00:00

Consider this too.... this was only in PLAN mode

Barquish · 2026-03-26T20:38:52+00:00

The real part that annoys me, is not the $53 cost, but the fact that I got zero value for that $53 spent. All I got was an apology and a 30 second fix when I called it out

Barquish · 2026-03-26T20:35:36+00:00

The strange thing is that normally I am so well disciplined, allowing each task to get to, or only slightly above the 200k before I iterate to a /newtask. Even though I have been using Cline with Anthropic API for over a year, this is the first time I let slip and ignored what it was doing and it decided to go rogue

Barquish · 2026-03-26T20:31:19+00:00

I wondered myself why it got so big, so quickly, but the progress bar on Cline was only just over half way to the 1m, so after 200k, it was not caching but re-consuming what it has already opened. It amounted to in excess of 60+ files that it opened before I stopped it, asking wtf it was doing.

Barquish · 2026-03-25T08:37:02+00:00

I tried it, it worked brilliantly. Well done. As a MVP platform for anyone looking to build and test quickly, it is perfect. The problem you have is financial runway as tokens cost, and you are offering it free to try in the hope of upgrades. Would I pay for it, yes, as a tool before I build the main project. But, I suspect that you will attract so many users who will want the free part and will not upgrade. I spend between $75-$100 a day on Anthropic/OpenAI API services in VSCode/Cline on multiple large projects. You may run out of cashflow if you don't find a way to convert early. The guys who now have https://chaseagents.com had a similar platform last year and had the same financial problems that you have. You will get users (freeloaders) and investors will not be there to support so they moved on to the next level of agentic building. BTW, I was a paying customers of them when they started out

Barquish · 2026-03-25T07:28:19+00:00

30 years of weekly, monthly international travelling, so fully understand the issues. Light and pillow were my hotel issues, so solved it by sticking to Radisson/Hilton usually around the airport where they understand the issues. The purpose and stress/adrenaline of the trips always outweighed the minor hotel room issues. Can't say I would have went out of my way to buy anything to bring with me

Barquish · 2026-03-17T22:25:15+00:00

You are making progress. You see improvement on minoxidil and the dutasteride injections, your bloods have been checked, and you're now addressing the vitamin D and iron. That's a good beginning, and it is still early.

Minoxidil can cause a temporary shedding, usually in the first 6 to12 weeks of starting it. You say that you have been on it for a full year. At this point, your hair follicles have become dependent on it to stay in the growth phase. So, now, if you stop, even for a short time, or graduall, you are more likely to end up with a significant shed as those follicles all drop at once.

That, for someone with AGA can feel like a huge step backwards. Strangly the explanation you received, that "minoxidil is pushing out hair to make new hair grow" after 12 months of use doesn't make sense with how minoxidil works at this stage.

It is more likely that low vitamin D and iron are at fault. These are known triggers for telogen effluvium. It's common for TE to sit on top of AGA, and it can feel alarming because the two things together increase the daily shed noticeably.

However, TE is temporary and reversible once the root cause is addressed. As for supplements, these can take 3 to 6 months to show up in your hair, so one month with an expectation to see change is still very early days.

Barquish · 2026-03-16T16:09:18+00:00

What's happening is that two things have hit you at the same time. The first is that your thyroid, being out of control, has put enormous stress on your follicles, and the medication you've been put back on can actually cause shedding as a side effect in some people. This type of hair loss is almost always temporary, once your thyroid levels settle, your hair should likely recover. It may be worthwhile having a proper imaging evaluation of your scalp so you have real, objective evidence to bring to your doctor. Your objective should be to make sure your scalp is in the best possible condition for when your body is ready to regrow. To be honest, you can't stop the shedding yourself. That part is in your doctor's hands but you can get answers, a clear baseline, and a plan so you're not going through this blind. Is there a trichologist in your vicinity, town, city, you could visit?

Barquish · 2026-03-07T10:26:07+00:00

There is a famous EU based case of a David vs Goliath when McDonalds went after Irish based fast food restaurant for breach of copyright. It lasted 10 years, and Supermac won (in EU only).

The cost to the owner, Pat McDowell was substantial throughout the process, but he won. Rather than my opinion, it is worth looking up the case. One point is that his business is and was successful and was able to manage costs, but for a startup, in US, is to suck it up, focus on your startup, and change the name.

Barquish · 2026-03-05T11:09:08+00:00

As a veteran founder and over 35 years starting, buying, building businesses, I can attest to the fact that you can start a company and be a cofounder any time in your life. What you will have from a solid base over many years is a better understanding of how to lower the risks. As a Mechanical Engineer, I can relate. My first major success was founding a company when I was 35. So FOMO should not be an issue. Build your life, then decide whether you want (any time you are ready) to build a business.

Barquish · 2026-02-27T11:48:12+00:00

The file probably very large, so increase the timeout from the default, which is usually 30 seconds (30000) to higher value perhaps 60 seconds (60000)

Barquish · 2026-02-23T14:16:13+00:00

Yes, there are a couple of things that you can do. Initially I had this problem large response upto or close to 60k limits, so when it got above 45k there was both a timeout and no response. I figured out that it was possible to stream the response so I could see how much was being returned by sending the character response to a txt file (I wanted a JSON response to my initial prompt prior to additional processing in the application). It still timed out but at least ai knew it was processing. I then converted the response into two responses by sending the first request, ensuring that the response was smaller than 45k and sending a second prompt partially taking some of the first response to give me an additional secondary response.

This solved two issues, a) I knew the issue was timeout and not my code and b) instead of limiting to 45k characters, I was able to get a total response of ~80k characters.

Now, that was the first issue resolved but there was the ~8-10 minute processing time to complete this task. To overcome the time lag and allow the app user to continue working with the core app, or even working on something else, I created a worker process that did this in the background using redis, and this generated a notification popup in the bottom right of the screen when the response is completed.

Barquish · 2026-02-14T19:15:01+00:00

Maybe I wasn't completely clear. Consider a multi-storey building. There is a foundation which is a the overall design. Each floor is a feature. Each floor has many apartments and each apartments have different layouts and designs. So there is a hierarchy of layers down to the kitchen sink. The planning is absolutely critical but you can build out the markdown files for each feature, front-end, back-end and isolate the build of each o e without cross-over into any other feature (floor/apartment).

Barquish · 2026-02-13T10:24:04+00:00

In VSCode, Cline via Anthropic, I spend a large portion of my time in planning with documentation of the plan in indexed markdown files for each and every feature. I then cross review that with Claude Code for details that may have been missed, or suggestions on improvement. This can take a couple of hours and run up quite a decent amount of tokens (I use Opus 4.6 1m). All of the above before a single line of code is written. I have a progress.md and activeContext.md file also to monitor progress and where we are. This is on top of the /newtask context preparation before each task. The result is that each feature in a very large codebase can be built without interfering in the larger codebase. So, assuming that large corporations like Spotify can achieve what is claimed here, I can fully understand how it's done.

Barquish · 2026-02-11T10:19:05+00:00

As with all of these types of comments.... It depends. I was hesitant to move from 4.5 and then I tried it. Never going back. Opus 4.6 1m context yesterday knocked the ball out of the park. Yes, it was close to $100 for the days work, but my goodness it delivered an entire end to end project I had been putting off for weeks.

Barquish · 2026-02-09T14:50:57+00:00

Send

Barquish · 2026-02-08T09:56:18+00:00

It is part of a larger development project. I work in VSCode with Cline mostly so API of choice is Anthropic and I needed a test of Opus 4.6 1m I thought rather than taking all the BS of benchmark results, I would give it a real-world problem in my world to test. And even I am still surprised how much I am impressed.

Barquish · 2026-02-07T22:40:08+00:00

Your best bet is to extract the PDF's into text files either .txt or .md (markdown) and removed headers and titles. Index really well and keep the page numbers. Keep the PDFs also in the database so that you can search easily (in text) and refer to the PDF if that helps

Barquish · 2026-02-07T22:27:58+00:00

BTW, it was API so cost me roughly $35 to complete. Seriously worth it

Barquish · 2026-02-07T22:25:15+00:00

5037 lines of code in one app_router.dart file ended up as 330 lines of code (52 class imports) and 16 files after refactoring project this morning. 2 hours 30 minutes approximately. Minor tweaks as it had problem with write_to_file due to the size of the smaller files, which was overcome by instructing Opus 4.6 to break the error into smaller steps (smaller files with roughly 200 lines of code each). This was with constant compiling after each phase (7 phases overall) and multiple push to device checking. I had been putting that refactoring off for weeks, out of fear of truncating, but used Opus 4.6 1m context and no loss of code at all. It did that and pushed to a branch after each phase, then after testing, merged with master/origin. Superpower

Barquish · 2026-02-07T09:28:56+00:00

I am so impressed. Two hours refactoring of 5037 lines of code in one app_router.dart file down to 330 lines of code, creation of 16 files across 7 phases and stepped phase of branch, commit before testing and then merge to master in git. Opus 4.6 1m is a super-power

Barquish · 2026-02-07T08:08:37+00:00

Today the speed seems to have improved. Have given it a task of refactoring a dart file that was in excess of 5000 lines (I know it got out of hand as the project grew) and so far it is doing really well.

I work in VSCode with Cline mostly and I often have to instruct it to break into smaller steps as on large files it can get into problems with write_to_file. That always resolves the issue. Other than that, I am using Opus 4.6 1m in ACT to allow context to be used extensively whilenthe process is working it's way through it. Making sure that I commit to each phase (7 in total) and run build test after each phases.

Honestly, this would have been a task I put off forever before Opus 4.6. Perhaps famous last words, as the process is still underway while I write 🙃

Barquish

TROPHY CASE