Comment by scotty79
4 days ago
> LLMs have none of that, and every new session is rebuilding the world anew.
For LLMs long term memory is achieved by tooling. Which you discounted in your previous comments.
You also overstimate capacity of your short-term memory by few orders of magnitude:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/short-term-me...
> For LLMs long term memory is achieved by tooling. Which you discounted in your previous comments.
My specific complaint, which is an observable fact about "Opus 4.5 is next tier": it has the same crippled context that degrades the quality of the model as soon as it fills 50%.
EMM_386: no-no-no, it's not crippled. All you have to do is keep track across multiple files, clear out context often, feed very specific information not to overflow context.
Me: so... it's crippled, and you need multiple workarounds
scotty79: After all it's the same as your own short-term memory, and <some unspecified tooling (I guess those same files)> provide long-term memory for LLMs.
Me: Your comparison is invalid because I can go have lunch, and come back to the problem at hand and continue where I left off. "Next tier Opus 4.5" will have to be fed the entire world from scratch after a context clear/compact/in a new session.
Unless, of course, you meant to say that "next tier Opus model" only has 15-30 second short term memory, and needs to keep multiple notes around like the guy from Memento. Which... makes it crippled.
If you refuse to use what you call workarounds and I call long term memory then you end up with a guy from Memento and regardless of how smart the model is it can end up making same mistakes. And that's why you can't tell the difference between smarter and dumber one while others can.
I think the premise is that if it was the "next tier" than you wouldn't need to use these workarounds.
> If you refuse to use what you call workarounds
Who said I refuse them?
I evaluated the claim that Opus is somehow next tier/something different/amazeballs future at its face value. It still has all the same issues and needs all the same workarounds as whatever I was using two months ago (I had a bit of a coding hiatus between beginning of December and now).
> then you end up with a guy from Memento and regardless of how smart the model is
Those models are, and keep being the guy from memento. Your "long memory" is nothing but notes scribbled everywhere that you have to re-assemble every time.
> And that's why you can't tell the difference between smarter and dumber one while others can.
If it was "next tier smarter" it wouldn't need the exact same workarounds as the "dumber" models. You wouldn't compare the context to the 15-30 second short-term memory and need unspecified tools [1] to have "long-term memory". You wouldn't have the model behave in an indistinguishable way from a "dumber" model after half of its context windows has been filled. You wouldn't even think about context windows. And yet here we are
[1] For each person these tools will be a different collection of magic incantations. From scattered .md files to slop like Beads to MCP servers providing access to various external storage solutions to custom shell scripts to ...
BTW, I still find "superpowers" from https://github.com/obra/superpowers to be the single best improvement to Claude (and other providers) even if it's just another in a long serious of magic chants I've evaluated.
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