← Back to context

Comment by furyofantares

11 hours ago

I'd been on Codex for a while and with Codex 5.2 I:

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.

32 comments

furyofantares

Reply
pjerem  4 hours ago

If you use OpenCode (open source Claude Code implementation), you can configure compaction yourself : https://opencode.ai/docs/en/config/#compaction

  • furyofantares  19 minutes ago

    OpenAI has some magic they do on their standalone endpoint (/responses/compact) just for compaction, where they keep all the user messages and replace the agent messages or reasoning with embeddings.

    > 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://openai.com/index/unrolling-the-codex-agent-loop/

  • comboy  2 hours ago

    Not sure if it's a common knowledge but I've learned not that long ago that you can do "/compact your instructions here", if you just say what you are working on or what to keep explicitly it's much less painful.

    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.

    • brookst  1 hour ago

      You can also put guidance for when to compact and with what instructions into Claude.md. The model itself can run /compact, and while I try to remember to use it manually, I find it useful to have “If I ask for a totally different task and the current context won’t be useful, run /compact with a short summary of the new focus”

  • genewitch  2 hours ago

    so you have to garbage collect manually for the AI?

    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

mgambati  10 hours ago

1m context in OpenAI and Gemini is just marketing. Opus is the only model to provide real usable bug context.

  • furyofantares  10 hours ago

    I'm directly conveying my actual experience to you. I have tasks that fill up Opus context very quickly (at the 200k context) and which took MUCH longer to fill up Codex since 5.2 (which I think had 400k context at the time).

    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.

  • johnebgd  10 hours ago

    Codex high reasoning has been a legitimately excellent tool for generating feedback on every plan Claude opus thinking has created for me.

karmasimida  8 hours ago

This is true.

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