Comment by kccqzy
1 day ago
You just haven’t worked on tasks that are complicated enough. Occasionally it took more than 1M tokens just to come up with a plausible plan.
Personally I find using /rewind judiciously is better than using /compact. The latter essentially gives you no control of what details to discard, but the former at least has coarse-grained control.
Oh my goodness. I’ve used over 1B tokens on a single feature. I’m running at about 25B tokens/month right now.
My whole point was that by planning in advance you can shard the work into manageable sections with clear beginnings and outputs with acceptance croteria, and never compact, or even use more than a few hundfed thousand tokens in context.
It’s all hierarchical. Looking at an eval feature building right now, it’s 20ish build plans, each with zero to five or so /clear moments.
But maybe that’s the key thing… I don’t iteratively prompt ad hoc software writing. I do iterate on requirements, but if those are solid enough there is no “now write this function, now write that module”.
Have you ever looked at how much performance drops as context grows? The difference in intelligence between 100k and 1M is huge, like opus drops to haiku level performance, or worse. For that reason I try to keep under 200k. That feels about the upper bound for tasks requiring accuracy.