yup, after the token-increase from CC from two weeks ago, I'm now consistently filling the 1M context window that never went above 30-40% a few days ago. Did they turn it off? I used to see the Co-Authored by Opus 4.6 (1M Context Window) in git commits, now the advert line is gone. I never turned it on or off, maybe the defaults changed but /model doesn't show two different context sizes for Opus 4.6
I never asked for a 1M context window, then I got it and it was nice, now it's as if it was gone again .. no biggie but if they had advertised it as a free-trial (which it feels like) I wouldn't have opted in.
Anyways, seems I'm just ranting, I still like Claude, yes but nonetheless it still feels like the game you described above.
We defaulted to medium [reasoning] as a result of user feedback about Claude using too many tokens. When we made the change, we (1) included it in the changelog and (2) showed a dialog when you opened Claude Code so you could choose to opt out. Literally nothing sneaky about it — this was us addressing user feedback in an obvious and explicit way.
Off topic, but I found Sonnet useless. It can't do the simplest tasks, like refactoring a method signature consistently across a project or following instructions accurately about what patterns/libraries should be used to solve a problem.
It's crazy because when Sonnet came out it was heralded as the best thing since sliced bread, and now people are literally saying it's "useless". I wonder if this is our collective expectations increasing or the models are getting worse.
New models come out with inflated expectations, then they are adjusted/nerfed/limited for whatever reason. Our expectations remain at previous levels.
New models come out with once again inflated expectations, but now it's double inflation, because we're still on the previous level of expectations. And so on.
I think it's likely to get worse. Providers are running out of training data, and running bigger and bigger models to more and more people is prohibitively expensive. So they will try to keep the hype up while the gains are either very small or non-existent.
I like not running into the mandatory compaction but I do try to actively keep it under too. From an Anthropic standpoint with the new(ish) 5min cache timeout, it's a great way to get people to burn tokens on reinitializing the cache without having them occupy TPU time.. Esp. the larger the context gets.
hmm, I just reverted to 2.1.98 and now with /model default has the (1M context) and opus is without (200k) .. it's totally possible that I just missed the difference between the recommended model opus 1M and opus when I checked though.
I never asked for a 1M context window, then I got it and it was nice, now it's as if it was gone again .. no biggie but if they had advertised it as a free-trial (which it feels like) I wouldn't have opted in.
Anyways, seems I'm just ranting, I still like Claude, yes but nonetheless it still feels like the game you described above.