Yet another Hacker News

38 points pchristensen 2 hours ago 4 comments

jdw64 46 minutes ago | parent

>This is the advice I keep giving now. Someone says, “My coding agent’s doing something weird. Claude’s been nerfed.” And I ask, “How big is your context?”

That’s really true, but on the other hand, if there’s too little information, it also ends up working in strange ways. Most AGENT code anti-patterns work well at a medium amount of context, but when there’s too much or too little information, they don’t behave properly.

losvedir 30 minutes ago | parent

> The tea task for FireRed was in its weights, so it poisoned its context.

Mmm, to my mind, isn't this mixing completely different things? I thought poisoned context is stuff in the context that makes the model behave poorly. But if it's in the weights, that's just... model issues.

agentdev001 24 minutes ago | parent

So like- I considered this idea of using a fast decision model to prune before compaction, but I scrapped it because A; im not bottlenecked by speed, and B; cache invalidation dark magic

From my understanding, if we have turns [A, B, C, D, E] and we decide that turn C is useless context, then we lose our cache for the [D, E] segment. (plz correct me if im wrong, I havent tested this)

Personally, I pay no mind to session state nowadays. I exclusively use provider native hosted compaction, which if you believe the providers, is the way to go. For context management- I spend most of my effort on the things which dump output back to the model.

If anyone has any good reads on benchmarking OpenAI and Anthropic hosted/native compaction against custom stuff, I would love to read!

CBLT 5 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I also think decision models for pruning context isn't worthwhile. You're paying to load it into context (of your decision model), in order to save on loading the same data into context (of your generation model). The only way the economics makes sense is if you need a much smarter model for the compaction, but can't pay for it to load all of that context (because it's uncached or something). That sounds like a niche but it really doesn't exist. Cheap models are good enough, and smart models are cheap enough.

Personally, I use a harness extension that auto-compacts my context just before the cache expires. Combined with the default compact-when-full, this ends up being pretty much always what I want. It's one less thing to think about.