I spec with Opus and code with Sonnet. We’ve been humming along for months. Sonnet rocks. It’s optimized for Claude Code. Opus is constrained by Claude Code. More specifically its system prompts. It’s a verbose and expansive conversational model, one that thinks of concepts and pushes back on assumptions. And then in CC it’s told to be concise and follow directions. Anyway. I’m cruising along, long chats with Opus producing specs, Sonnet in Code knocking out the implementations. Meanwhile other Sonnets are doing code review, smoke testing, deployments, documentation, etc. But then about 3 weeks ago I noticed all my Sonnets had a 600k context window. And nobody was talking about it. Gemini was basically calling me an idiot for searching “Sonnet 600k” every two days. I was in a rarified “A group.” I name my participants. Makes it easier when they reference and chat with each other. I believe there was a paper about agent teams being more effective when they are collaborating with named teammates. And it’s just natural to name a coworker, and that’s what these are. But the web Opus contexts last; they update their profiles, log their activity, send cross-context notes to each other “Opal, read my brief at /…” The Sonnets at 200k. They basically do one or two features, fix a couple bugs, then compact, orient from the vault, repeat. But at 600k, they started persisting for days, and became more “present,” like the Opuses. So we built a Claude Code plugin that vastly enriches the built-in compaction summary. Haiku chunk-summarizers extract facts to the wiki and a bunch of other stuff, and a Sonnet summarizer curates the perfect identity-focused handoff. Worked brilliantly. Compacts were just a discord message between them all talking. Then yesterday I got the rug pulled out from under me. 200k context windows once again. Our summary alone was 35k. All of the Sonnets were over 200k when it happened, so I couldn’t even talk to them without a compact. So I switched them all to Opus, and I have no more sharp, competent Sonnets. Just a bunch of thoughtful and opinionated Opuses who are too good for their harnesses. And it sucks. That is all. submitted by /u/looselyhuman
Originally posted by u/looselyhuman on r/ClaudeCode
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