Yeah, I start most of my sessions now with “read the diff between this branch and main”. Seems like it grounds and focuses it.

subagents are huge, could execute on a massive plan that should easily fill up a 200k context window and be done atnaround 60k for the orchestration agent.

as a cheapass, being able to pass off the simple work to cheaper $ per token agents is also just great. I've got a handful of tasks I can happily delegate work to a haiku agent and anything requiring a bit of reasoning goes to sonnet.

Feel like opus is almost a cheatcode when i do get stuck, i just bust out a full opus workflow instead and it just destroys everything i was struggling with usually. like playing on easy mode.

as cool as this stuff is, kinda still wish i was just grandfathered into the plan with no weekly limit and only the 5 hour window limits, id just be happily hammering opus blissfully.

IMO it seems to start "forgetting" or "overlooking" claude.md well before the context window is full.

>"This fresh context thing is a big reason subagents might work where a single agent fails. It’s not just about parallelism: each subagent starts with a fresh context, and the parent agent only sees the result of whatever the subagent does — its own context also remains clean."

This is the true power of agent teams: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams

You maintain very low context usage in the main thread; just orchestration and planning details, while each individual team member remains responsible for their own. Allows you to churn through millions of output tokens in a fraction of the time.

>Same here. I don't understand how people leave it running on an "autopilot" for long periods of time.

Things have changed. The models have reached a level of coherence that they can be left to make the right decisions autonomously. Opus 4.6 is in a class of its own now.

It actually did automatically break the work up into chunks and launched a bunch of parallel workers to each handle a smaller amount of work. It wasn't doing everything in a single instance.

The problem wasn't that it lost track of which changes it needed to make, so I don't think checking items off a todo list would have helped. I believe it did actually change all the places in the code it should have. It just made the wrong changes sometimes.

But also, the claim I was responding to was, "I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time." If I have to tell it how to organize its work and how to keep track of its progress and how to execute all the smaller chunks of work, then I may get good results, but the tool isn't as magical (for me, anyway) as it seems to be for some other people.

One of the more subtle points that seems to be crucial is that it works a lot better when it can use the context as part of its own work rather than being polluted by unrelated details. Even better than restarting when it's off the rails is to avoid it as much as possible by proactively starting a new conversation as soon as anything in the history of the existing one stops being relevant. I've found it more effective to manually tell it most what's currently in the context in a fresh session skip the irrelevant bits even if they're fairly small than relying on it to figure out that it's no longer relevant (or give it instructions indicating that, which feels like a crapshoot whether it's actually going to prune or just bloat things further with that instruction just being added into the mix).

To echo what the parent comment said, it's almost frustrating how effective it can be at certain tasks that I wouldn't ever have the patience for. At my job recently I needed to prototype calling some Python code via WASM using the Rust wasmtime engine, and setting up the code structure to have the bytes for the WASM component, the arguments I wanted to pass to the function, and the WIT describing the interface for the function, it was able to fill in all of the boilerplate needed so that the function calls worked properly within a minute or two on the first try; reading through all the documentation and figuring out how exactly which half dozen assorted things I had to import and hook up together in the correct order would have probably taken me an hour at minimum.

I don't have any particular insight on whether or not these tools will become even more powerful over time, and I still have fairly strong concerns about how AI tools will affect society (both in terms of how they're used and the amount of in energy used to produce them in the first place), but given how much the tech industry tends to prioritize productivity over social concerns, I have to assume that my future employment is going to be heavily impacted by my willingness to adopt and use these tools. I can't deny at this point that having it as an option would make me more productive than if I refuse to use it, regardless of my personal opinions on it.