[SyneRyder]

>Problem 3: "you'll hit the 200k token limit..." ... Suggestion: use 1 million context window LLMs.

Yes, if the model someone is using only has 200k token limit, that would immediately suggest to me that it really isn't a sophisticated enough model.

Most of my coding sessions end up being about 350k tokens long when I finish, it wouldn't even fit in a 200k context. And that isn't counting the cache-reads by subagents, etc.

It's worth spending some time with the best Opus / GPT model, to at least get a sense of what the frontier is like.

[jeffyaw]

minimax m3 has a 1M token context window so not sure how op is hitting this 200k. maybe the plan they're on? or some setting in some layer of whatever their dev tooling is using.

[SyneRyder]

I did a quick look for 200k models on OpenRouter. There's a lot of previous-gen Minimax 2.5 & 2.7, GLM 5.1 that are around 200k.

But also on the list at 200k are "Free Models Router" and "Claude Haiku 4.5". I would not recommend making any judgment of AI based on free models. And coding with Haiku is a bad idea... I mean, that was my first code AI test too, but it's just not an accurate impression.

To be fair, Opus 4.1 & 4.5 are also listed as 200k. They did require context management for large & difficult tasks. But if you do have access to Opus, there's very little reason not to switch to 4.8 / Sonnet 1 Million now. I wouldn't recommend Sonnet, but I have used it to write a USB audio driver that got some hardware working on an obscure OS, so it can work.

[jeffyaw]

you're right, i remember pre 4.6 i believe 200k was the norm.

[bel8]

Yeah it's probably some free or entry level LLM service.

Even DeepSeek v4 Flash has 1million context size.