this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah so I've been working with Claude on that. Typically it greps to find what it's looking for and that can be a lot of tokens. So I created something halfway between rag and that (semantic search), and overall it lowers token usage a bit, but even if it optimistically reduces tokens 20%, Claude is hungry for docs.

There is automatic compaction, but I typically want to control that myself when I change focus (if I don't just /clear it). Still I'd say almost all of the stuff I do runs north of 100k tokens.

[–] hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Surprised the community hasn't found better ways to reduce context, 100k is insane. Is it possible to make the agent work on smaller pieces at a time, so less context is needed per piece?

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Oh for sure. Agents often use under 30k tokens, but the orchestrator needs to have enough information to instruct the agents so it typically is a fair bit bigger in context. Agents tend to save you money on frontier models, but I'm skeptical about local LLMs. I suppose if you aren't pressed for time it's probably just fine. I haven't played that much with it because anything big enough to bother with agents I typically feel is too big for local anyway. But I'm sure others have experimented more on that front than I have.