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Comment by benswerd | Hacker News Reader

Why not?

The docs for git clone at https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone are less than 4000 tokens, I don't think this is unreasonable.

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Because the defaults aren't just for convenience, the API designer is also making the parameters they think should be used the most have the least resistance. Good example is runtime parameters like in the JVM. You shouldn't start with having to tune your JVM, you probably want a middle of the road place to start with even if you know you're going to tune it.

im not opposed to good defaults, i just believe they should be explicit. The AI should read the starting.md to fill in explicitly what its JVM configuration is. Then, when you want to tune in the future its clear what options are available and what specifically is changing.

I can't parse this. If you explicitly define recommended values, those are not what I consider "defaults".

Because LLMs degrade with context length. And even if they didn't, having to constantly ingest the same stuff is wasteful for execution and cost. Why stuff the context when you don't have to?

Conservatively speaking, LLMs degrade past 40% of a 2M context window, 4k tokens is 0.2%, so no degradation there. Thats also current generation conservative estimate.

I think wasteful is an irrelevant metric. Claude ingests those tokens in a quarter of a second, if it causes it to catch any bug ever it saves far more time than it ever uses.

Any individual default that causes unexpected behavior causes more problems, takes more time and costs more than the small cost of being explicit.

Boiling frog problem

the Electron problem

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