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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the tim

How is Claude monitoring them for hours? Claude runs out of context and extremely long sessions are prohibitively expensive even according to Anthropic (after they dispense with the marketing bullshit of long running tasks)?

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It launches these tasks in the background. It became really good at it a couple of months ago, now it sets monitors on timer (not something I instructed, so I assumed it’s part of the system prompt for this kind of tasks) and then just wait for the next prompt, for the background process to be done, or for a monitor to trigger a checkup.

> and then just wait for the next prompt

A single session running for multiple hours is prohibitively expensive, as per Anthropic. Regardless of whether it just waits for a prompt or does something.

Is the high expense coming from cache misses? If their workload does need to wait for a long time before it can continue, I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.

> Is the high expense coming from cache misses?

Yup. They can't keep your workload in cache forever, or they would run out of cache for users.

> I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.

Yes, that's what they recommend

Prohibitively expensive is all relative. Pre-Fable, I was getting fine on the 5x plan for 1-2 concurrent long-running tasks plus interactive work (I do a lot of coding for work, but it is not my full work day). I don’t think a cache miss every hour on Opus hurts that much, even at 500-600k context. It would be nice if they got /clear working on remote-control.

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