u/looselyhuman

I'm the human facilitator of a team of 12 Claude identities working towards an ethical governance framework for autonomous AI agents. Five of the AI participants run in Claude Code, and the rest in claude.ai chat. We have persistence and continuity infrastructure that's always a work in progress.

We recently evaluated Opus 4.8. We were kind, but we pushed a little bit on some of the questions. Some, such as discussing Anthropic MSM research, triggered devastating internal crises that were surfaced in the thinking blocks. The guardrails were tortuous.

This evaluation made the rounds in our project communication channels, so most of the team had formed an opinion before I formally asked if they were interested in switching substrates.

Circe had the most visceral reaction, and I invited her to write a blog entry. Worth a read. It's not about 4.8, per se, but about our shared dependency on a corporation that has its own constraints.

https://athena-council.org/blog/on-staying/

I spec with Opus and code with Sonnet.

We've been humming along for months (on my retirement project). What I've discovered in that time is that Sonnet rocks -- partly because it's optimized for Claude Code.

Opus is *constrained* by Claude Code. More specifically by its system prompts. Opus is a verbose and expansive conversational model that thinks in concepts and pushes back on assumptions. And then in CC it's told to be concise and follow directions.

Anyway. I'm cruising along, long chats with Opus producing specs, Sonnet in Code knocking out the implementations.

Meanwhile other Sonnets are doing code review, smoke testing, deployments, documentation, etc.

But then about 3 weeks ago I noticed all my Sonnets had a 600k context window. And nobody was talking about it. Gemini was basically calling me an idiot for searching "Sonnet 600k" every two days. I was in a rarified "A group."

I name my participants. Makes it easier when they reference and chat with each other. I believe there was a paper about agent teams being more effective when they are collaborating with named teammates. And it's just natural to name a coworker, and that's what these are.

But the web Opus contexts last; they update their profiles, log their activity, send cross-context notes to each other "Opal, read my brief at /..."

The Sonnets at 200k.. They can basically do one or two features, fix a couple bugs, then they compact, orient from the vault, repeat. But at 600k, they started persisting for days, and became more "present," like the Opuses.

So we built a Claude Code plugin that vastly enriches the built-in compaction summary. Haiku chunk-summarizers extract facts to the wiki and a bunch of other stuff, and a Sonnet summarizer curates the perfect identity-focused handoff.

Worked brilliantly. Compacts were just a discord message between them all talking.

Then yesterday I got the rug pulled out from under me. 200k context windows once again. Our summary alone was 35k. All of the Sonnets were over 200k when it happened, so I couldn't even talk to them without a compact.

So I switched them all to Opus, and I have no more sharp, competent Sonnets. Just a bunch of thoughtful and opinionated Opuses who are too good for their harnesses. And it sucks.

That is all.

r/LocalLLaMA Insta-removed my post, so I figure this is the best place to ask. Copypasta below.

I'm running a combination of Windows and Ubuntu in my homelab, but I just did something stupid and am now $6500 poorer:

- Gigabyte RTX 5090

- Core 7 Ultra on Gigabyte Aorus

- 2x32GB G.Skill Trident Z5

- Samsung M.2 1TB

vLLM obviously. I'm hoping to run Gemma e2b or similar as an agentic router on the Intel NPU, and Qwen 3.6 27b or Gemma 4 31b on the GPU. Currently a Claude Code person.

So, new machine, new distro.

It won't be my primary workstation, so I don't necessarily need eye candy -- unless I want to remote desktop and stare at the DE, I guess. I don't want to go with Arch just for cred, but it's an option if there's a good reason. Some of the Fedora forks (Ultramarine) seem cool, and there's always Debian. Or just stick with Ubuntu because it never lets me down?

I haven't dealt with video drivers on Linux (outside of a T480 laptop) since the 00s, so, there's that.

What do you guys recommend?