On long sessions even with workflows and sub-agents I typically hit around 500-750k tokens in context (say 4-16 hours of work in a session, across multiple 5-hour limits) with Claude Code.

I was going to explore paying for Codex since OpenAI seems to be a bit more generous with rate limits, but I'm now not sure - for the stuff I do limited context size would be a dealbreaker - basically lots and lots of documentation and guideline references, code review loops, documentation references and web searches, multi-repo exploration, lots of tool calls and so on.

I might just upgrade to Anthropic's more expensive Max subscription or something to get more subsidized tokens. Even with plan files and the plan mode, it's like a slot machine after compacting the context, sometimes steps or other details just evaporate in thin air, the less of that I need to do the better. It's not that it can't work, it just doesn't work reliably enough not to be annoying.

Luckily DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3 don't seem to have those limits either - though DS is around Sonnet, GLM 5.2 feels a bit above Sonnet and only K3 only really is in the proper Opus ballpark that's good enough for me to work undisturbed, even if it seems to be slower.

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