This is just making it more expensive for everyone else, right?

How Claude handles its sessions is none of my business. I'm going to let them do the best they can to provide good service for everyone, and if they can't/won't, I'll switch to a provider that can.

Using these massive models is already pretty danged extravagant, I'm not going to demand to be at the front of the queue at all times, too.

I've directly inspected calls for pro/Max plans and as of today they have 1hr cache expiries. This has definitely degraded to 5 min in the past but that's the behavior today.

If you're paying API rates, you can choose 5m or 1hr yourself (and pay different rates).

Keeping a 1hr cache warm could still be useful, sure, but outside that, I don't see much use of this today.

I assumed (perhaps incorrectly, but it was a guess since I never dug into it) that less used "hot pockets" of previous inference gradually got more stale as time went on, and the conversation went elsewhere and didn't need those bits.

Hearing one byte refreshes the whole thing is huge! 5min is wayy too slow, because sometimes I want to spent more than 5 min looking at a diff before choosing where to go next.

Kind of outrageous, I hope this kind of feature gets built into claude code =D

Interested in how the critics of approaches like this defend an agentic session (with Fable, for example) that stops and runs a multi-hour ML training session. It's a script, so the actual LLM convo goes stale, but then when the results get returned to the main thread you get an expensive cache hit without doing anything.

You would have avoided that cache hit if the LLM session was kept "alive" for those few hours. Why not automate the part where you keep the large main thread alive until you're ready to analyze the results?

I thought the cache length was 1 hour, not 5 minutes?

They should increase the cache to 10 minutes. 5 is just too low, you can even miss it by taking time to select a response from a question.

Feels like will be shut down real quick

Is the 5-minute expiration correct? I thought it was more like ~1 hour.

How will this not lead to tragedy of the commons?

Glad this exists. It will force anthropic to fix their flawed cache mechanism.

Don't we pay for cache input though?

This is a good idea if it could manage it in an acceptable way.

For example, there might be something I intended to complete in one sitting, but took two sittings in the same day unexpectedly. Maybe it could just be a few cache delays per day or something, tagged in advance somehow.