How to Handle Large Projects with Limited Context When working on large projects with Opus 4.5, the relatively limited context window (~200k tokens) often gets exhausted during the planning phase or while reviewing the overall project architecture—sometimes even before real implementation starts.
This raises a broader question about handling large-scale projects under context limitations:
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What are the best strategies to manage context efficiently?
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How do you structure planning, architecture reviews, and implementation to avoid losing important information?
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Are there effective workflows or tools (summaries, checkpoints, memory files, etc.) that help preserve continuity?
On the other hand, Sonnet 4.5 Max offers a much larger context window (up to 1 million tokens).
Does this make it a better choice for large or long-running projects?
Or does a larger context introduce other trade-offs (cost, focus, reasoning quality), making a hybrid approach—using Opus for deep reasoning and Sonnet Max for context-heavy tasks—more effective?
I’m curious to hear how others choose between Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.5 Max when working on complex projects in Cursor, and what real-world workflows have proven successful.