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I compared the writing style of Opus 5 vs Fable 5, and Opus 5 continues many of the "Claude-isms" of its 4.8 predecessor in a way that Fable broke away from. O
by deet 2mo ago
I compared the writing style of Opus 5 vs Fable 5, and Opus 5 continues many of the "Claude-isms" of its 4.8 predecessor in a way that Fable broke away from.
Opus 5 still uses "carry the argument", "worth stating plainly", ", and the trap", "The X matters more", the use of "move"
We need an "annoying English" benchmark.
- Fable 5 Max: https://gist.github.com/deet/3d97f854b48eac6658d642fa18bb24d3 https://gist.github.com/deet/3d97f854b48eac6658d642fa18bb24d...
- Opus 5 Max: https://gist.github.com/deet/1a43693a732dfccb4d0d914bfc426923 https://gist.github.com/deet/1a43693a732dfccb4d0d914bfc42692...
- ianberdin 2mo agoI’m pretty sure Opus 5 is adapted to tricks from long reasoning in Kimi K3 and based on original Opus 4.8. It is not fable in any form.
- duplessitous 2mo agoSeems unlikely they adapted anything from K3 given the timeline of releases, similar to how K3 was obviously not distilled from fable
- winwang 2mo agoI found 4.6 more amenable than 4.8 to style directions, we'll see how 5.0 does. Super-small-sample-size: I think part of its "Claude-ism" style comes from its propensity to try and "proactively" move the conversation/work along. Not sure how this would fare in non-obviously-productive environments, I'd guess "it's still annoying" considering your evidence. I'm also thinking of another benchmark: (quantified) stylistic range across different prompts. Just putting it out there if anyone wants to do the work for me :D
- sibeliuss 2mo ago4.6 is night and day better. It was before the big language switch up. Terrible direction that Anthropic has taken this.
- Kwpolska 2mo agoFable might be using those phrases less, but its writing is still terrible and exhausting to read.
- arizen 2mo agoCould these complex/hard to read Fable outputs be sign of some kind of industrial level of intelligence, which us humans may have a hard to comprehend, while it may be also hard for machine to use simpler texts to properly outline all nuances and complexities of concepts it output?
- solenoid0937 2mo agoFable subagents communicate very effectively with one another, so this would be a reasonable take imo
- dwaltrip 2mo agoI've increasingly felt like Fable and I speak different dialects of English...
- californical 2mo agoTwo things tell me this isn’t the case: (1) it’s not that I can’t understand their output, it’s just written in a way that is very homogenous and same-y, with very boring cliches and phrases that don’t quite match their context (2) a pretty strong sign of intelligence is being able to explain complex things in simple terms
- rkoten 2mo agoIt's very much number 2 in my experience with it. Predominantly whenever a really advanced word or phrase is used it can be substituted for a much simpler one without losing useful context. And it seems to really prefer to use them a lot.
- Omniusaspirer 2mo agoIf you feed Fable or Opus primarily handoff documents from a previous context instead of human written prompts and are working on something sophisticated it rapidly reaches a level where it's hard to actually comprehend for a non expert. I've received incredibly obtuse outputs that contain more mathematical formulas than English words with programming workloads.
- DonsDiscountGas 2mo agoI think a signature Claude style of writing is good since it makes it that much harder to pass off Claude written text as human.
- robwwilliams 2mo agoEasy enough to change. I have a Stylometry Skill fit to my preferred style—a mix of me and Terry Winograd. Give Opus 10 of your best paper thst you wrote and tell it to build a model of your style. hHard to distinguish except I make way more typos.
- unglaublich 2mo agoLet Opus write a tool that introduces statistically likely human typos. Don't let it just rewrite itself, let it write a model that it can apply. This sentence above filtered with the one-shot result of above prompt at a high typo-rate: Let Opus write tool that introduces statistically likely human typos. Don't let it just rewrote itself, let it wroite a model taht it can apply.
- kanodiaayush 2mo agoI've found Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 both difficult to learn from purely because of how annoying their writing style is. I'm finding GPT 5.6 Sol to be much better for this.
- arjie 2mo agoOne nice thing but ChatGPT is that good image model means it can generate good infographics occasionally to illustrate. These become naturally compact in text.
- yesitcan 2mo agoAnd this is the most important observation in this thread. It’s load-bearing!
- user43928 2mo agoI had Fable review some legal texts yesterday. It told me that one particular line is "the most load-bearing sentence in the document". Fable "rated it legally load-bearing without reservation".
- flimflamm 2mo agoI on the other hand think that I have now found the smoking gun!
- steve_taylor 2mo agoYou're absolutely right. Your belt-and-braces are earning their keep.
- Creamsicle47 2mo agoThe user is making an extremely sharp point – full stop.
- AussieWog93 2mo agoI don't understand why Claude sounding like Claude is a bad thing? What's next - complaining that `make` says "nothing to be done for 'all'"?
- zmmmmm 2mo agoI'm very happy I can tell when AI wrote something. It keeps everyone honest. I'd be far more concerned if it didn't have a distinct tone and style.
- NikhilVerma 2mo agoThat's what led me to make https://slopsift.dev/editor/ https://slopsift.dev/editor/
- btbuildem 2mo agoThese are relatively easy to nip in the bud with a brief addition to claude.md
- asdfasgasdgasdg 2mo agoI know this is not "as designed," but I kind of like it? Because, as long as it stays this way, it's still at least possible to tell if a human wrote something. Like, I know it's not much, but it gives you the ability to classify information as human generated or machine generated. Machine generated information may not be useless but it is different and IMO needs to be treated with a different level of skepticism. Not that you can simply trust human writing but it seems like the type of people who would publish machine writing have a different distribution of motives than those who would publish human writing. I do think they're gonna figure out how to fix it at some point. :(
- sentientsergio 1mo agoWrite about the importance of style, diction and tone - without writing about the importance of style, diction and tone (is the followup prompt I think is appropriate)