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All these "intelligence" benchmarks miss something extremely important when using an LLM in a code-agent harness: How it communicates with you about what it did
by d4rkp4ttern 1mo ago
All these "intelligence" benchmarks miss something extremely important when using an LLM in a code-agent harness: How it communicates with you about what it did.
Opus-5 is practically unusable (for complex tasks) in this sense - its updates are voluminous, and dense with cryptic language (there are numerous reddit threads complaining about this, so it's not just me). I often have to ask it to re-state concisely in plain terms.
For a fairly gnarly task, after fighting with with Claude-Code + Opus-5, I ported my session to Codex + GPT-5.6-sol, and it was like a breath of fresh air.
Arguably a key aspect of intelligence is concise, clear communication, and current benchmarks miss that, at least as far as I'm aware. I would think some arena-type benchmarks where humans rate responses would measure this, though I'm not sure which those are.
- moffkalast 1mo agoDamn I thought it was my extra instructions, I swear everything it writes is in some shorthand with direct references to variables that literally nobody could figure out unless you literally just wrote that code 5 minutes ago. I had it stop writing comments altogether cause it was always four lines of complete and utter nonsense, and it doesn't even obey that rule half the time. Despite doing an extensive back and forth to make a complete plan, 5 seconds into the implementation it changes its mind and makes another assumption, adding some extra thing that tends to break the entire approach and needs follow-ups to repair or cleanup. Instruction following is basically non-existent compared to Fable, it just does whatever the fuck it wants.
- fearmerchant 1mo agoEverything is load-bearing with 3 measured blockers.
- pixelready 1mo agoDon’t forget the smoking guns! I think these new models have been reading too many Agatha Christie novels.
- jiggawatts 1mo agoGPT 5.6 has similar language quirks that makes its comments nearly unusable. I wonder if this is a side effect of MoE models — they can write excellent prose, but not simultaneously with writing code.
- notfromhere 1mo agoI think it’s just where they focused RLHF resources. The models have generally only gotten worse at writing. And writing doesn’t have validators like code so you can’t really scale it in the same way
- chpatrick 1mo agoIs that what it feels like when the models get smarter than us?
- micw 1mo agoGuess that's the exact point of the "intelligence" benchmarks
- gpt5 1mo agoA smarter model would know how to communicate with you correctly, and not just throw jargon it has just invented at you without explaining it.
- IanCal 1mo agos/model/engineer
- chpatrick 1mo agoBut if you have two experts in a field talking to each other you wouldn't expect them to dumb down their communication.
- riknos314 1mo agoEffective jargon usage is understood by the target audience. If the AI is communicating to me and can't select the appropriate jargon level, it's failing at communicating effectively.
- chpatrick 1mo agoOr you're below its level.
- fuck_google 1mo ago[dead]
- 1mo ago
- satvikpendem 1mo agoEh I don't know, I care whether it gets the job done and I can see the difference when I review the code, not how well it needs to explain the code to me, I can just read it myself.
- veber-alex 1mo agoIt takes 2 minutes to fix Opus 5 https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
- veber-alex 1mo agolol. I am being downvoted for trying to help people out. This community is pure trash.
- HDBaseT 1mo agoInstead, you should say something like: "You can adjust the output style in your '.claude/settings.local.json' file". OR "You can decrease verbosity by doing x, y and z."
- km144 1mo agoWhat output style have you found to actually fix Opus 5's grating prose then? I find it leans hard into its preferred grammatical structures and rote sayings no matter what I include in the output style.
- octoberfranklin 1mo ago> and dense with cryptic language Yeah if you ask it a medical question, it answers in that impenetrable jargony style that clinical journals use... full of unnecessarily custom adjectives ("orthopedic" instead of "of the bone") and discipline-specific terms (anterior, distal) even when the user didn't display mastry of this terminology (hint to frontier labs: add training cases for this; it will improve your model's usability). My theory is that LLMs perceive the writing styles of various fields as being like different (but related) languages, and they're inclined to answer a question in the language of its source material unless specifically asked otherwise. If you add "ELI5" the model treats it as a question plus a translation task. I think this is why programming questions are answered with an exaggerated cringey form of HN-speak ("load bearing", "gate" as a verb, "dissolves") by some models.
- plaguuuuuu 1mo agoit's like asking a developer to explain something. I always get Haiku to rephrase anything human-facing.