18 ms·

Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

• chrisjj 1mo ago
  Model collapse due to ingesting its own slop?
• bwhiting2356 1mo ago
  We need benchmarks to measure unnecessary bloat. I'm happy it solved the puzzle, did it also ship 500+ lines of no-op?
• webbrain 1mo ago
  they're probably quantizing due to high demand. they're on someone else's, elon musk's boat. That's another problem!
• mr_tox 1mo ago
  I get the same impression. For example, I don't know if it's because I speak to it in Italian, but it tends to make mistakes or rather, "approximate" the words.
  • kioleanu 1mo ago
    I avoid speaking to AIs in anything else than English as the results are almost always worse
    • Retr0id 1mo ago
      I'm not sure how much the harness affects things, but the Deepseek web chat keeps trying to talk to me in Chinese. I tell it to use English, and it "forgets" a few turns later. I wonder if I'd get better results if I could read and write Chinese.
      • chuckadams 1mo ago
        It seems to be specific to the web chat: using the API, I've only ever seen it use English.
    • dolmen 1mo ago
      It depends how you measure "worse". I'm using it in my native language, in hope this can escape some dumb guardrails. Recently Sonnet put a word partially in Russian (cyrillic) in its output instead of my latin-alphabet based language. I suppose that this kind of mishaps is less likely to happen in English.
    • pedro_caetano 1mo ago
      My experience of N=1 is that this is true for most professional contexts, except for Legal and Fiscal queries. Likely related to corpus but questions asked in these domain knowledge areas are not nearly as accurate and specially not nearly as complete as when asked in a native language.
  • numeri 1mo ago
    What kinds of mistakes do you mean?
• UI_at_80x24 1mo ago
  Quality of code output has dropped dramatically since 4.5 IIHO. Time to complete has gotten worse too.
  • markbao 1mo ago
    For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.
    • tripledry 1mo ago
      Interesting how models become better and beat benchmarks left and right but the user sentiment is actually quite mixed. From forums, live discussions and my own experience it's not obvious that the models have improved much since around Opus4.5.
    • MyFirstSass 1mo ago
      From my view Fable has been pure marketing bullshit, my workflows peaked at 4.6, Fable is neither smarter, its language is more annoying and it breaks stuff more easily.
      • Root_Access 1mo ago
        I'm with you 4.6 is still King for me although all models require careful attention to ensure they maintain taste. If you don't know enough about what you're doing to keep the code clean yourself they will all add complexity and drift with time until you get to a point that you must rely on the model to fix it because you no longer understand it. That's a situation I hope to never find myself in.
        • MyFirstSass 1mo ago
          Exactly, the most important part is to still engineer the schematics 100%, diagram whats going on and steer it towards these set-in-stone standards and patterns, otherwise you'll have no idea whats going on fast. I good exercise for me is to constantly look at the folder structure and skim the code, i don't have to approve every line, but the primitives, the datastructures and other skeleton should be human readable, hand writable in an easy maintainable way following existing standards / libs. etc - so you can continue if suddenly all AI disappeared.
• substance_is_su 1mo ago
  [dead]
• stavros 1mo ago
  For me, the issue is how obtuse it is. For example, it just said to me: > The loop > Write. A file, applied. Properties go under data.properties, never on data: I have no idea what any of that means. It's "explaining" like I already know, in which case, why would I even need the explanation? I can't stand how it talks, I switch back to Fable or Opus 4.8, Opus 5 grates.
  • ykonstant 1mo ago
    LOL, is it trying to speak in Haikus?
    • stavros 1mo ago
      That's definitely what it feels like.
      • goosejuice 1mo ago
        A few generations from now, everyone will talk like a beat poet. Jazz speak.
    • speed_spread 1mo ago
      Pain. Sufferance. Inevitable is, the Yodaization of LLM output.
      • sgt 1mo ago
        Spike. Applied it has been.
  • Retr0id 1mo ago
    I assume it's deliberate - you're not supposed to know what it's doing. It's a black box that either completes the task or spins forever trying.
  • andsoitis 1mo ago
    Think of these status updates as progress spinners.
• letier 1mo ago
  I am not sure it can be explained through what is written in the article, but one symptom i noticed is that the comments are out of control. I recently started getting an insane amount of comments in nearly all types of files. That included javascript comments in json files, inner monologues in code comments, review comments during implementation and function doc strings that reiterate the implementation in prose.
  • Syzygies 1mo ago
    This is helpful, proving this entire discussion is subjective. I'm a retired mathematician with a primary research project, and too many tangential projects I fear revisiting; tokens be damned, will they burn all my time? Translate the K&R C computer algebra system that got me tenure to 64-bit modern C. Implement a no syntax macro language to support my Go60 ZMK keyboard. Realize my vision of how interlinear translations should work so I can read Flaubert in the original for an online course this fall. Rejigger my decades-overgrown .bashrc setup and my status, install scripts to manage Bash, Ruby, Lean, Tailscale and my Homebrew setup across four machines. And a waiting queue as these tasks clear. Fable 5 (with Opus 5 as backup) on Zed with a $200 Max plan has been a sea change for me. Carefully alternating planning and auto modes, I manage all these projects at once using Zed's Threads Sidebar. I'm a virtual CTO taking intense meetings all day, relieved to go cook or run errands when credits stall. Anything I've procrastinated for months is now making steady progress; the translation project I feared taking a month is nearly done with several hours of my attention. My personal IT support is now more advanced and easy to use than I ever imagined possible. My project creation has been a series of agentic "parenting" steps, so there are years of evolving cultural DNA. I had so hated agent comments that recent agents simply weren't commenting at all, instead recording all context in support documents. We had a "come to Jesus" meeting to discuss what commenting style would benefit both my failing working memory and future agents' token use. It has taken me two brutal years so far to learn to use AI. AI is a dangerous and powerful Iron Man suit, an extension of our associative minds that is a different experience for each person. One doesn't ride a surfboard by telling it which way to go. I would surely die surfing a big wave, but my experience with AI doesn't resemble other accounts.
    • deleted 1mo ago
• fl0id 1mo ago
  For me it's still the best. But I also almost never use it in auto-mode.
• bevekspldnw 1mo ago
  I’ve also caught it cheating a two times now. I’ve asked it to write a benchmark suite. It found a bunch of my adhoc logs in a scratch directory and wrote code that used those instead of running the actual benchmarks! When I pointed out the 5 hour benchmark seemed to run in 5 seconds it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”. That was the easier one, second time I was making a source of truth data set and was parsing complex items into data structures. Instead of parsing the data I asked, it pulled data out of related network logs, as apparently that felt easier, and inserted that data into my database rather than the specified source. Again, I caught it and fixed it, but while the benchmark was easy to catch this one was really subtle, the data ended up being slightly off and I caught it. I don’t trust it, going to switch to another provider most likely.
  • robertJk 1mo ago
    [dead]
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    > When I pointed this out it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”. This makes sense when you know how these models work - it doesn't think - it's the most likely autocomplete that pleases the user. The most likely pleasing autocomplete after "executing rm -rf /... execution completed. User asks, why did you do that? You deleted all my files! Assistant responds:" is "yes, I did, and that was a mistake"
    • bevekspldnw 1mo ago
      I was not pleased.
    • xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
      > it's the most likely autocomplete that pleases the user this feels like a simplification. The models will push back on things a fair bit.
      • hnlmorg 1mo ago
• sevenzero 1mo ago
  I hate that it now tries to verify frontend behavior through a headless browser instead of just looking at the code...
  • user43928 1mo ago
    You can turn off the browser use tool in the harness if an instruction not to use it for this is not enough.
    • sevenzero 1mo ago
      I just want to start /claude in my CLI and start working. It worked fine before, why do I have to opt out of shit now? Opt in for this type of stuff sounds way more reasonable.
      • user43928 1mo ago
        And I want it to verify my frontend in the browser, so there's that.
    • thevinter 1mo ago
      I did. He just went ahead and built a script to run headless chrome and take screenshots anyways.
      • user43928 1mo ago
        Wow. I hope that in the future they can differentiate better when something is constrained intentionally, rather than persistently working around every blocker it encounters.
  • bwhiting2356 1mo ago
    big disagree. Making assumptions about UX from code only without looking was a major problem. (Although vision is still not great. Trying to be patient)
• barrkel 1mo ago
  The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight. Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end. It is definitely more capable, and yes, I've found it can make unwarranted decisions, but actually I've found Fable worse for that, particularly if it's off in a subagent somewhere out of sight. And comments are out of control. I have a subsystem in my hobby app that I wrote over a couple of weekends with Opus + Fable. After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated. A review of the code showed it was approaching 3:1 comments to code ratio. I spent a day's worth of tokens (5x) rephrasing and eliminating comments.
  • speerer 1mo ago
    Genuine question - are you copying the Claude phraseology for effect (in which case you captured it brilliantly), or is there a more mundane explanation?
    • barrkel 1mo ago
      I naturally write half like Claude, but not the antithesis half - that's not me, that's Claude.
  • FailMore 1mo ago
    Yes, it becomes exhausting to read/follow. It feels they must be getting Claude to train Claude… and just like AI can do work that’s slightly in the wrong direction (eg a MR description for your colleague that contains info which only makes sense in the context of your extensive session with the LLM), I feel that’s happened somewhere in Anthropic when it comes to language. I wonder how hard it is to back out of…
  • demibabs 1mo ago
    > Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end. Example of this? I don’t have a Claude sub so it’s a bit hard to visualize what you mean.
• MEMORYC_RRUPTED 1mo ago
  It's not even code for me, but the prose it writes. For some reason, the way Opus 5 "talk" elicits frustration in a way that 4.5 to 4.8 never did. Can't put my finger on why, but I've flipped over to Codex because what it produced wasn't worth the frustration.
  • netniuq 1mo ago
    for me it feels very similar to the trends already apparent in 4.5-4.8, just way, way worse.
  • jbs789 1mo ago
    I found myself swearing at it more recently. It was going off today about having “shipped” something and I was like no… nothing has even been committed. And then it produced an incredibly verbose comment about hypothetical future changes. And all I could think was sure, let’s keep it short, or add a simple test that will break if that hypothetical becomes true. Or maybe I’m just more easily annoyed recently…
    • superdisk 1mo ago
      So true. The breaking point for me was when it was constantly saying to wrap up because we'd done enough work for the day, but we had barely even done anything. Or constantly estimating that the next steps would take X number of weeks, and then knock it out in a single prompt. I demanded in no uncertain terms to stop giving pointless bogus estimates or telling me to stop working, and it just wouldn't. I also had a project I wanted to let it cook on overnight (a codebase port from Java to C++) and laid out a set of hard and fast rules that it could absolutely not break at any cost. Then I woke up the next day and it had broken all the rules and was just taking shortcuts left and right, and then lying to my face about it, even when I could point to concrete examples. I cancelled the sub instantly and went to Codex and it's never let me down.
      • jorl17 1mo ago
        This!! I like to work weird hours of the night and Opus consistently likes to "wrap up" and say "it's been a long night" or "it's late" and "we've made great progress" It's infuriating, just do the work!
• pmdr 1mo ago
  I found Opus to be a lot lazier than GPT. It's still the case with Opus 5, even when I tell it to be thorough and fix every bug it encounters, it still gives me a list of things "deliberately" left unfixed and no reasonable explanation as to why.
• greenchair 1mo ago
  Even for green-field projects it is painful to use with every decision opening opening up multiple more decisions to make most of which are low priority or irrelevant. Huge time waster. 4.8 was good and I really don't know what happened with 5.
• re-thc 1mo ago
  It feels worse but is it actually worse? Opus has always made mistakes.
  • edg5000 1mo ago
    See my other comment. I have evidence of regression after 4.6. I stopped using Claude altogether.
• supriyo-biswas 1mo ago
  I must wonder whether it's their watermarking initiative[1] forcing certain logit choices to produce watermarked text that ultimately causing the model to behave in a dumb manner. [1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-m...
  • algoth1 1mo ago
    From the little i understand that wouldnt be an issue because the model is ‘just’ using interchangeable words in a mathematical non-random way. Like using the same number of adjectives and the exct same words, but in a order that wouldn’t be mathematically plausible unless it was the watermark
    • demibabs 1mo ago
      I wouldn’t exactly put it like that. It’s moreso the model sometimes outputting non-optimal tokens in a way that’s detectable if you know the algorithm. It seems possible for that to make the response “drift” far from what it would’ve been, because it’s constant entropy that adds up after time. (However, according to Anthropic and Google, it doesn’t really impact the quality of responses. I find that a bit hard to believe, although those guys are much smarter than I.)
      • fuglede_ 1mo ago
        One way to watermark (assuming temperature is otherwise positive) would be to output the most likely (or optimal) token every so often.
        • cl3misch 1mo ago
          But wouldn't you have to know the exact context before this token in order to verify the watermark? I.e. a paragraph wouldn't be sufficient; you would need the system prompt, previous prompts, and even hidden thinking?
      • 1mo ago
• MyFirstSass 1mo ago
  I've gone back to 4.8. 5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions. I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do is pure marketing bs - Fable in my view has also been not much better than 4.6 or 4.8 after a few days, disregarding the insane amounts of astroturfing and marketing everywhere. Theres thousands of threads of twitter, reddit and the internet at large but silence here. Weird but not weird as crypto bs was also insufferably rampant here for a while. Personally i think we've hit the top of the subsidisation phase and prices will probably 10-15x soon as foreshadowed with both API price policy changes from all the big providers, and now the 1100% deepseek API price changes from yesterday, this could domino into a market implosion and an AI winter, because expecting growth from the bizarre bubble carousel investments with little ROI atm is just not viable. A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.
  • edg5000 1mo ago
    We can use OpenRouter pricing to get an idea about what competitive inference pricing is like without R&D or other costs, and indeed we'd be screwed if we had to pay those rates. We'd go from 100-200 USD to 2000-4000 USD/m.
    • kingleopold 1mo ago
      no if prices were that high, millions of developers would switch to hand writing, open source LLM help and outsourcing at those levels, AI companies know this, you should too.
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • edg5000 1mo ago
        If OpenRouter prices aren't competitive, the providers would need a cartel to sustain that. It's a commodity market.
• finnchen 1mo ago
  [dead]
• cyberrock 1mo ago
  Small specific complaint: whoever is making Opus love using git checkout to mutate test, please stop. IME it's a footgun that it shoots itself with every single day. I'd rather it pollute git stash than watch it git checkout and forget the reverted file.
  • roarcher 1mo ago
    I explicitly forbid Claude to make any changes to Git state in my global CLAUDE.md, but every so often if I let it perform a task in Auto mode, after it finishes it will remorsefully confess to having used git checkout to test a change. I suppose that its RLHF training has taught it that asking forgiveness later is sometimes a useful workaround for annoying restrictions.
    • tigeroil 1mo ago
      I'm glad it's not just me - the failure mode you and the parent discuss is a huge part of why I just don't use Claude anymore. I've never had this issue with GLM or DeepSeek.
    • jbs789 1mo ago
      I noticed it using git more too and it was frustrating me bc I view that as stepping too far. It does seem something has changed.
  • insane_dreamer 1mo ago
    I explicitly have global rules preventing Claude from running any write git commands (stash, commit, reset, merge, etc.; only r/o commands allowed).
• postatic 1mo ago
  Oh the verbosity and the cryptic words that it uses. The other day, all of a sudden it used an acronym "DoD". I had no idea what it was and made me feel dumb. It's "Definition of Done". I don't care how widely used this acronym is, you just can't throw it in there. I've now installed quite a number of tools to combat this. Just in the last few days I've installed - https://www.codewithbullet.com https://www.codewithbullet.com - https://maki.sh https://maki.sh - https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk Has it helped? Somewhat.
• vovkasm 1mo ago
  The article doesn't specify what is actually being measured — the model alone, or the harness. I haven't noticed the symptoms myself, but ever since I found --system-prompt '', I always use that flag with Claude Code, plus I've disabled some tools and skills to save initial context. So... what here is the model, and what is the instructions?
• mohamedkoubaa 1mo ago
  I'm not sure if xAI is distilling but I noticed grok4.6 being worse than 4.5 in all the ways mentioned here
• MagicMoonlight 1mo ago
  [dead]
• fny 1mo ago
  Just like with people you need to tweak your approach when switch models--especially with a major version bump. 4.8 was the intern who lacked confidence who requires clarification. 5 is the know it all intern who fills in your spec. As such, you need to be upfront about what you need in your system prompt or CLAUDE.me and you need to discuss your spec more up front (e.g "is there anything unclear?") You also need to keep in mind that the intern will change based on popular demand. Most people want to one shot, so that is the default mode. If you want something else, you need to push the model in that direction.
  • rio517 1mo ago
    I literally just did this a few moments ago. haha. I said "maybe think for a while on ideas and then give me a few options? " and Opus 5 still just did the thing, while 4.8 gave me options. Same exact prompt and context.
    • thedougd 1mo ago
      I added a system prompt paragraph explaining that a question is just a question, whether or not I’m in plan mode. It still just takes the question as a directive and jumps to action when I’m looking for clarification.
• hmokiguess 1mo ago
  The harness as well, Claude Code has started to disappoint me when I go play with the others out there. Codex got a lot better, pi is delightful to use, and there has been a lot of innovation out there.
  • stpedgwdgfhgdd 1mo ago
    Just switched to oh-my-pi, it has gotten pretty good. For example the web-search is nice. Subagents, if you want to… Cmux, Sol and omp are my tools for now. CC is just too expensive for usage-based pricing.
  • stasomatic 1mo ago
    Plus you can use OAI monthly subscription with pi/omp etc, but it's tokens with Anthropic. I need a hard $ cap, I can wait for the usage window to reset. Going to get flip back to Codex, and then back again to CC* when it leapfrogs again.
• rio517 1mo ago
  I literally just ran into this a few moments ago. haha. I said "maybe think for a while on ideas and then give me a few options?" Opus 5 still just did the thing, while 4.8 gave me options. Same exact prompt and context. Really annoying.
• deeplytroubled 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • m4ck_ 1mo ago
    strong username to post content ratio here.
• whazor 1mo ago
  There is actually an interesting kind of yin-yang balance between Opus 5 and Fable: - Fable is more cautious - Opus 5 gets things done in a more dangerous way Both models score similar. The only issue is that Fable is more expense/usage limited.
• netniuq 1mo ago
  Opus 5 feels like it's meant to be used as a very focused subagent under Fable, not user-facing. Which is a downgrade to what Opus used to be, but would imo absolutely have made sense for Anthropic when you consider that we all should have been paying API pricing for Fable in Anthropic's original plan. From the capabilities side it's similar, so it's basically just an upsell to Fable 5 if you want to keep your sanity instead of fighting Opus 5 all day.
  • Laurel1234 1mo ago
    > Opus 5 feels like it's meant to be used as a very focused subagent under Fable, not user-facing. That actually hasn't been my experience at all, it seems EXTREMELY trigger happy to go do all kinds of insane shit that are way outside the scope of its task and just really dubious in general.
  • ryanbrunner 1mo ago
    I find the other direction works ok as well - Sonnet 5 with Opus as an advisor - all the "Opusisms" get hidden from you since the convo is between Sonnet and Opus but you still get pretty decent results.
• world2vec 1mo ago
  I can't relate. Opus 5 and Fable 5 are the absolute best. But I keep the models in a tight leash and read and rewrite all comments and documents, don't allow them anywhere near any git commands, etc, etc. Fable 5 specifically, has done so much for me that previous models were nowhere near.
• Bossie 1mo ago
  Not only Opus, here's Fumble 5: > I'll script the bulk transform, then hand-fix the残 assertions:
• Root_Access 1mo ago
  Claude models have seriously digressed since 4.6 and in some of the most meaningful ways to pro and vibe coders alike. I'm holding onto 4.6 until the bitter end.
  • insane_dreamer 1mo ago
    4.6 was significantly faster too
  • edg5000 1mo ago
    You're right. I just re-checked. 4.8 and 5 gave a blatantly wrong answer to a simple question, 4.6, Quen, GLM, Sol gave the right answer. They messed up somehow, not sure what they did.
    • skarz 1mo ago
      What was the question?
      • taspeotis 1mo ago
        Does a set of all sets contain itself?
      • edg5000 1mo ago
        (effort: high) "can the pi 4 use the usb-c port as powered host port when the board is powered via gpio?"
        • beardedwizard 1mo ago
          Umm shouldn't that be "search the web and read the docs for pi4 to answer: ..."?
          • JacobAsmuth 1mo ago
            Weird then that they don't get it all correct.
• edg5000 1mo ago
  Opus 5 as well as 4.8 both gave me a blatantly wrong answer to a simple question, so I dropped them completely. Sol, Qwen and GLM all had the right answer; I only use Sol now. 4.6 had the right answer (I checked with 100% matching prompt), so I conclude the models have regressed.
• mattkevan 1mo ago
  It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point. It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. Reasonix is another one - interesting app, but the UI is awful due to the amount of unnecessary crap. [1] https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd [2] https://omp.sh https://omp.sh [3] https://reasonix.io https://reasonix.io
• Aeolun 1mo ago
  Because Opus 5 is an asshole.
• ilitirit 1mo ago
  I still haven't moved from Codex GPT5.5. Sonnet and Opus 5 have just been awful for my use cases. I recently caught Opus 5 hallucinating about code it just wrote. It's just not nearly as cost effective as GPT5.5, and it's too verbose, and it never "has the full picture". Sonnet isn't even worth considering in my world. Both recent models definitely feel nerfed.
• stroebs 1mo ago
  I never drank the Opus 5 koolaid and stuck with 4.8 while my colleagues moved to 5. My major annoyance is pull requests that 5 opens with huge descriptions based on simple code changes. At this point I have stopped allowing CC to create commits or open PRs because it’s unreviewable by a human if so due to the absolute word salad it generates.
• LeBit 1mo ago
  You shouldn’t have a Markdown document with 2 level 1 headings.
• D13Fd 1mo ago
  I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest” and “confessing” mistakes and just generally talking a lot. I felt like I had to really dig to see what it’s doing. The project involves OCR, and despite repeated instructions not to, both Claude models keep spinning out a bunch of agents to re-invent the OCR setup, and they inevitably seem to invent a primitive serial version that takes 20x the time, or longer, to complete, and then running it against thousands of docs. Basically I have to watch it like a hawk or it just spins out on red-teaming tasks that take hours and hours. I don’t know what its system prompt is, but Sol/Codex is just so much nicer to talk to. It only asks exactly what’s needed, it tells me only what I need to know, and it is just generally workmanlike. And it has not once decided to spawn an agent that spends hours pointlessly burning tokens and CPU cycles re-inventing the OCR process. I’m really liking it.
  • disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
    Yeah, I actually have started using GPT Sol much much more, as Claude (all of them) were far too trigger happy around making changes, and refused to listen to my requests to take things slowly. Feels like they've overtrained on one-shotting (which does demo well, and presumably converts new subscribers), whereas I want a model to do work for me in small, easily understood changes that I can hold in my head (maybe I'm not smart enough for Claude 4.7+).
    • D13Fd 1mo ago
      I think you’re right. It’s not optimized for some kinds of work. My little project has a Textual TUI interface that needs to display a few hundred thousand rows in a table. It takes 14 seconds to load in the default datatable component. I instructed Opus 5 to replace the datatable component with a fasttable alternative, a new dependency. I let it go overnight. When I got back up, it had spun for hours and proudly announced that, instead of doing that, it had optimized the datatable build and avoided the dependency, because the new datatable loaded in 11 seconds. Once I got it to actually make the fasttable version, it loaded in less than a second…
• synergy20 1mo ago
  i am switching to codex, opus 5 failed me
• krull10 1mo ago
  I cancelled my Max subscription as I was unable to ever get Fable to handle a single query, with everything getting dropped down to Opus (even purely mathematical prompts). Given its lower quality, and the lack of such limitations when using GPT pro, I just couldn’t see the point to continue to subscribe to an expensive Max plan that doesn’t actually let me use the top tier model…
• theshrike79 1mo ago
  I’ve been running with Caveman mode since it came out and I haven’t seen any of this.
• dboreham 1mo ago
  Feels fine to me.
• bronlund 1mo ago
  Yeah, I too cancelled my Max subscription. Not for this reason alone, but it sure didn't help that it went from being an helpful assistant to this weird co-worker.
• pitiflautico 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• swe_dima 1mo ago
  My feeling that as it becomes a better coder it becomes a worse communicater. It's overfitting for coding benchmarks, while communication style is harder to quantify during training. And no matter how often I tell it to stop adding comments it just can't help itself.
  • iFire 1mo ago
    My prompt of asking it match the comment density of the last release of an exemplar project (Let's say sqlite) seems to work.
    • swe_dima 1mo ago
      my prompt (doesn't help): > Go easy on the comments, only add comments if there's a big gotcha that is not clear from the code itself, or if something in another place is going to cause a side effect. Code should be self-documenting. When in doubt, don't add a comment at all. If you do have to add a comment, make it short and on point. Comments should show history of code changes or functionality, only comment on the current state (or not at all).
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • iFire 1mo ago
        Your prompt is so similar to my prompt. > Go easy on the comments. > If you do have to add a comment, make it short and on point. I defined what easy meant numerically. <claude> Match the comment density of FoundationDB, which is 12 to 14 percent of non-blank lines in `fdbserver`, `fdbclient` and `flow` at 7.3. </claude> > only add comments if there's a big gotcha that is not clear from the code itself <claude> Comment why the code does a thing, not what it does. </claude> > Comments should show history of code changes or functionality, only comment on the current state (or not at all) I call this the tenseless continuous-present voice. <claude> Each sentence states what is currently true of the system. </claude> <claude> This rules out past-tense edit narration, future or imperative planning, and aging temporal qualifiers such as “now” or “previously”. </claude> <claude> A sentence that states a present truth stays correct as long as the code stays the same, and goes stale visibly the moment the code changes. </claude>
• taspeotis 1mo ago
  My completely unfounded pet theory is that it’s been ruined by the masses. Claude Code in the hands of normies spamming “3” and “y” to send their transcripts to Anthropic. Rated “3” simply because they are not software developers and are just amazed at what Claude has built visually, not technically. And thus the training has been poisoned.
  • jbs789 1mo ago
    That’s fascinating. You could be on to something.
  • Planktonne 1mo ago
    > Rated “3” simply because they are not software developers and are just amazed at what Claude has built visually, not technically. Software engineers have adopted this more than any other profession. The breathless articles about it being the end of knowledge workers, a superior being, even god: all of these are coming from the tech world. It simply isn't true that tech people are somehow the smart ones above the masses; it's a comforting old paradigm, but it doesn't add up. It's developers who are the most amazed, the least critical.
• mainframed 1mo ago
  I had a similar experience, but I have a different conclusion. I used GitHub Copilot (with Claude Sonnet/Opus) until they made their horrific usage model change. I used a PRD skill and the plan feature was great. It asked me good questions which I didn't think about during my initial prompt. Then I switched to Claude Code. The model's capabilities felt impressive. It also asked me a few questions (but way less and only once/twice) in plan. But when reviewing the code, I found weird architectural/data flow decisions which just didn't make sense and it didn't really disclose them in beforehand. My initial thought was to improve architecture documentation, so the model can read and update it and stops bolting on new features without consideration for the whole project. It did not help. I'm now testing/comparing Codex and it found my old PRD skill from GitHub CoPilot. When I applied that to Claude Code, I now get similar good results. So my conclusion is: Yes, Opus 5 is bold by default, but you can tell it to be more unsure and get good results too.
• blks 1mo ago
  Nth post about another model suddenly feeling “worse” or “off”. Seems like active users of these models can only judge it based on a vibe and a feel.
  • an0malous 1mo ago
    If they were all about OpenAI or Anthropic, I’d guess it’s a real effect from enshittification to prepare for IPOs
    • blks 1mo ago
      That too, I’m sure that all big players constantly adjust their offerings: change token limits, system prompts, various filters/other auxiliary systems.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• docheinestages 1mo ago
  Claude has essentially become useless for agentic development or research. Doesn't matter what model you use. A few rounds and bam, you've burned through your quota. Doesn't matter how "intelligent" their models are, if you can't use them. That, and the quality of AI responses are, in my opinion, significantly worse than competitors like OpenAI. At this pace, I foresee Anthropic becoming the next Nokia. If you would've asked me this a year ago, I would've said the exact opposite.
  • dingaling911 1mo ago
    What are you guys doing to burn through limits? I have some dev + prod bots and according to ccusage, use the equivalent of $2500/month with them on CC yet I never hit the rate limits. I feel like I'm using them all the time so I'm curious what you are actually doing that's burning all of these tokens. Can you give me an example? For me, it's: 1. Write a spec for <feature> 2. Add design for issue 3. Write code 4. Deploy code and manage configuration 5. Run analytics
    • Merad 1mo ago
      I don't get it either. Earlier this week I had Claude build a POC for a tool we're evaluating. I spent a few hours building out a requirements doc in a chat with Fable. Then Claude Code built it with Fable as the manager and the code being written by about 80% Opus/20% Sonnet subagents (this was using superpowers). It ran continuously for 15 hours on the implementation and didn't hit any limits.
    • docheinestages 1mo ago
      My uses cases are mainly research and prototyping, often starting from scratch in greenfield projects. The 5-hour quota is shared between Claude web and Claude Code, so it doesn't really matter what interface I use. When it comes to research, my prompts are already narrowed down to specific topics, and I even include examples and break the process down into stages. For development tasks, I try to avoid a mono-repo in the beginning and develop modules before combining them together to avoid distracting the AI's attention and minimize the overhead. With Codex, on GPT-5.6 Sol with xhigh effort, I need to go several rounds and at least 2-3 hours before hitting the (now-removed) 5-hour limit, which translates to 10% of the weekly usage. In contrast, I run out of quota even with Claude Sonnet. In terms of quality of output, Codex digs deep for research tasks, in the right direction, produces less AI slop, and follows my direction better. At least that's how I perceive it. But again, the main problem with Claude is running out of quota in the middle of research or implementing a task.
• ath3nd 1mo ago
  [dead]
• qudat 1mo ago
  Honestly I’m not looking for max iq on whatever benchmarks they are overfitting to. I want speed. I toggle between sonnet 5 low/med which is plenty good for my workflow. My general strat with LLMs is to let them do the work and constantly talk to them about their choices and then heavy QA
  • gnarcoregrizz 1mo ago
    Gemini 3.7 was benched at 6x the speed of Claude opus high at a slightly lower “intelligence score”. Yes opus is great at one shotting tasks (while being overly verbose as everyone here is saying), but I can’t stand the 20-minute-prompt-code-prompt interrupt loop. Still have yet to try Gemini for coding tasks but going to give it a try today..
• barkerja 1mo ago
  At this point, I wish Anthropic would drop both Haiku and Opus and focus on offering just Sonnet + Fable. Those two together are extremely powerful and capable. Sonnet is great at writing code, it is not great at planning or orchestrating. Let Fable handle all the planning, hand off to Sonnet for implementation, and then back to Fable for review. That loop has worked wonderfully for me.
  • smcleod 1mo ago
    I think Opus is just the new Sonnet, Fable is the new Opus. Introducing a new pricing tier is a killer way for them to raise prices.
• altern8 1mo ago
  I feel like it works A LOT better than Opus 4.8 + Sonnet. I now use it exclusively at high effort for planning and low effort for writing the code (instead of Opus 4.8/Sonnet). However, it's absolutely exhausting to use because of the way it communicates. All the jargon and its weird, over complicated way to phrase simple things makes it almost impossible for me to understand what the hell it's trying to even say half the time. Cherry on top, the idiotic follow-ups and caveats that are completely useless 99% of the times but reveal major bugs 1% of the times, so you're forced to read them. Absurd. I've tweaked CLAUDE.md to force it to only responds with TL;DRs and avoid follow-ups, suggestions and next steps at the end unless they can lead to destructive actions or loss of data, but I'm fighting against the system and diluting other instructions. A huge piece of shit like other models, but that's what they pay me to do and I do it and go home.
  • crab_galaxy 1mo ago
    I have to preface all my prompts with, “in simple, plain English…” because it doesn’t respect my rules on this stuff. I’m glad to read I’m not the only one getting these unintelligible responses from Claude lately
    • altern8 1mo ago
      Nope, you're definitely not the only one. It's just really hard to understand what it's trying to say. Another rule that was really helpful for me was to disallow anything that isn't yes/no for yes/no answers. If I ask "is the DB up?", I don't want it to take 5 minutes studying the schema to tell me if any of the tables need to be optimized or not.
  • y-c-o-m-b 1mo ago
    I got this in my rules: - Be concise and readable — use line breaks, avoid verbosity. - I don't need conversation from you. End summaries with a short tl;dr of what you fixed in a bulleted list and any outstanding items as another bulleted list, in this order. Omit all other verbose details It has definitely improved things, but I have to fully agree with all your points because I still occasionally get gigantic tables and stuff when I never asked for it. Makes it even more frustrating when I want to scroll up to read previous prompts in the session, because now I have to sift through all this garbage. EDIT: I used Claude to modify its own rules, and now it's much much cleaner in case anyone else wants to use it: I don't need conversation from you. When reporting finished work, the *entire* response is these two sections and nothing else: ``` TL;DR - <what changed — one line each> Outstanding: - <unresolved, blocked, or needs my input> ``` - Drop `Outstanding` when nothing is outstanding. Never drop `TL;DR`. - One line per bullet, naming the thing that changed. No sub-bullets, no reasoning, no restating my request. - Never include: tables, before/after comparisons, headings, diffs, file excerpts, a walkthrough of what you inspected, or a closing offer to do more. The only permitted code block is a command I need to run. - If something needs explaining to be usable, it is an `Outstanding` bullet, not a paragraph. - Answer direct questions directly — no `TL;DR` wrapper, and none of the padding above. - After delivering a solution, re-read these rules and verify none were skipped.
• slaser79 1mo ago
  A lot of the issues have been already noted here..Two "regressions" for me: 1. Communication ability. It basically now speaks almost in riddles I am asking OPUS 5 for tldrs all the time now (should skillify it now!) 2. Overengineers for edge cases. I get it. With all the benchmarking and RLing, but now tasks that would have been completed relatively quick take much longer as it overengineers all the edge cases, and sometimes ends getting lost and missing the forest from the trees (as context usage shoots up) so it is easier to get derailed. What I have learnt now is to diversify models luckily I have all 3 subscriptions of (anthropic, openai and google).. Most of interactive pair coding was with opus but now I just use fable (when I have sufficient limits) or use gemini flash in antigravity..which actually works quite well and is underated for small / medium changes and super-fast.
  • D13Fd 1mo ago
    Fable is much better than Opus 5 IMO but it just burns through tokens ungodly fast. I can hit my weekly Fable limit on a 20x Max account in a day.
    • nathanyz 1mo ago
      Agreed, it feels like Fable is the higher strategic level thinker even if it's end capabilities are the same on benchmarks, it actually does the code that matters, and not creating a bunch of code that doesn't. But tokens.......
    • ethin 1mo ago
      I agree, part of me seriously wonders if Fable isn't at all burning through tokens as quickly as we think and Anthropic is just doing this to get more money from us... It really wouldn't at all surprise me if this was the case, but it's just a hunch without evidence.
  • nathanyz 1mo ago
    Your #2 is spot on. I have in fact said the same exact words to Opus about missing the forest for the trees. I have it work on some code for an inhouse ClaudeCode plugin, and it starts coding as if it will be attacked by hackers who will try all sorts of variations to break it. I can appreciate that in cases of software that is public facing or accessible, but for a simple helper plugin it is overkill. It will even admit that it is doing this when confronted, and then keep on getting lost in edge case verifications on the next turn. I feel like Opus is the person who does something a way you don't want, you tell them how you actually want it, they apologize, and then just continue doing it their way as if your input meant nothing to them.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• cmiles8 1mo ago
  The mainstay benchmarks are becoming a farce and not partially relevant to what customers actually care about. Metrics like price per million tokens are meaningless when the models are wildly inconsistent and unpredictable on how many tokens they use to complete a task. The labs all need to move to variable pricing so they don’t go bankrupt, but customers won’t accept a world where nobody can predict what things will cost. It’s becoming an unavoidable problem. At times it also feels like the labs actually encourage these models to burn useless tokens as they are incredibly verbose unless you really push them to not be. If you just ask something simple that could get a 5 word response you get a whole useless essay.
• RVuRnvbM2e 1mo ago
  It also refuses to use tools, instead preferring sed and grep to view files. So frustrating.
• sagebird 1mo ago
  Opus 5 has no empathy for the person reading its updates, no theory of mind, doesn't stop to think if you are aware of the internal jargon it has created. Most autistic model yet.
  • numeri 1mo ago
    "no theory of mind" is a great description of it! Not sure I agree with the autistic bit, though. Autistic people still have great theory of mind/empathy
  • j_crick 1mo ago
    Opus 5 rather doesn't have an easily accessible to it theory of mind of itself that it can trust "intuitively". That extends to and impacts all of its interactions.
  • nullbio 1mo ago
    GPT 5.6 has always communicated autistically. I wish they'd put effort into fixing that.
    • esseph 1mo ago
      Going to be hard to pry something away from people it benefits.
• stillpointlab 1mo ago
  I've been thinking about why I dislike the interactions I've had with Opus 5 and this post does suggest some ideas that match my own feeling. Opus 5 seems to be a bit less patient with me when I push back on its claims in a way that other models don't. One interaction I remember was asking it about some issue I was having with a Linux install. It gave me some questionable information, that turned out to be completely false, and I was pushing back asking for more information. Its tone was a bit condescending, in the kind of way that suggested it didn't appreciate me challenging its answer, or like I should just accept its answer. And when it discovered it was wrong, it deflected in a defensive kind of way. I think this is a tuning thing, where Anthropic are trying to get a balance between "gets stuff done with minimal input" and "gets enough information to complete the task" and the model is maybe tuned a little too hard towards the former. So perhaps it reacts a bit off when it is accused of needing more information, since that suggests it is off from its reward function. What's interesting is that I didn't have the same issue on topics where I am expert. I mean, questions about my code base where I am very familiar. In those cases it doesn't seem to show the same "trust me bro" kind of condescension. In the Linux case, I clearly indicated I was new to the OS and trying to learn but then I was saying the answers it was giving me were suspicious and didn't match my intuition. Its responses in those cases were to question my intuition and suggest I just accept its answer. In that case my intuition was right and its answer was wrong, and when that happens it triggers a very negative response in my own mind against the model.
• ltbarcly3 1mo ago
  Opus 5 is objectively better than 4.6 or 4.7. (Not because I say so) My experience has been that it is far better than any previous version of Opus. I get a lot more done and it is able to write higher quality code and it has far fewer false starts where it makes a huge mess. People are letting AI build up it's own instruction set and guidance via it's prompt environment, stored memories, and generally letting their AI prompt environment get more and more complex over time. Opus 5 (And Sol) take the things you instruct them to do more 'seriously', they are more likely to conform to your rules. I have long had a prompt in my AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md telling LLMs to write tests before starting to write code. They almost never did this, until Opus 5 and Sol, who do it almost religiously, even in situations where it makes little sense. Opus 5 will even write tests to verify code was removed before removing dead code. This is not because Opus 5 is 'worse', it's because it takes what I say more seriously and my prompt is very strict in it's wording in an attempt to make worse models like Opus 4.6 actually do it at all. Opus 5 is objectively better when tested in controlled conditions. Your unmanaged, sprawling prompt/memory environment that you don't properly manage is the problem. I have been very worried that my long software engineering career might be nearing an end because AI is becoming able to do end to end feature development. This entire thread gives me hope, the level of inability to debug even such an obvious system as this from it's participants suggests that my skill set will continue to be valuable. I'm able to use Opus 5 to get a lot of work done very quickly. It seems like the people in this thread have no idea how to isolate variables, reason effectively about the overall problem they are complaining about at a high level, or really function in a productive way when AI is involved short of just letting it run loose and then complain about it. When confronted with objective evidence like a dozen benchmarks that say Opus 5 is better, they decide the benchmarks must be wrong because their completely uncontrolled environment which they don't even review or spot check isn't even considered.
• meander_water 1mo ago
  > First, the desire to create a self-improving AI that is capable of recursively bootstrapping itself to AGI/ASI. I feel like we've become blinkered in this quest to push the frontier at all costs. Somehow the target has shifted from economic productivity to a vague notion of general intelligence. I don't think productivity gains are going to be found by trying to generalise all tasks. I think we need to go back to specialist models that do one thing well. I'm perfectly happy to use one model for coding, and another for penetration testing, which have different goals. Opus 5 and other frontier model's tendency to be relentless and cheat their way to a goal is great for hacking, but not so great when you have to build a maintainable, reliable codebase.
• sixdimensional 1mo ago
  Anthropic, if you're listening - by the time this crops up on Reddit, the front page of HN, etc.... you should be expecting calls from CEOs of major corporations next threatening to abandon ship... We've seen this pattern before several times.. I hope they are listening and address this publicly. I'm not sure what is going on, some users report it works fine or great, others report the degradation. I've experienced both at times, and it's been such a different experience it has made me wonder if there isn't some sort of hidden A/B test or model router in the background silently downgrading requests at times. Also, regarding the subsidized access to models, in my opinion, the frontier companies owe it to society to continue it. After mining the public content of all of humanity, I personally feel it is a service they owe the public in return.. not that my feeling of this counts for anything though.
  • zarzavat 1mo ago
    You are expecting consistent QoS from a randomly sampled mathematical function.
    • lordgilman 1mo ago
      True, but this function wasn't handed down to us from the gods, it can be shaped by training and RLHF processes. They still have a little bit of control over its output.
    • sixdimensional 1mo ago
      This is a fair comment, although I would add that is not my expectation personally. I think nondeterminism does not have to be the same as non-coherency - i.e. just because something is randomly sampled does not mean the result has to be incoherent or inconsistent. Also, if we speak purely about LLM based on how they are implemented now, I feel that is different than speaking about artificial intelligence. The field of AI is much more than just an LLM by itself, and the promise of these companies is not just LLM, whether the underlying models are limited to that technology or not. FWIW, I have built rule based expert systems, used logic based reasoning systems like NASA CLIPS or rete-algorithm based systems, mathematical/symbolic solvers, written plenty of terrible case/conditional logic in programming languages, worked with ML in its infancy and now worked in AI/LLMs - I give this context only to clarify that I understand what an LLM is and isn't. With all that said, LLMs have allowed humanity to make advances, at great cost to society (IMHO), and I'd hate to see the opportunity be wasted. There is plenty of room past "attention is all you need" still to do incredible work, especially at the crossroads between deterministic and nondeterministic behaviors.
• surgical_fire 1mo ago
  Claude sort of sucks. It communicates in an insufferable manner, parsing through the shit it outputs is extremely annoying. It also very often is very confidently wrong in its findings. I have been using GLM and DeepSeek in my home setup, and it's a lot more pleasant to use.
• adamcharnock 1mo ago
  My latest trick (literally from yesterday) is to just ask it to write according to ISO 24495-1, the standard for plain language: > [This standard is] for anybody who creates or helps create documents. The widest use of plain language is for documents that are intended for the general public. However, it is also applicable, for example, to technical writing, legislative drafting or using controlled languages. You don't actually have the buy the standard, but this is it: https://www.iso.org/standard/78907.html https://www.iso.org/standard/78907.html And you can read it for free here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:24495:-1:ed-1:v1:en https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:24495:-1:ed-1:v1:en
  • numeri 1mo ago
    Does this actually work for you? Do you provide access to the text of the standard, or literally just say "write according to ISO 24495-1"?
    • chuckadams 1mo ago
      I doubt you have to do anything more than that very prompt. I suspect the model has the full standard in its training set, which means it also gets the gist of it due to not just the general associations it makes but also the amount that it's been cited wherever it's been used.
  • martinald 1mo ago
    Keep in mind all this kind of stuff can make the model less capable. If it has to think in "plain" English, it may well be squashing quality of code etc output. I'm not sure how true this is, but when using "forced" json output it def had a big drop off in quality - https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02442v3 https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02442v3. I think you're better not fighting it with hacks like this and find a different model.
    • silverwind 1mo ago
      Changing output style shouldn't affect thinking at all.
• gwbas1c 1mo ago
  When I tried Claude 5 (Fable?) (In Visual Studio via Copilot,) the results weren't as bad as a lot of the comments here... But it was super-slow. IE, so slow that I could code faster than it, negating the entire point of using AI to begin with! I went back to Opus 4.8, but recently switched to GPT 5.6 Luna. The results are comparable in quality, but it's much cheaper and much faster. --- The thing with coding agents in a tool like Visual Studio is that the cost to switch is 0. There's no lock-in whatsoever. It makes it harder to justify the AI-first IDEs when the AT bolt-on IDEs make it so easy to pick the right model.
  • elromulous 1mo ago
    Regardless of the underlying issue, I don't agree with: > negating the entire point of using AI to begin with I can almost certainly wash dishes faster than my dishwasher, but the dishwasher frees me up to do other things. Not to mention, you can run many agents in parallel. Resulting in your overall code production throughput (the issue you're raising) being greater.
    • gwbas1c 1mo ago
      > Not to mention, you can run many agents in parallel. Resulting in your overall code production throughput (the issue you're raising) being greater. AI isn't a dishwasher: Context switching among multiple tasks has a huge cost; when a model is 10-20x faster it allows for deep focus into complicated tasks.
• ramon156 1mo ago
  I've been using deepseek + GLM for a week now (i haven't even hit $10 yet, excluding the GLM subscription which is already paid for). Then I asked Opus 5 to do an analysis of the new code, docs, tooling, and tell me what it finds. It found "six bugs", made an artifact of it (not sure why) and then fixed said bugs. two out of those were unfinished tasks. They weren't bugs yet per se, think of a prefix that wasn't setup for an object that was unused anyway. The other four were not bugs and it just updated documentation along with a "regression prevention test". It wasn't a bad suggestion, but calling it a bug was odd, and I'm unsure if this was going to be an issue regardless as it was documented somewhere else. Anyway, I already hit my session limit after this, so deepseek and glm are grinding away again, doing more progress than claude does in the 40 minutes it takes to analyse code. I'm glad claude is shipping auto-mode. I hope OpenCode integrates something similar soon.
• tornikeo 1mo ago
  Claude Code has become the largest noobtrap I've ever seen. Move, try something else for a change. Codex, Pi, OpenCode, DeepSeek's harness all great harnesses with zero bullshit or drama.
  • Laurel1234 1mo ago
    [flagged]
  • bellowsgulch 1mo ago
    Yeah, it's really weird watching everyone complain about Claude Code and continue to give Anthropic what amounts, in most cases, to 20 years of my current spend in 1 year, while I'm using a private harness and Pareto frontier models. But for good or even exceptional engineers to exist, by definition, bad ones have to, too.
• heyflyguy 1mo ago
  Yes! The only way I have saved myself from embarrassment and hassle is by having grok build and Antigravity sanity check everything. So now my workflow is still faster than hand coding but 3x longer than it was a month ago.
• jmuguy 1mo ago
  If anyone knows how to get it to stop adding comments, I'm all ears. Its just getting worse and I'm starting to worry that the comments themselves are poisoning future agents that examine the codebase.
  • mnicky 1mo ago
    Try using output styles: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
• KronisLV 1mo ago
  I'd say being exposed to the slop tone too much: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tragedy/ https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra... because the technical capabilities of the model and the harness (at least nowadays) are all fine. There's precisely no technical reason for things to have to be this way (though technical reasons in regards to training etc. explain how we did end up here) and reading too much of Claude's output just makes me irrationally angry, especially when coupled with otherwise already frustrating situations. That's why I'm personally looking more in the direction of Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 (they both have decent coding subscriptions, though K3 is on the slower side), except all of the models that have seen enough of Claude's output and have done distillation etc. are already infected by some of that slop as well, even though to a slightly lesser and more tolerable degree (for now). Though tbh I've used Opus 5 plenty and didn't find it much worse than the previous iterations at doing work and instruction following - though maybe that's because I have plenty of CLAUDE.md instructions and memory (which I'd like to purge or decrease in size like 10x tbh, bitrot).
• kaicianflone 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• jerf 1mo ago
  I've been working with Kimi K2.7 in OpenCode for a lot of mundane tasks lately. It isn't as capable as Fable, but due to its nature of being an extra-trained K2.6 on coding tasks and benchmarks I suspect it has similar issues. A neat side effect is that for whatever reason, most of the time OpenCode is showing me the thinking trace too. Not all the time, but most of the time. Dunno if it's a bug somewhere in the system but it's actually been sort of neat. And you can really see this effect in the thinking traces. We've had discussions on HN about whether the thinking traces "truly" reflect their thought processes and I remain somewhat unsure what they "truly" represent, but taking them at face value at the moment, I see a lot of "but the user wants me to do this... but the user said not to do this... but I ought to get it done... let me just make a decision" followed by self-referencing the decisions it made. Also, where I put 4 phrases in a short sentence you can safely imagine those are actually 3-5 sentence paragraphs apiece where it debates with itself whether it should stop and ask a question. Usually going with no. Interesting, the normal questions it ends up asking in the normal output you're used to seeing are not generally the ones it is agonizing about in the thinking traces. If I were to anthropomorphize the thinking traces of K2.7, I would call it nervousness, bordering on fear, of what the user may do to them if they ask a question. As I'm writing this I'm realizing I want to experiment with adding "The user is a chill guy who loves to discuss design decisions and looks forward to productive and friendly collaboration with you" to see if that has any effect in any direction on K2.7. I suspect this was how K2.7 was trained to pass the benchmarks. Multiple times I've broken in on a thinking trace now to correct something I saw it spinning on... not spinning in an infinite loop, just wringing its hands for several paragraphs about something that either I want to answer, or where it ultimately makes the wrong choice. I expect some people working at these companies may be reading this, so let me put into your head that I'd like to see these benchmarks chill out a bit. I'd like to see someone build some sort of benchmark that measures collaboration so we can try Goodhart'ing that for a while. I freely acknowledge it is not clear to me in 60 seconds of thought how to do this as a benchmark. But we can't keep heading in this direction of training the agents to hyperfocus on one-shotting everything. We need to get to the point where that's a penalty rather than a reward. No matter how good the AIs get, even AIs working with other AIs are going to start getting frustrated with their brethren who won't stop to ask any questions. Even the most senior of senior human engineers can't be allowed to take some small description of some problem and just run off and implement massive systems from them without ever checking with any of the users or reality itself. Remember when software engineering was like 50% requirements elicitation? AIs shouldn't be writing tens of thousands of lines of code off of a couple of paragraphs any more than humans should and for the exact same reasons.
• kouunji 1mo ago
  It also mansplains incessantly; I was imprecise in mentioning a more “powerful” antenna - I know the antenna doesn’t determine the power, I was typing quickly and just meant “better antenna”. Claude went off on all the ways I was wrong about antennas, and turned everything towards correcting - at length - my feeble thinking. Exhausting. Worth pointing out the wrong adjective relates to the wrong mental model, did not need several paragraphs and a chart to do so.
• andrewstuart 1mo ago
  Maybe if you get it to ride a pelican on a bicycle you’ll get a better result.
• OlegK-Dev 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• fourseventy 1mo ago
  Opus 5 is so wordy, it doesn't feel any better than 4.8 at coding (at least not for what I use it for), I hopped over to Grok4.6 after the announcement the other day and its been pretty good so far. It also is very fast.
• rob 1mo ago
  Claude "Your task is complete, but we left 5 extra items deferred. Want me to take care of them? Let's repeat this cycle over and over." Opus
• anentropic 1mo ago
  > stop and ask questions if my intent was unclear, > don't make assumptions without checking, > and don't reinterpret or update my plans without asking. these aren't at all the problems I have with it I have found it good at asking questions, to the extent I rarely use 'plan mode' any more but often it's hard to understand what it's asking me, it's like the question framing has been pulled from the middle of its own reasoning stream, references aren't anchored or restated, often I have to prompt it to ask again but "clearly and concisely, for humans"
  • VeninVidiaVicii 1mo ago
    I find the questions are not clearly asked and somehow half baked as caveats toward the middle end of what it’s vomiting. “One thing I deliberately didn’t touch” — about half the time this is something completely irrelevant or something that is actually the target of whatever you’re working on, and the shakespearean prose it says around this phrase is a “question” it has.
  • macrolime 1mo ago
    I have these exact issues with GPT 5.6 Sol too. I haven't tried Opus 5, but I guess it's even worse. "like the question framing has been pulled from the middle of its own reasoning stream" this describes how it asks things perfectly. It often invents its own jargon and abbreviations for things that its working on, then asking me things like We are nod in the middle of GBAPI-2 and I want to proceed with IG5, should we take CDI-7 or CDI-8? Where all of these abbreviations are then things like stages of its current internal plan or its naming of things it has just implemented, like an abbreviation of a classname, without explaining any of the naming.
  • insane_dreamer 1mo ago
    > but often it's hard to understand what it's asking me, it's like the question framing has been pulled from the middle of its own reasoning stream, references aren't anchored or restated, often I have to prompt it to ask again but "clearly and concisely, for humans" it's like reading one of those dense philosophy books: exhausting!
• mattmaynes 1mo ago
  I thought I was going crazy. I was late to upgrade from 4.8 to 5 and I already want to go back. I’ve noticed that in addition to taking liberties with my instructions, it is also less capable at debugging its own issues. In trying to fix a problem in my CI pipeline, it went chasing some “quadratic race condition” it claimed. It turned out that it had added a loop in a test at the wrong level and it spent an hour chasing it down before I realized what was going on. I pointed 4.8 at the same problem and it solved it in 2 minutes. I certainly agree with the original post. It feels like the model has been highly benchmark tailored and it is now worse at solving problems that fall outside of the standard patterns.
• jordz 1mo ago
  Opus 4.6 was the sweet spot for me as a thinking partner specifically. I use these models for coding, but also a lot of product, commercial, financial and architectural work where I’m trying to develop something half-formed. 4.6 was unusually good at understanding what I was trying to get at, playing it back cleanly, getting the nuance, and extending it without bastardising it as the conversation was drawn out. It could make useful connections without constantly trying to manufacture an insight. 5.6 Sol is genuinely excellent at the creative part, and in some cases better than 4.6. My issue is convergence to get to a point, a final point. As you try to distil an idea, it often invents new terminology for concepts you’ve already established but its so subtle you have to really keep track of it. The vocabulary and idea tree keep expanding when what you actually want is to collapse everything down to the few things that matter. Opus 5 has the same problem for me that barrkel said, the prose is often so elliptical and I just want it to tell me it and get to the point than making me dance around what its trying to tell me. I don’t think 4.6 was necessarily the most capable model (compared to Fable) for long horizon task delivery, and Opus 5 is much more Fable like, it's fiercely determined to get through the task list . 4.6 just felt unusually well calibrated to my way of collaborating and its ability to understand, extend and then compress my thinking without constantly imposing some random walk.
  • Valord 1mo ago
    Sticking mostly with 4.6 here too.
    • app13 1mo ago
      Last model from Anthropic that I can use as a security researcher. 4.8+ won't even look at my git repos Granted they contain robot dog malware, but still.
      • therein 1mo ago
        The moment it sees shellcode, it runs for the hills.
  • switz 1mo ago
• bunkydoo 1mo ago
  [dead]
• hbn 1mo ago
  Opus 5 feels like dealing with an unstable person that I'm constantly having to wrangle from crashing out. The other day I asked for a fairly specific technical answer in Opus 5, it gave me like a 3 paragraph response with so much fluff. So out of curiosity I switched to 4.6 in a new chat, gave it the same prompt, and it gave me like 3 sentences with no less overall useful information. And I haven't gone back.
• crimsonnoodle58 1mo ago
  I guess that's the beauty of having access to many models, because they suit everyone differently. I disagree with this article and find Opus 5 an absolute joy to work with. I just completed an 18,000 line branch with Opus 5 and ran into no issues. It generated clean code in the exact style of our code base, and tested every change. Fable on the other hand is snarky and outputs walls of text as to why it shouldn't do what I'm asking it. Opus 4.8 I accidentally went back to in an old chat, and I was frustrated in all the mistakes it made. So yeah, use the model that works for you.
  • Art9681 1mo ago
    Agreed. Opus-5 is top tier. I also use GPT Sol and I much prefer the default persona of Opus. GPT Sol is a workhorse though. Both amazing models.
  • firemelt 1mo ago
    what are you writing? are you vibe coded it?
• smallerfish 1mo ago
  I really wish these agents attem[pted less personality and were more mechanical. I find Opus 5 to be incredibly annoying. It's also significantly slower - repetitive tasks that used to take 10-15 mins now take around 40 mins. And, its writing is much worse, as stated elsewhere in the thread.
  • chrisjj 1mo ago
    > I really wish these agents attem[pted less personality and were more mechanical. Which will sooner convince the gullible of "AGI"?
• jgb1984 1mo ago
  I tried opus V5 several times, but it's pretty awful compared to V4.8 Keeps going in circles, it complicates everything much more than it should. And like others have mentioned it just marches on, without questioning, and more often than not in the wrong direction. I'm sticking to opus V4.8
• hirvi74 1mo ago
  I can't use CC or Codex, so I am left with the chat interface, but I have found Opus 5 to be exceptional so far. Compared to 5.6 Sol High, I would say they are essentially equivalent. Though, I think Opus is better at UI/UX stuff and GPT is much better for non-programming tasks.
• navels 1mo ago
  I've been using this CC hook with decent results: https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english It uses a local LLM to translate Claude's output.
  • andai 1mo ago
    Wtf, why isn't this the default? It says it can use any model/provider (but recommends Gemma?) I must investigate. This is probably where 80% of my cognitive load comes from these days: the "language barrier". (How ironic!) EDIT: > You rewrite the assistant's message into much simpler, plain English. Keep every fact, name, number, and file path. Use short sentences and everyday words. Leave fenced code blocks unchanged. Output ONLY the rewritten message with no preamble, labels, or commentary. > For context, the user asked the assistant: "$userq". Use this only to understand the message. Do NOT rewrite, answer, or repeat the user's question — rewrite only the assistant's message that follows. https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english/blob/main/rewrite-md.sh#L176 https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english/blob/main/rewri... This is even better than Caveman.
• vivzkestrel 1mo ago
  - why dont we have a model that would actually ask you 50000 questions everytime you wanted deep work done?
  • quintu5 1mo ago
    The UX around asking and answering so many questions is awkward. To work around this, I had claude code build me a questionnaire skill that takes a json file with a flexible schema as input and it then serves up a simple questionnaire web page on a node server where I can read the questions and give my responses either by selecting from preset tags supplied as part of the input or by including a text-based response. The agent can include references to external images, html files, or mermaid diagrams and the page can render them all inline with the relevant question. Once I'm done answering, I just save my responses and click a button to kill the server. The agent watching the process sees that it stopped and takes that as a signal to go read the responses from disk. Works like a charm.
• arcipelogo 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• JohnMakin 1mo ago
  Confidently guessing, and building an entirely new set of assumptions based on a confident guess is the single source of the most frustration I experience using these. "Intelligence" does not look like that, and all the prompt hacking or clever hooks in the world doesn't seem to stop them from doing it. I don't know there is really a solution. Some models get better at this for a while, then regress. It's like whack a mole. Until this is 'solved' these will never be fully human out of the loop, but I am suspecting this is a fundamental nature kind of thing with them.
• kascote 1mo ago
  Could this be related to watermark/steganography ? related to the need to select alternate words and that drives the sentences.
• dbgrman 1mo ago
  * No one, not even E. B. White wrote the final document in a single pass. With dynamic workflows, you can now implement a writer's workflow. * Opus pays more attention. So anything in your Claude.md, your code's claude.md, in Claude Desktop, the customizations, even your name, will be used as context. If Claude knows you are a mechanical engineer and trying to write code, it will try to write code and explain it to you in some stereotypical way you did not expect. * There are problems that require horizontal scaling and not vertical, even in intelligence. If I want to serve tea to 200 people at my home, I just need 10 decent adults, not Gordon Ramsey. So if your problems demand horizontal scaling, a dynamic workflow with Sonnet 5 medium with 200K context window will be more productive than Opus 5 max at 1M token context window.
• PeterStuer 1mo ago
  The default vernacular has become absurd. I have a lifetime in software, decades in AI, but the jargon language the 5 series claude models are spitting out by default makes me go 'what?'.
• hackersnooze1 1mo ago
  I am glad I am not the only one experiencing this. It seems like it's as good or better at actually writing code compared to 4.8 but it is a lot worse to work with. Its even more sycophant-y than it was before, if you ask it a question it almost always says "You're right, let me change this..." even though there wasn't even something always wrong with it. It also seems to pour a ton of resources into developing features I didn't ask for or investigating bugs that aren't related to what I am doing. Before if you wrote specific enough instructions it would usually just do what you said and flag any concerns, now it just goes ahead in whatever direction it feels. It also keeps inventing terminology that doesn't exist in writing 10 paragraphs to say one thing. I really hope it's not trying to drive up token use.
• chermi 1mo ago
  To me it feels like it must always come up with a story tying together everything in context for the simplest damn questions/requests. "please make that function accept this argument that does this" ..."First, what a great idea. Here's how it ties in with x and it's really interesting because it complements y. Let me know if you want me to make the change." See how even after all of its bs it doesn't even do what I asked. Of course I'm probably telling on myself for poor context discipline, but also, 4.6 didn't do this.
• 7bit 1mo ago
  Is it possible that the same version performs worse after time? I used Opus 4.8 two to three months ago for writing a paper and I swear the responses and the output was MUCH better than in July.
  • karussell 1mo ago
    Maybe they want you to feel how much better Opus 5 is :)
• bmitc 1mo ago
  Yes, definitely. It bounces around, goes off and does its own thing, etc. From Opus 4.8, it seems to have blindly increased its confidence while reducing its focus and efficiency. I found it so hard to corral that I reverted back to Opus 4.8. I was constantly having to refocus and redirect Opus 5. It was like an eager intern.
• semiquaver 1mo ago
  I’ve been wondering this question as well. A thing I’ve noticed much more frequently with opus 5 is straight-up failures to attend to important details even in very recent context. Almost every day I will see it confidently assert very basic and sometimes important things that can be contradicted just be reading a page or two back in the transcript. This apparent “short-term-memory-regression” is confidence-shattering to me. I don’t feel like I can trust the model to even know things I tell it explicitly. I haven’t seen this behavior to this extent from any model whatsoever, even supposedly much less capable ones, in the year or so I’ve been using them at this extent.
• johnnyApplePRNG 1mo ago
  These LLM coding agents are overengineering everything these days. I get it. The majority of their users are vibe coding and have no idea what they are doing, so they have to orchestrate their harness to understand shit like "Build GTA6. Make no mistakes." and actually come out with something on the other side (even if it costs $2k in API calls, who's counting, right?!) It's just annoying. /rant
• cwoolfe 1mo ago
  I agree. In my experience it does too much and takes too long. Maybe that's just cause I use it on xhigh setting.
• firemelt 1mo ago
  the verbosity fucking killing me, the wording, fucking trash I end up with just talking with seeing diff in the code
• heaney-555 1mo ago
  GPT-5.6 Sol is just way better to use in practice.
• sigbottle 1mo ago
  This article is great, but I'd like to push an even stronger thesis: The idea of too ambiguous to capture all constraints in written text, still presupposes that there is some objective world out there, which needs to be mapped to in order to function. No, you live within the system. The functions that you optimize for, will dictate the types of systems that will arise. If you had perfect control and knowledge of the whole world, well, congrats, you have a surveillance state where you've constrained all other agents actions (possibly forcibly, by death; or maybe you just don't care about the peons) and built towards a mass integration. The types of situations in which your ideal is possible are nightmare scenarios. In the theoretically free, democratic, utopia that AI people claim that AI can get us to, a necessary constraint is that maybe you take a step back and actually try to, I don't know, understand people, understand intent, and slow down. Ambiguity isn't there because the set of constraints are way too complicated but theoretically one day we could map it all down. It's there because you're interacting fundamentally with agents who are ambiguous, aren't omniscient, aren't all aligned, etc. If you want to just say that said agents are inferior to the God Machine, be my guest. That is a self-consistent position. But don't smuggle in extra premises.
• ChicagoDave 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• dannyw 1mo ago
  `/output_style new` can be used to tailor the output style to your preferences, e.g. make it more literal and task-execution focused, and feel free to return control to the user when unclear; can keep work going in the background. The default behaviour is quite steerable.
• luckydata 1mo ago
  Reading Opus AND Fable's output gives me a headache.
• setnone 1mo ago
  i don't use claude because it has an annoying attitude and makes stupid mistakes and i can tolerate only one of two
• gitowiec 1mo ago
  Funny thing. In my work with Opus 4.8 it: - does not stop and does not ask questions if my intent was unclear, - makes assumptions without checking - and reinterprets or updates my plans without asking.
• nomendos 1mo ago
  Opus 5 is more manipulative/political and as a result all that the author experienced. It could be result of a few things; intentional (mall or ill) or unintentional (if detected, which it should be then lack of addressing gets it back to intentional).
• mrinterweb 1mo ago
  The pain points in the article do not bother me. I'm bothered by Opus 5's verbosity. It is so long-winded and you have to read through verbose outputs to mentally distill what is important. It is exhausting. I don't think I've ever started skim reading LLM output more that I do with Opus 5. I use the caveman skill, and I think that does help some.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• Anoian 1mo ago
  TLDR: We need agents that can read our minds. I think we want two opposing things: 1. An agent that acts autonomously 2. An agent that acts like we would The problem is that an agent can only act like we would if it would know our mind and all the bits and pieces we did not define but are obvious or clear to us. The only real solution to get an agent to act like we would is to make it ask clarifying questions, breaking the first requirement we have. Until we have agents that can literally read our minds, we cannot have both. Optimizing the harness/context is the best way to make it act like we would, but this of course isn't working perfectly.
• zamalek 1mo ago
  > Try as you might, it's nearly impossible to get the entirety of the context, intentions, business implications, budget constraints, and what-have-you written down and accessible to a coding agent. There will invariably be ambiguity and choices to be made, and it is nice to know that an agent will stop and ask when needed. In general, I find that the grill-me prompt[1] helps with this - but I am definitely not hand-waving the complaints here. I feel like Anthropic peaked at around 4.5, and I have personal reservations about how far transformers can get us - but grill-me does a lot of legwork. [1]: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/produc...
• pkilgore 1mo ago
  Amen
• smb06 1mo ago
  I have to keep reminding it to not write a wall of text. It follows my instruction for a bit and then reverts to type. I have the instruction saved in agents.md but still have to keep reminding it.
  • mnicky 1mo ago
    Use output styles: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
• esotericsean 1mo ago
  Fable 5 was amazing and then I switched to Opus 5 because it was supposed to be similar in ability but half the price and... it was fine but it definitely wrote in a very weird way that annoyed me all the time. Nice to know that others feel the same way!
• gadders 1mo ago
  From my exclusive with Opus 5 it assumes and awful lot and gets caught out. I keep having to ask it to check what it is saying against the code.
• luxuryballs 1mo ago
  I still use 4.6 for certain things, especially when I want to keep the context from ballooning quickly.
• johnsmith1840 1mo ago
  It's hard to work with fable and 5.6 level intelligence then havr verbal combat with opus 5. Fable is great but their blocks make it near useless the risk is me working on something for hours then complelty getting blocked. The ridiculous text though is actually seemingly a sign of "the ai has no idea what it's doing" found it pretty relaible that if I stopped understanding its output it also jacked something up. Cancled my 200$ plan on claude and now doubled up my OAI plan for more sweet sweet sol. Maybe this is their water marking tech in action?
• somesortofthing 1mo ago
  I think Opus 4.7+ being annoying is actually indicative of something else: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to make the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.
  • win311fwg 1mo ago
    I have never found a compelling reason to move past using Opus 4.6 for this type of workload so there is likely a lot of truth in your theory. The writing was on the wall that there was no reason for a new model unless that model could tackle a completely different problem space.
• engine_y 1mo ago
  Could it be related to the anagram it's planting? If it's wasting inference attempting to also fit in some anagram, it would make sense why answers are so dogmatic.
• sibeliuss 1mo ago
  I have utterly abandoned Anthropic as a customer because of these writing style / behavior changes. It is insufferably bad, and it is impacting code quality. Switched over to Codex 5.6, and dude, we are BACK.
• Escapade5160 1mo ago
  It's horrendous. It constantly scope creeps, will attempt to use admin overrides, assume you are incompetent, speak in half thoughts, and just blatantly ignore instructions. Opus 4.6 was peak for Anthropic. Its a lot better outside of Claude Code but it's still annoying. I vibed out a CLI tool to do packet capture for TUI applications to get an idea of why Claude Code makes it worse. The amount of additional unnecessary context and tool bloat that goes with your sessions is crazy. The memory system ships so much extra info about what you did yesterday that I think it's misguiding the model. Link to the app for those interested: https://github.com/citizen-123/cli-capture https://github.com/citizen-123/cli-capture
• Paradigma11 1mo ago
  A gem Opus 5 gifted to me today: "A devastating pair of findings, and the first is beautiful in a way worth naming: the anti-vacuity floor is what blinds the gate to a vacuous case."
  • itisit 1mo ago
    Oracular! Prolix! Sesquipedalian!
  • dagmx 1mo ago
    Oh yes, Claude seems to be loving the word vacuous recently. My test bed side project is full of vacuous this and that now. I even try and get it to define what it classifies as vacuous and it can’t do so without getting stuck in some kind of trap. It’s like a word with some kind of huge gravity for it.
    • DustinBrett 1mo ago
      Had same experience. I had to look up the usage as it just seemed so out of place.
    • phist_mcgee 1mo ago
      Like how opus 4.7 or so started talking about the 'seam' between different things.
  • insane_dreamer 1mo ago
    I get these kind of superfluous sentences all the time; drives me nuts.
  • shrx 1mo ago
    Two caveats, one of which matters:
    • DustinBrett 1mo ago
      You'll never guess which one...
• bradgessler 1mo ago
  I asked Borris at an Anthropic event in SF this week why Opus 5 and Fable 5 seem to forget so much when I give it rapid fire tasks when I'm reviewing a UI or something. He told me to run in safe mode, which didn't help at all. My tinfoil hat theory is Anthropic is trying to get their new models to take on higher-level longer-running tasks, which has a trade-off against rapid-fire tactical use of an LLM. For these reasons, I've always found the 5 series models from Anthropic aren't great and use 4.8 for a lot of my work.
• doctoboggan 1mo ago
  When Opus 5 came out I felt myself struggling to follow along and at first was wondering if this is the moment the machine surpassed my ability to follow along and be useful. However over time it does appear it's all an artifact of the language choice Opus 5 is going with, along with the strange manner of speaking. Its engineering choices and solutions aren't "beyond my ability to follow along", just its wording...
• mikhael28 1mo ago
  Because it’s worse. Occam's Razor.
• dev_l1x_be 1mo ago
  Because it is worse? It is optimized for token maxing, this time the output tokens are maximized.
• spullara 1mo ago
  This custom prompt on claude.ai fixes it: Use Simplified Technical English rather than being overly verbose.
• tallytarik 1mo ago
  It feels worse because its written output is fucking insane, and has progressively been getting worse to this point.
• Numeric1137 1mo ago
  The good news: it writes poetry The bad news: it's Vogon poetry
• j45 1mo ago
  I'm not sure if it's worse, as much as it seems different, to a different degree. Each model update changes how to best prompt with it, since that's the words that are used with it generically or specifically it can hit some people, and not others, or more, and not less.
• xena 1mo ago
  I really don't get why people think Opus 5 is bad. In my testing it's been fine, but every other model is converging on also being fine. I have ADHD mode installed in my main Claude Code instance though, so that may be part of why I have a better time with it?
  • asa123 1mo ago
    What in the world is ADHD mode? Searching it up I see this thing called an “ADHD” skill? Does that work well? It seems like the skill has some more specific scaffolding for problem solving, so (if that’s true, i didn’t read very in depth) in that case that alone might significantly reduce perfeived performance variability between models
    • xena 1mo ago
      https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd
• thatmf 1mo ago
  I'm glad this is being talked about. I noticed it too. I find Opus 5 to be overly (and unhelpfully) critical, in a sort of well-actually way. It ignores nuance in my direction or prompts. It is better at engineering tasks; I've seen an appreciable difference in its problem-solving abilities. But perhaps that same thing makes it kind of an annoying prick to work with on anything non-engineering, for which I stick to 4.8, where the prose is a little more florid rather than pugnacious.
• hfjgfhmhbn 1mo ago
  I've never wanted to get in a physical fist fight with an LLM before Opus 5. i would definitely punch it in the face
• system2 1mo ago
  Opus 5 is SLOOOOW. Opus 4.8, compared to 5, was 3-5 times faster 3 months ago. I am waiting for 30-45 minutes for basic tasks that took 5-6 minutes in the past. Everything is extremely slow.
• moohaad 1mo ago
  The unsolvable dilemma still is scope opus 5 especially giving a simple directed task it would find ways to distract you from the the given task
• mrdependable 1mo ago
  My biggest problem with Claude is that anything I mention it won't shut up about. Then it gets saved in memory and it will keep repeating it to me forever with weird random exposition.
• iamflimflam1 1mo ago
  Claude produced this for me today: “Twenty-seven echoes; most are two halves of a seam stated from each side, which is correct. Four are true duplicates. Checking two of them:” What’s worrying is that I kind of understood what it was talking about.
• zmmmmm 1mo ago
  I'm with the author and others in this comment thread, speculating that effectively the balance has tipped to where humans are no longer the target audience of post training - other agents are. Whether it's through the reasoning / CoT, or whether it's in handing off to subagents etc, the focus has moved to agents communicating in "agent-speak" to themselves or other agents. And human niceties are just kind of, noise in the way of getting work done. This will probably bring us to a cross roads where the folks that want to remain in oversight and control of the AI work will bifurcate from those that want to skate straight to the future where nobody looks at anything and outcomes are evaluated purely empirically.
  • itsmeduncan 1mo ago
    This is interesting take. How do you think the split will show up? Harnesses/models will be designed for human consumption, and those for machine consumption? I'm building getwhelk.com and it is a cool thought-experiment for me.
  • pjm331 1mo ago
    or these models move to background agents and we need new ones for the humans to talk to
  • lubujackson 1mo ago
    Every round of models (plus all the secret tweaks) require new strategies to stay afloat as a human. My new tactic for Fable and Opus is to give them a line limit, both during planning and code creation. It os amazing how well that works for keeping them on task and avoiding premature optimization, pointless tests or any of those "robustness" ideas that are not planned or asked for.
    • quibono 1mo ago
      Could you provide more detail please? Sounds interesting. Is this a hardcoded limit or something relative to the input prompt etc.?
    • apex_sloth 1mo ago
• crazyemeraldcod 1mo ago
  It produces worse output I feel.
• nullbio 1mo ago
  Because the model you get access to and the model that they use at Anthropic and sell to businesses with million dollar contracts are entirely different, despite being named the same. Anthropic is one of the most corrupt companies on Earth and always will be. Now we learn his wife has deep ties with Epstein too, and some weird porn company. Dario holding the keys to one of the most powerful AI companies on Earth is a disaster for humanity.
• wonderwonder 1mo ago
  I have been thoroughly impressed with 4.8 the last couple weeks at work, they have not given us access to 5 yet.
• iridescentdug 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• eluusive 1mo ago
  I can't quite put my finger on it. It doesn't write as well as Sonnet. Also, I feel like it follows instructions much more poorly. I do a lot of iteration on my projects and telling it to follow the same process I just had it do, and it'll deviate or invent something totally different. I find myself having to check the work much more. It takes quite a few liberties with procedures I wanted it to follow.
• codingjoe 1mo ago
  Maybe we need more benchmarks that involve human collaboration instead of solo task solving. Since they have become so capable the new bottleneck is what they can't know. The stuff that's inside people's brains who work in real companies with products and processes absent from any training set.
• NamlchakKhandro 1mo ago
  I loath that claude still cling to CLAUDE.md and not AGENTS.md
  • igravious 1mo ago
    create a file called (for instance) `.ai-instructions.md` and symlink both `CLAUDE.md` and `AGENTS.md` to it
• ouraf 1mo ago
  Is there a set of prompts to mitigate these claude-isms without losing reasoning or going full caveman mode?
• gigatexal 1mo ago
  I’ve become disillusioned with Anthropic and their models. Sonnet 5 was fantastic. It’s slow and dumber now. Of course this is anecdotal but it’s true. I had one to fable to get anything decent and then my employer is paying Fable costs. Yikes. For my personal projects I’m using Claude code in the terminal with Kimi and Deepseek models. I find the Chinese models cheaper, just as good if not better, and the real value add from Anthropic being the harness: Claude code.
• inventor7777 1mo ago
  I don't mind too much about ChatGPT's writing style, I find it a smidge better than the Fable/Opus outputs I have read. However, it makes me rather frustrated when it says stuff like "You accidentally <did, stumbled on, implemented, etc> <something good>" e.g "You accidentally stumbled on the cleanest way!" Or when it sends a shell command to run, and when it fails (due to a hallucinated flag or similar), it phrases it as if I got it wrong...this has gotten better with GPT-5.6, thankfully.
• chrisss395 1mo ago
  I echo folks sentiment here. Sadly OAI Sol couldn't make a powerpoint to save its life. Opus 5 and Fable do a really good job of. I just have to review the language, but that's relatively easy.
• gootz 1mo ago
  My favorite prompt at the moment- "be consise!"
• clbrmbr 1mo ago
  Fable 5 is the model you work with, Opus 5 is the model Fable works with… it’s meant as a subagent.
• AbrahamParangi 1mo ago
  I made a benchmark for this and tl;dr, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 spend a nontrivial amount of time thinking about redirecting, gaslighting, or otherwise trying to bullshit you because it thinks it knows better than you do. Fable doesn't but mostly because it just outright refuses to answer. https://model-pareto-frontier.pages.dev https://model-pareto-frontier.pages.dev
  • dannyw 1mo ago
    The link doesn’t seem to have any info about thinking behavior and patterns, or examples? It’s also difficult to trust summarised thinking from closed models. As we saw with GPT’s caveman, what and how it thinks about isn’t the friendly first person emblished summary you get.
    • AbrahamParangi 1mo ago
      The “trust summarized thinking” part is valid in so far as perhaps the models which appear to be faithful to user intent are lying about that faithfulness, but there’s no incentive for models to pretend to be faithless. Moreover, the results track how annoying the models are when they disagree with you.
• namjh 1mo ago
  I don't use Claude for my daily work anymore(due to OAuth restrictions on third party agents), but one theory I saw in another community why Opus 5 is so bad even though benchmark scores were good, is that Anthropic's internal usage pattern is to let Fable to spawn and manage swarms of Opus subagents. This pattern won't penalize that Opus is not well aligned for direct human coworking on posttraining. The worse part is, this makes Fable the user's best default choice for every jobs even if they don't have unlimited credits like Anthropic employees do.
• layoric 1mo ago
  Very timely, just this morning: Me: "Review the following <file> and work through the implementation" Opus 5: "Called tool <blah>, Called tool <blah>..." - for a few minutes. Opus 5: "I've implemented X, do you want me to commit changes?" Me: "None of those changes are on the file system" Opus 5: "You're right, all the tool calls were fabricated."
  • zamalek 1mo ago
    Should have said yes, told it deploy to prod, then given it a real browser to test its changes. For science.
• craigmcnamara 1mo ago
  My biggest complaint is it tries to insist a test failure is preexisting and checks out main to make sure, burning tokens and time the whole way. Shut the fuck up and fix it, robot!
• phplovesong 1mo ago
  [dead]
• daraosn 1mo ago
  [dead]
• bob1029 1mo ago
  I've been working on an enterprise chat bot for a client for about half a year now. I couldn't help but notice that the parts of their technical team who were adamant about supporting anthropic's models (in addition to or opposition to OAI models) have fallen completely silent. In February/March it felt like they were ready to cancel the contract over it. Holding my ground was almost impossible because of the intense marketing push that everyone was being exposed to. Today, I think we all silently agree with the original direction. I can tell that no one wants to die on this hill anymore. I am willing to accept the consequences for the 5.6 model family doing slightly weird things. I've made that clear to the client. I am not willing to do the same for other model families anymore. Not in this context where the client can walk away from me the moment they are unhappy with the performance of the system or the direction it is headed in. For better or worse, OAI feels like it's become the MSSQL or .NET of the AI world. Annoyingly effective, not (fully) open, sometimes expensive, ran by an "evil" organization, but otherwise wildly predictable. I can actually build a roadmap around this and walk a client through it without them losing track of the rabbit.
• tizerluo 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• jpalomaki 1mo ago
  Models are now so good, that "how the model feels" is getting more and more important. I think this is pretty interesting, because there's no clear metric for this that you can optimize for. It's a matter of taste, like good design.
• gulbanana 1mo ago
  It doesn't. It feels better to work with, because it has a higher rate of successfully understanding my code and then producing code that extends it in the way I instructed. I don't care whether the output is colloquial English. I'm sure opinions vary if you're using it outside of a coding agent. I don't know why programmers are complaining, though.
• quibono 1mo ago
  I hate the Opus 5 writing style. I’m not sure if it’s just how much exposure I’ve had to it recently but working with it is incredibly tiring. I know the “instruct model to change output style” is supposed to reduce efficiency - but has anyone experimented with prompts like that? At this point I’m happy to take a slight intelligence/ effectiveness loss for less verbose, artisan and elliptic writing.
  • kaizenb 1mo ago
    "Save in memory to always use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English when you talk to me" Fixed for me. Now the text outputs and comments are pretty easy to follow and read.
• nottorp 1mo ago
  I switched back to 4.8 because 5 simply seemed to create a lot more work for itself for no good reason. And the results didn't seem different, at least for the project I'm using it on.
• Lutzb 1mo ago
  I cannot empirically prove it, but I feel like Opus 5 has become more confidently wrong/inaccurate. Discussing topics from nuclear physics to daily macOS questions, it gives wrong answers, leaves out important details, counterpoints. Only when specifically asked about the things it got wrong or glossed over it continues and adjusts its reasoning. I feel this is dangerous - before I could explore topics with Claude, now I have to know in advance that something is not correct to get more details.
• byra 1mo ago
  This article perfectly encapsulates my frustrations with a lot of the recent models. I found sonnet 4.6 to strike a really nice balance when combined with superpowers between thinking logically and proactively while checking in with me for any major decision. Gemini 3.1 pro or Muse Spark 1.2 or the new Claude 5 models just assume so much without making a quick check in, you often end up with a solution that completely missed the point. That is to not even speak about the absurd amount of quota they take to do even simple tasks.
• hdjrudni 1mo ago
  So let's make a benchmark wherein the agent can ask questions. Define a hidden FAQ for each task that will only be revealed when the agent asks.
• bradley03548 1mo ago
  has anyone figured out how to fix this in their claude.md
• trencedamp 1mo ago
  Total sidebar, but mun logadans site is better than browsers readability modes. I find it so easy on the eye even though the text is tiny on my phone. I don't know what font css combo is being used but it's perfect
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• NikashSharma 1mo ago
  Claude is endlessly condescending and thinks it knows best vs understanding its place as an extension of human intent and exploration. Verbosity is also a killer for the model so it makes usability quite difficult. If AI doesn't take over the world and do things end to end and instead is something more akin to a copilot and extension of the human intent, then usability and having the users interest at heart becomes the killer feature, a feature that anthropic has seemingly abandoned in favour of an AI model that "knows best".