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Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

mun-logadan.github.io

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Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#81

Post by causal »

causal wrote: post #74
barrkel wrote: post #12

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 mo…

> writes too elliptically > Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice Wow, what a great way of phrasing this. Thanks for word-smithing what I've been wanting to express for so long.

Follow up thought: I wonder if Claude is overtrained on academic papers, which often suffer the same kind of "prove how good I am at talking before getting to the point" prose.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#82

Post by pedro_caetano »

kioleanu wrote: post #4
mr_tox wrote: post #2

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.

I avoid speaking to AIs in anything else than English as the results are almost always worse

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.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#83

Post by deskamess »

barrkel wrote: post #12

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 mo…

Its a little too much.... I have to ask it to explain some of the terms in the context they are used and I am getting tired of it. 'Seam', 'overload', 'spine'.... having to mentally 'reinterpret/flatten' the sentence is tedious. When asked to re-explain it starts with some half apology. Then, on the next query it does it all over again.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#84

Post by Retr0id »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #73
Retr0id wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.

It's bad enough that I've seen dedicated skills to do comment hygiene scrubbing and consolidation.

I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help.

My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (human comments are intended to be read and understood by other humans, whereas Claude comments are their own dialect).

I bet this is a result of iteratively training Claude on output from other successful Claude sessions. Presumably it's good for making benchmark scores go up.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#85

Post by world2vec »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #73
Retr0id wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.

It's bad enough that I've seen dedicated skills to do comment hygiene scrubbing and consolidation.

I built my own skill to somewhat follow the Simplified Technical English guidelines (loosely adapted to my work context)

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#86

Post by whazor »

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.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#87

Post by netniuq »

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.

Re: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

#89

Post by world2vec »

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.

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