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Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

deskamess wrote: post #83
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.

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by fuglede_ »

demibabs wrote: post #44
algoth1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 be…

One way to watermark (assuming temperature is otherwise positive) would be to output the most likely (or optimal) token every so often.

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

#94

Post by jodacola »

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…

Yes.

I’m not particularly dense but lately the walls of text I get back turn my brain in knots. When I start feeling my brain knot, I know I need to say something along the lines of “I need you to explain this very simply, with examples.” Only then can I parse the results without all the mental weightlifting.

On more than one occasion my mind has wandered into “is this purposeful to get me to spend more tokens?” territory, but I’m trying to not get too tinfoil-hat-like.

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

#96

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

causal wrote: post #81
causal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe just Calvin and Hobbes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/ky81y/verbing_...

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

#97

Post by stpedgwdgfhgdd »

hmokiguess wrote: post #88

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.

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.

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

#98

Post by tharkun__ »

Retr0id wrote: post #84
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (huma…

I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them.

Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less likely to go "copy what the rest of the codebase does".

Of course I've now jinxed it and some update will cause it to ignore the instructions coz I didn't write them in the new model's style or something.

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

#99

Post by Jgrubb »

jodacola wrote: post #94
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…

Yes. I’m not particularly dense but lately the walls of text I get back turn my brain in knots. When I start feeling my brain knot, I know I need to say something along the lines of “I need you to explain this very simply, with examples.” Only then can I parse the results without all the mental weightlifting. On more than one occasion my mind has wandered into “is this purposeful to get me to spend more tokens?” terr…

What's tin foil about that? It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text.

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

#100

Post by ACS_Solver »

Retr0id wrote: post #84
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (huma…

I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down.

My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.

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