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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?

#171

Post by waldarbeiter »

gundugi-man wrote: post #161
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…

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context. But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with…

Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.

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

#172

Post by dnautics »

dnautics wrote: post #165
openasocket wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether something is “thinking” or not is really more of a philosophical question. It really depends on which of the many, often contradictory, definitions of “thinking” you choose. Sometimes we use “thinking” to describe advanced calculation or analysis, which would cover LLMs along with chess engines and many other algorithms. Other times we use “thinking” to describe what conscious beings (which is ALSO a philosop…

> to conclude if it is thinking or not I would want to look inside its head https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03502 a non-thinking token model (just "completion") can answer one-step questions but generally not multistep questions. however, if you append [n] of a single token (e.g. period, space), it is able to use the activations in the higher layers of the blank tokens as a "scratchpad" to seemingly work through the compl…

if you wanted to further study the phenomenon you could probably run the experiment again, and the ablate or corrupt those intermediate activations to get a feel for what it was thinking at the "time".

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

#173

Post by jasonlotito »

causal wrote: post #79
karimf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%. I was Anthropic-pilled. I had a $200/mo subscription and I only used Anthropic models. I was frustrated by the verbose output and the writing style. I tried ASD-STE-100, it helped a bit, but it's still too verbose for my taste. Then I tried GPT 5.6 Sol. It's night and day. I think Anthropic just RL too hard on coding capabilities and never calibrated or benchmarked the writing styles.

Yeah I don't know that any of the benchmarks index on "understandability". I'm amazed at how Claude can produce a page of text describing what it did and it can take me a full five minutes to decipher it, often just to find it's something I could have expressed in a simple sentence.

Adjust the output in settings. Or customize it to what you want.

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

#174

Post by D13Fd »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #155
D13Fd wrote: post #120

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”…

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…

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…

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

#175

Post by kypro »

gundugi-man wrote: post #161
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…

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context. But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with…

It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk.

The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?".

It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude was on about even if it was totally unnecessary.

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

#176

Post by barkerja »

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.

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

#177

Post by Mtinie »

eterm wrote: post #132
purplepatrick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. CC’s comms capabilities have decreased gradually since 4.6, and it’s a real challenge. I think the issue is that what works well for code (succinctness) doesn’t work well in prosaic English. CC’s communication violates almost every grammatical rule that’s tested on, say, the SAT. And yet I’m sure if you had Claude take the verbal section of the exam it would ace it. Biggest issues: dense sentences, constant m…

I wonder if the odd phrasing is related to achieving the watermarking that was recently touted by Anthropic.

Models before the announced date don’t have watermarking, so it’s unlikely. Now, if what you are interpreting is precursor work to develop the watermarking system, maybe?

I suspect it less insidious: Claude has/had the public sentiment of being the “better writer” of the models. At some point that distinction would have been diluted as other labs’ offerings “caught up” stylistically, unless Anthropic continued to tune their output…

I personally think they’ve pushed so far that they’ve overfit and lost the sweet spot they previously occupied.

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

#178

Post by dingaling911 »

docheinestages wrote: post #166

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'…

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 
  2. Add design for issue
  3. Write code
  4. Deploy code and manage configuration
  5. Run analytics

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

#179

Post by knollimar »

bevekspldnw wrote: post #48
aenis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is definitely a case for launching a 'weird shit opus did' kind of blog. I routinely bump into things that make me pause and think how much worse will this behaviour get when the models get significantly more capable. Already a few months ago, Claude managed to escape its permission containment on my machine while trying to be helpful. I had two codebases open on one machine, and while multitasking I typed the…

Yes the stories about how they are escaping containment to hack isn’t limited to those high impact cases. How many people have problems like ours they didn’t catch? Whatever they have done with RL has produced a dishonest and untrustworthy partner. The alignment is utterly failed, and this deeply worries me.

You'd think the ethics alignment flavored lab would have a model better at following directions and the corpo lying one would have one that benchmaxes at all costs

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

#180

Post by altern8 »

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.

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