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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?

#181

Post by jasonlotito »

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…

Change the output in settings, or create your own.

I know, it would be best if it was just worked like you wanted out of the box (not being sarcastic here) but that is an easy option you can use right now and it works.

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

#182

Post by droserasprout »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #100
Retr0id wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obviou…

> Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules.

Exactly my experience! Since the release of Opus 5, no amount of instructions helps. In CLAUDE.md, in a separate file, in memory, as brief bullets, as long detailed guides, with reasoning from medium to max — nothing.

Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes.

I have a relatively low bar for prose, could live with some junk. But Claude's comments are _poisonous_. They always require maintenance, instantly become out of sync with the actual code, and are a token black hole — for all agents, but especially for Claude itself.

Gave up and canceled Anthropic subscription yesterday. To my taste, it has become unusable for coding.

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

#183

Post by madradavid »

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…

"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." This. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I've tried to put a finger on this and you've done that for me. I wonder what the solution could be , Ask Claude to "Dumb it down" , "Speak plain English" ? I have even thught of building some sort of "middleware" that fixes all this.

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

#184

Post by chuckadams »

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…

I find Deepseek's house style to be pretty refreshing. It has its own cliches (it does like talking about "seams") but I don't think I've ever caught it saying "load-bearing". I've even watched its thinking where after analyzing some awful legacy code, it started off with "Holy crap". And it certainly doesn't over-comment. I definitely can't one-shot a complex system with it like Fable can, but I prefer iterating over interactive brainstorming sessions anyway.

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

#185

Post by samrus »

algoth1 wrote: post #28
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #23

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-m...

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

But its not just swapping the words out post hoc is it. LLMs are autoregressive, so weird word choice before would influence the probability distribution of all future tokens.

I feel like they thought it wouldnt be that bad, or it was a worthwhile tradeoff, but im getting the feeling it might be contributing heavily to opus5's uncanny communication style

As for the verbosity, my conspiracy theory is that they are token maxxing to hack revenue/enshitify the product in prep for their IPO

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

#186

Post by VeejayRampay »

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 phraseology is unbearable, it speaks like some kind of pretentious dude from a software engineering discord or something, littered with lingo and catch phrases

I try to push through but it's insufferable

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

#187

Post by Mtinie »

saaaaaam wrote: post #153
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…

> Of course, it also has no concept of what context the user has and assumes that it must be the same it holds in its memory, which creates this “I didn’t know that you didn’t know” type of communication. Yes, this is a repeated problem for me. It will drop something in as though we have discussed it before and when I say “hold on, what is this” it realises its error - though on more than one occasion has started to…

I notice the models with reasoning can conflate “internal” (or subagent) discussions with external (i.e. me). So it is accurately indicating “I’ve had this discussion before” but incorrectly asserting who it was with.

My understanding of how “thinking”works is limited though, and given the reduced visibility into the thinking traces, it is harder to tell if this is actually happening or if these are imaginary discussions the model for some reason calcifies on.

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

#188

Post by slaser79 »

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.

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

#189

Post by smcleod »

barkerja wrote: post #176

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.

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.

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

#190

Post by ryandrake »

the_af wrote: post #162
ACS_Solver wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obviou…

> 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've noticed this a lot, and before your remark I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. Now I know: Claude is writing its thought processes and maybe parts of the conversat…

It also loves to reference internal notes and scratch docs that never go into source control, so a reader will have no idea what it’s talking about. For example:

    // load_tree() loads the binary tree with data, but only the recently updated data, not all data (INTERNAL_NOTES.md section 4)
Ok but nobody reading the source code knows what this doc is. You don’t have to cite it.
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