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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?

#231
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.

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

#232
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

And you can read it for free here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:24495:-1:ed-1:v1:en

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

#233
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”…

Recently converted to OpenAI too. Similar experience. Sol writes really well.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is the problem with commercial AI and the way our minds work; it writes garbage and we’re trained to think we’re stupid because we can’t understand it.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like "try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point" funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"

CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.

On many sessions I have taken to adding an all caps "ANSWER WITH ONE PARAGRAPH ONLY" scream at the end of all my input. It's the only thing that gets results.

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

#236
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 discuss…

Yeah, basically everything that becomes context in a session will bias perception and communication style -- subagents, plan lingo, prompt lingo, etc. And then if you write a plan with the comms context having been biased, the lingo will creep into the plan, and from the plan into the code and code comments. And from there, bad lingo will go on multiplying like rabbits...

I usually think of it in terms of having a "good" or "bad" session. In a bad session, there is a harmful bias that you can only get rid of through a new session. For example, if you exposed too much context about, say, a variable that features prominently in a doc. The entire session will be anchoring on the importance of that variable. Or if you introduced the notion of CC having to ask for permission for stuff you will have a hard time getting it to "think on its feet" or propose an effective solution (you have made CC so insecure that it now relies on you even for little things that wouldn't normally require your input). In some cases (let's say you have important context in that session) you can overcome this by upping the reasoning level or switching to Fable, but usually a new session is the way to go.

Because it's so easy to bias the session I wouldn't even want to use any of these tools that pretend to give Claude "a brain" or "remember" things. That was en vogue a year ago and helpful then, but now, it's plain harmful IMHO. The key is to have just enough context.

Subagents often have the reverse problem in that they tend to have too little context to make "judgment calls", which is why the tasks for them must be either deliberately basic or mechanical in nature, or their output should be audited by the main session agent.

As for "thinking" it's not clear that that's even a thing (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24941)...

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like "try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point" funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"

CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.

Yep, it might work for one or two turns but I see it regress pretty quickly with instructions and/or CLAUDE.md. It has to be deeper.

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

#238
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…

OK so I am not the only one :D

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

#239
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.

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

#240

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 parsi…

Are you not planning these tasks out before you let it loose?
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