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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?

#291
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man. Hadn't even considered the watermarking angle.

The simpler angle is that more text lets them bill you more. I don't think that was necessarily their intent, but it does mean they have a negative incentive to fix it.

I would have assumed reasoning tokens dramatically outweigh user-visible output. It certainly seemed that way when they were visible!

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

#292

I've gone back to 4.8. 5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions. I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do i…

It is bizarre. There has been no statement, no mention of even hearing concern about Opus 5.

I presume something is forthcoming, but it may be they don’t want to come empty handed—-5.1 is intended to “fix the glitch.”

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

#293
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.

"seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.

An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.

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

#294
post #175

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…

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 wa…

Claude writes like a guy at a firm I used to work with in the 90s; he was my employer's "visionary"; he'd worked at a whole lot of different companies on both sides of the Atlantic in inexplicably high-placed roles given that he was often bluffing, and was considered a lucky hire of a rising star. He'd be called into meetings with high end clients to spout off. He really needed you to know he understood, but very often he didn't.

I think it's likely that LLMs adopt the tone and style of their developers' communication culture. If you assume this is the case, you can infer quite a bit about the differences between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

I am more and more clear about this given the way Muse Glimmer writes. Like a talented, slightly snarky guy who is maybe a bit of a dick but quite fun to be around.

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

#295
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried asking it for a lay explanation of what it did? That’s usually all it takes for me. Sends garbage -> request -> sends something readable

When I ask it to make a CL description, it's worthless unless I tell it to dumb it down as much as possible, assume the reader has zero knowledge of the codebase. And then it makes a perfectly cromulent description that just needs a touch of trimming-down. If I don't do this, the description is just a wall of gibberish and paraphrasing of every little thing it encountered.

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

#296
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…

It’s a strange feeling as a native English speaker to read the entire sentence and know every word, for the sentence to be entirely grammatically correct, and still have no idea what it’s trying to communicate.

Another problem is that it will open up all sorts of tangents about nits that it encountered, but it will often not tell you that it’s a nit or give you adequate context to realize that this paragraph is exceedingly low value until you’ve spent a bunch of time and energy trying to make sense of it.

I’m curious if anyone has any suggestions for prompting agents to improve their prose. I’ve had some okay results with “optimize for clarity, don’t dump every thought on me, treat my attention and focus as constrained resources, stay focused on the task at hand”.

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

#297
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 excessive commenting has definitely been noticeable and very annoying. I'm not against abundant comments as long as they're pointed and appropriate, but these models are literally just leaking their overly verbose output into the actual codebase.

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

#298

Anthropic, if you're listening - by the time this crops up on Reddit, the front page of HN, etc.... you should be expecting calls from CEOs of major corporations next threatening to abandon ship... We've seen this pattern before several times.. I hope they are listening and address this publicly. I'm not sure what is going on, some users report it works fine or great, others report the degradation. I've experienced b…

You are expecting consistent QoS from a randomly sampled mathematical function.

This is a fair comment, although I would add that is not my expectation personally.

I think nondeterminism does not have to be the same as non-coherency - i.e. just because something is randomly sampled does not mean the result has to be incoherent or inconsistent.

Also, if we speak purely about LLM based on how they are implemented now, I feel that is different than speaking about artificial intelligence. The field of AI is much more than just an LLM by itself, and the promise of these companies is not just LLM, whether the underlying models are limited to that technology or not.

FWIW, I have built rule based expert systems, used logic based reasoning systems like NASA CLIPS or rete-algorithm based systems, mathematical/symbolic solvers, written plenty of terrible case/conditional logic in programming languages, worked with ML in its infancy and now worked in AI/LLMs - I give this context only to clarify that I understand what an LLM is and isn't.

With all that said, LLMs have allowed humanity to make advances, at great cost to society (IMHO), and I'd hate to see the opportunity be wasted.

There is plenty of room past "attention is all you need" still to do incredible work, especially at the crossroads between deterministic and nondeterministic behaviors.

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

#299

I've gone back to 4.8. 5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions. I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do i…

Opus 5 has a habit of taking what I asked for, doing something tangentially related to it, and then lying to me and saying it did exactly what I asked.

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

#300
post #177
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tun…

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