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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?

#361

Post by eternaldao »

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…

Claude offers money credits and double usages but take them out and Claude becomes almost unusable where it would take opus about two - three high effort conversations to exhaust my session quota in Pro. I once extended my claude code session beyond the session limit, and thought they are too generous in offering 100 dollars worth of usage. It was sonnet, for a somewhat mechanical task - and it spent 13 dollars worth of usage after exhausting my quota mid task. Only a few months back, I was awestruck by the quality of Opus 4.6 and jumped ship from chatgpt to claude. Even in technical tasks, Opus has to be told to limit token spend, it treats it as infinite budget - it will spawn a subagent to read every file just to get one line summary when I ask it to sort a messy folder of past ai chats. Thank heavens I was not doing it off machine, it would burned off my monthly usage and credits.

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

#362

Post by andai »

navels wrote: post #359

I've been using this CC hook with decent results: https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english It uses a local LLM to translate Claude's output.

Wtf, why isn't this the default?

It says it can use any model/provider (but recommends Gemma?)

I must investigate. This is probably where 80% of my cognitive load comes from these days: the "language barrier". (How ironic!)

EDIT:

> You rewrite the assistant's message into much simpler, plain English. Keep every fact, name, number, and file path. Use short sentences and everyday words. Leave fenced code blocks unchanged. Output ONLY the rewritten message with no preamble, labels, or commentary.

> For context, the user asked the assistant: "$userq". Use this only to understand the message. Do NOT rewrite, answer, or repeat the user's question — rewrite only the assistant's message that follows.

https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english/blob/main/rewri...

This is even better than Caveman.

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

#363

Post by Syzygies »

letier wrote: post #7

I am not sure it can be explained through what is written in the article, but one symptom i noticed is that the comments are out of control. I recently started getting an insane amount of comments in nearly all types of files. That included javascript comments in json files, inner monologues in code comments, review comments during implementation and function doc strings that reiterate the implementation in prose.

This is helpful, proving this entire discussion is subjective.

I'm a retired mathematician with a primary research project, and too many tangential projects I fear revisiting; tokens be damned, will they burn all my time? Translate the K&R C computer algebra system that got me tenure to 64-bit modern C. Implement a no syntax macro language to support my Go60 ZMK keyboard. Realize my vision of how interlinear translations should work so I can read Flaubert in the original for an online course this fall. Rejigger my decades-overgrown .bashrc setup and my status, install scripts to manage Bash, Ruby, Lean, Tailscale and my Homebrew setup across four machines. And a waiting queue as these tasks clear.

Fable 5 (with Opus 5 as backup) on Zed with a $200 Max plan has been a sea change for me. Carefully alternating planning and auto modes, I manage all these projects at once using Zed's Threads Sidebar. I'm a virtual CTO taking intense meetings all day, relieved to go cook or run errands when credits stall. Anything I've procrastinated for months is now making steady progress; the translation project I feared taking a month is nearly done with several hours of my attention. My personal IT support is now more advanced and easy to use than I ever imagined possible.

My project creation has been a series of agentic "parenting" steps, so there are years of evolving cultural DNA. I had so hated agent comments that recent agents simply weren't commenting at all, instead recording all context in support documents. We had a "come to Jesus" meeting to discuss what commenting style would benefit both my failing working memory and future agents' token use.

It has taken me two brutal years so far to learn to use AI. AI is a dangerous and powerful Iron Man suit, an extension of our associative minds that is a different experience for each person.

One doesn't ride a surfboard by telling it which way to go. I would surely die surfing a big wave, but my experience with AI doesn't resemble other accounts.

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

#365

Post by someone4958923 »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #24

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…

Yeah. I set my default back to 4.6 and only use 5 for code review etc. Also save s alot of tokens...

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

#366

Post by PhilipRoman »

moomin wrote: post #273
gundugi-man wrote: post #161

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…

I'm particularly fond of "load-bearing seam", which it loves to use. It rather hilariously fails the "draw the metaphor" test.

I even saw it using the -bearing suffix in other cases, like describing a function responsible for 802.11 radar detection as "radar-bearing"

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

#367

Post by layer8 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #285
nobleach wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pie…

Which is worse, when people noun verbs, or when they verb nouns?

The is latters.

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

#368

Post by bpodgursky »

sixdimensional wrote: post #229

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…

They have usage metrics that are 100x more unbiased and rich than random internet complaints.

They can see which models people are using, how irritated they are during conversations, and how often people drop or shift to a different model. There is just no world where listening to random complaints on the internet gives them information they don't get from actual conversation logs.

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

#369

Post by whstl »

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…

A lot of people I work with are reporting that reading Claude-made PR descriptions is burning them out of doing PR reviews because it is incredibly tiresome to read.

My company recently forbid AI-only text if it’s meant meant to be consumed by humans.

I dodged the drama but I agree so much.

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

#370

Post by chis »

coldbrewed wrote: post #358
chis wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is lucky that they've built a lot of loyalty over the last year that they can burn through right now. I see people talking about switching back to Opus 4.8 rather that using 5.6 Sol, which is wild. My current approach is to occasionally use Fable for high-intelligence tasks but use Sol as the translator and clean-upper afterwards, and otherwise just use Sol for everything. Fable sometimes says the most insa…

I'm still on opus 4.6 for a healthy chunk on work; the technical competence has lagged behind but the slop-comment generation and misdirected self-initiated actions on newer models ultimately burn more time than a little more babysitting, but I'm optimizing for minimized slop generation over sheer generation speed.

Have you tried Sol? Just curious. I don’t wanna sound like a shill, just feels like every generation it’s important to reevaluate models and pick the best again.

I do find myself returning to 4.6 for casual conversation - asking it to help explain some science/engineering or news to me.

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