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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?

#371

Post by jakevoytko »

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…

It's clear that we're not the audience; it writes to be read by its training evaluator, not a professional software engineer. Professional software engineers can't read this word soup and are desperately trying to find ways to fix it.

It feels like it found a register that games the evaluator, where it can ramble forever and rarely be marked wrong while slowly racking up points as it talks more.

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

#372

Post by whstl »

stefan_ wrote: post #222
inferniac wrote: post #207

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.

Yes.

CLAUDE.md only works half the time, except in longer conversations, when it works about 10% of the time.

Hooks are also useless in the sama manner, the agent learns to dodge “no comments” hooks (why is it adding them anyway?).

Hooks to append text to your prompt reminding the agent of certain rules are useless.

Claude does whatever it wants, when it wants, the way it wants

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

#373

Post by chuckadams »

Retr0id wrote: post #25
kioleanu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I avoid speaking to AIs in anything else than English as the results are almost always worse

I'm not sure how much the harness affects things, but the Deepseek web chat keeps trying to talk to me in Chinese. I tell it to use English, and it "forgets" a few turns later. I wonder if I'd get better results if I could read and write Chinese.

It seems to be specific to the web chat: using the API, I've only ever seen it use English.

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

#374

Post by whstl »

Applejinx wrote: post #262
kypro wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'. Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy w…

> the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions

This seems to be exactly the kind of thing automated/massive training would produce, just like it did with sycophancy recently.

Claude users would just gave up after the word vomit and some classifier considered it a success and into the model it went.

Wrong incentive and nobody checking.

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

#375

Post by waffletower »

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.

Load-bearing is a decidedly load-bearing metaphor for Claude. Fable actually used "money shot" the other day which I found much more hilarious and edgy.

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

#376

Post by waffletower »

SoftTalker wrote: post #351
chuckadams wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.

In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it. "Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.

This reminds me of an engineer that tried to explain to me that my prune tree in my backyard was in fact a plum tree. All prunes are plums but not all plums are prunes.

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

#377

Post by chis »

chis wrote: post #353
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”…

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 think Fable is the beginning of Anthropic switching to training models as agent-first, tool second. It’s certainly the best model if you want something to work autonomously without supervision and don’t care to read the code. The code and writing is ugly but it can complete huge tasks and fix its own work.

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

#379

Post by throwaway613746 »

zarzavat wrote: post #275
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…

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

[dead]

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

#380

Post by patates »

aenis wrote: post #38
bevekspldnw wrote: post #10

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…

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…

One weirdness I experienced: It suddenly decided to test how my software behaves under load and summoned 100s of processed that just burned CPU when running the e2e suite. My poor mac was not happy (too hot to touch).
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