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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?

#491

Post by beAbU »

mlsu wrote: post #428
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…

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter. - "Introduction that rephrases your prompt." - "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points" - "The Twist" - "The Bottom Line" It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane obser…

It's the same way how every AI generated poster looks exactly the same. As if there is a single underlying prompt that describes the template of the poster/long-form article, and it does not dare deviate from that.

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

#492

Post by ninininino »

rzz3 wrote: post #422
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…

As a native speaker, I have to ask it to rephrase 5-10 times a day. Sometimes I actually get mad and I tell it “I can’t answer that because I don’t know what the fuck load-bearing indirection means”. I’ve gotten so frustrated that I’ve ended a session and started over.

It sounds like you need to invert the abstraction, the communication of your model becomes the fulcrum for your learning, not merely the delivery of your product.

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

#493

Post by bonesss »

argee wrote: post #455
40four wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you guys, but it sounds like we’re taking about the default settings or “personalities” baked into the models by their creators. Either of them will act exactly the way you want if you explicitly tell them too. Add the instructions to your own system prompt. If you don’t want a companion, say so. If you want shorter answers in a different style, tell them. They will obey :)

Read this. https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ > We retired the “Nerdy” personality in March after launching GPT‑5.4. In training, we removed the goblin-affine reward signal and filtered training data containing creature-words, making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts. Unfortunately, GPT‑5.5 started training before we found the root cause of the goblins. When we…

> making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts

So inappropriate goblins are still likely, just less so…

Hey, remember when tech bugs were things like buffer overflows or cross-thread performance impacts? I miss the days when our war with system goblins was purely metaphorical.

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

#494

Post by kanzure »

mlsu wrote: post #428
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…

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter. - "Introduction that rephrases your prompt." - "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points" - "The Twist" - "The Bottom Line" It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane obser…

At this point, I'm basically telling models to not write any English text or prose. Only write code. They are great at writing code. Not so great at writing good English. In software projects, lengthy comments and docs are an anti-pattern: the software should instead be written to do the right expected thing so that you don't have to think about it. I don't want all these tokens polluting my context, either.

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

#495

Post by wahnfrieden »

eterm wrote: post #132
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…

I wonder if the odd phrasing is related to achieving the watermarking that was recently touted by Anthropic.

That has no effect. Look up the math. Claude/CC are just bad.

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

#496

Post by boomlinde »

mlsu wrote: post #428
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…

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter. - "Introduction that rephrases your prompt." - "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points" - "The Twist" - "The Bottom Line" It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane obser…

I've noticed that ChatGPT (whatever model the free version uses by default) likes to phrase answers as though it's correcting me, even when my question doesn't contain any assumptions.

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

#497

Post by mlsu »

phickey wrote: post #444
mlsu wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter. - "Introduction that rephrases your prompt." - "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points" - "The Twist" - "The Bottom Line" It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane obser…

In your reading, what is the distinction between blindsight’s scrambler and real intelligence? My reading is that it’s just as real, and draws out the disadvantages a sense of self constrains intelligence with

Sure. I should have been more precise about what is 'real intelligence' here.

What I mean is that blindsight's scramblers are aliens that cannot share human values. Their structure is completely different to ours, their qualia (or whether they even have it) is impossible for us to understand. In short, they do not have a soul. When Claude does this "slowly revealing a dramatic insight" thing that it does, it does that not because it has judged itself through some introspection as having an insight to share. It does not even know what an insight is or is not. It is not sharing anything, because it is not capable of sharing, because it does not have a soul.

The aesthetic structure of its replies is a pattern, a constraint on the token distribution, like the color of noise.

It's my bad to use the word 'intelligence' because it's so overloaded. Will Claude will act as a therapist or produce value or produce a work of art? No. It cannot, because it does not have a soul. I leave it freely open to interpretation whether having a soul is required for "real intelligence." But what I've noticed is that "intelligence" in these discussions is mostly used to denote some capability to produce [economic/social] value. In my mind value is a relational thing, a thing of human feeling.

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

#498

Post by wiremine »

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…

This is the most succinct summary of my interactions with Claude: thank you!

I feel like they need high school English teachers in the loop on the next ground of training to whip the language in shape.

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

#499

Post by wk_end »

waffletower wrote: post #376
SoftTalker wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?

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

#500

Post by Panoramix »

mlsu wrote: post #428
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…

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter. - "Introduction that rephrases your prompt." - "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points" - "The Twist" - "The Bottom Line" It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane obser…

You're right, and the load-bearing part of the argument is not what you think it is. Two ambiguities worth resolving before moving on: whether what you wrote also applies to ChatGPT, and whether you have custom instructions set up. Failure mode worth flagging explicitly: I didn't read TFA.

(I'm becoming allergic to how these things write).

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