Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

Post by sibeliuss » Fri, Aug 14, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

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.

Post by nonethewiser » Fri, Aug 14, 2026, 7:51 PM UTC

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #284

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, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

Post by jsrozner » Fri, Aug 14, 2026, 7:54 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #163

purplepatrick wrote: post #63

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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…

> being a coined word or quasi-synonym for something that is already named in the code base. This annoys me with a lot of LLM code. They rename things for the hell of it all the time.

Post by win311fwg » Fri, Aug 14, 2026, 7:55 PM UTC

somesortofthing wrote: post #550

I think Opus 4.7+ being annoying is actually indicative of something else: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to make the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.

Post by mnicky » Fri, Aug 14, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

0x500x79 wrote: post #237

stefan_ wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.