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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?

#571

Post by app13 »

Valord wrote: post #416
jordz wrote: post #329

Opus 4.6 was the sweet spot for me as a thinking partner specifically. I use these models for coding, but also a lot of product, commercial, financial and architectural work where I’m trying to develop something half-formed. 4.6 was unusually good at understanding what I was trying to get at, playing it back cleanly, getting the nuance, and extending it without bastardising it as the conversation was drawn out. It co…

Sticking mostly with 4.6 here too.

Last model from Anthropic that I can use as a security researcher. 4.8+ won't even look at my git repos

Granted they contain robot dog malware, but still.

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

#572

Post by paimapi »

saaaaaam wrote: post #531
paimapi wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a wide array of assessments when it comes to reading comprehension. the one you refer to, the GRA, sets the 'sixth grade level' as whether or not a reader understands the author's main points, is able to answer conceptual questions related to the text, and then apply those to relevant situations. beyond this level is the ability to essentially be skeptical of a text and to know how to critically analyze it. s…

I’m inherently skeptical of big walls of text like this these days. (So here’s a big wall of text of my own!) However, a lot of what is written here makes sense. And particularly “if your comprehension level stops [here] you get 'big words in complex sentence structure sounds smart and right so it is smart and right' even if the reasoning and process is poor” This is exactly the problem. And another point you make: >…

I do appreciate the thoughtful response to a really long wall of text lol. and yes, I agree - I think that'll be the lesson that society is going to take probably far too long to learn, to not see everything as a nail that AI can hammer at. a lot of tech companies are in essentially a 'fuck around and find out' phase with AI taking over code review, testing, etc. combined with the expectation of shipping 3X the amount of code, we've enshittified the entire SDLC. and so we have near-daily incidents, data leaks, etc, something that I was able to measure and report on at my old place of work to, well, no avail

it's the old tortoise vs hare parable, I think. go fast, make a bunch of mistakes, get too arrogant, and you lose out. your forum might be slightly lower engagement now while people are caught up in the latest fad but your rules are proactive for a future where average people hopefully realize that you can't trust an LLM that has zero context, no real harness and determinstic tests to speak of, and a propensity towards probabilistic rabbit holes that result in hallucinations. at least that's the kind of space I'd look for now and largely why I've given up on a lot of other forums

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

#573

Post by jsrozner »

gwd wrote: post #336
demibabs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Example of this? I don’t have a Claude sub so it’s a bit hard to visualize what you mean.

Here's an actual output from Claude from a conversation about rewording a document to make it more readable: > Start with §1 (Overview) as the register-calibration piece. It's small, it's the section where the skimmability goal bites hardest, and your review of it teaches me the target voice cheaply before the bulk ports (the map and appendix B are the big volume). One review round on §1 is worth more than any amount…

The funny thing about imprecision (e.g., in poetry) is that it allows for varying downstream interpretations. I wonder if there's some pressure to use "poetic" language so that the model does not overly commit itself to something.

Sales and corporate speak are like this: sycophantic language that seems plausible, ostensibly sounds good, but commits you to nothing.

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

#574

Post by nhecker »

blharr wrote: post #436
waffletower wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can prune a plum tree but you can't plum a prune true

But you /could/ make a pruned plum tree plumb.

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

#575

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

> A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.

Ka-ching

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

#576

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

IgorPartola wrote: post #540
Panoramix wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it. Like if I was talking to a person who constantly used a phrase they liked I would notice it and it is possible I might get irritated by it, but I wouldn’t necessarily. In high school I had a teacher that would say “that type of thing” a lot. One time my friend and I counted it during one class period and he averaged to use the phrase every 48 seconds…

> I am curious why LLM writing has such an uncanny valley feel to it.

Because they are HEAVILY trained to give addictive responses.

They don't want to just answer your question. They want to sycophantically make you feel like a genius for being smart enough to use them.

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

#577

Post by nonethewiser »

barrkel wrote: post #252
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…

I have a chunky bit of functionality in my hobby app using babylon.js to render 3D worlds using things like portals and LoD rendering to manage the visual load. I built it out with a combo of Fable and Opus 5. I too got fed up with the prose of Opus in particular, and tried going back. Unfortunately, the previous models were less able to hack it. The prose was better but progress was worse. It wasn't just conversatio…

> "isSolidWall(x)" it would write something like "weightyNotEphemeral(x)"

Is this a literal example? That is wild.

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

#578

Post by shinycode »

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…

Thank you I thought I was crazy, but it’s not only me. Unbearable to work with compared to a few months back

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

#580

Post by bwhiting2356 »

sevenzero wrote: post #17

I hate that it now tries to verify frontend behavior through a headless browser instead of just looking at the code...

big disagree. Making assumptions about UX from code only without looking was a major problem. (Although vision is still not great. Trying to be patient)
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