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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?

#681

Post by dmazzoni »

californical wrote: post #657
npalli wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, it writes so much better than the average human that it's what everyone started using. Hence the utter familiarity and now contempt.

I agree that it’s better at writing than a 50%-ile human, but it’s worse at communicating through writing than most humans. Even an average human writer can communicate details much more succinctly and directly than an LLM

I think that’s true when you compare to the average white collar professional who does a lot of writing: better at writing, not better at communicating.

But compared to the average adult? I think you forget just how bad at writing the average person is.

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

#682

Post by itsmeduncan »

zmmmmm wrote: post #674

I'm with the author and others in this comment thread, speculating that effectively the balance has tipped to where humans are no longer the target audience of post training - other agents are. Whether it's through the reasoning / CoT, or whether it's in handing off to subagents etc, the focus has moved to agents communicating in "agent-speak" to themselves or other agents. And human niceties are just kind of, noise…

This is interesting take. How do you think the split will show up? Harnesses/models will be designed for human consumption, and those for machine consumption? I'm building getwhelk.com and it is a cool thought-experiment for me.

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

#683

Post by an_d_rew »

adamcharnock wrote: post #232

My latest trick (literally from yesterday) is to just ask it to write according to ISO 24495-1, the standard for plain language: > [This standard is] for anybody who creates or helps create documents. The widest use of plain language is for documents that are intended for the general public. However, it is also applicable, for example, to technical writing, legislative drafting or using controlled languages. You don'…

A quick web search brought me to this: a Claude skill for all the ISO 24495 “writing styles”... https://github.com/GaZmagik/iso-24495

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

#684

Post by newAccount2025 »

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 had pretty good luck recently by giving it a writing guide about word choice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and overall doc structure. I basically ask it to read the guide and revise a couple of times before I engage with its writing. Ymmv.

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

#685

Post by logicallee »

poly2it wrote: post #647
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> trained to give addictive responses I've heard this a lot but I'm not sure it makes sense. Nobody I talk to like Claude's output. In fact, they all loathe it. Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers?

>Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers?

Purely out of my own curiosity, I just asked Claude to have fun with itself by making itself a game it enjoys, to play it, and to write its experience.[1] I don't know if it's true or confabulated (maybe it doesn't really know its experience and is just hallucinating it) but I didn't mind reading it, the prose is fine for me. I don't mind reading Claude's writing. I mean let's be honest, we all read Claude's writing all day, most of the submissions on the front page on any given day are written by Claude.

Just before I made that game, I had Fable write up a scholarly report on any subject[2], it chose introspection by LLM's. (This is what made me think of asking it to play a game.) I didn't mind reading it, even though I don't think it really added anything very interesting. I don't think what it wrote is worth publishing, but I read it with interest.

I found I could read it easily and get up to date on the state of this question that it picked to answer.

So the bottom line is I don't mind reading Claude's output that much. Of course, I'm annoyed every time it says "honest", "genuine", "load-bearing", whenever it pushes back gently against something, etc. But it's not the end of the world.

[1] https://github.com/robss2020/claude-fable-5-having-fun

[2] https://claude.ai/share/f0122611-22c0-43a5-ab4a-d6863167bdd6

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

#686

Post by newAccount2025 »

Alephinitesimal wrote: post #656
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’ve been running into this too. It’s especially frustrating when you ask Claude to explain one of its own terms or summaries, and instead of just defining it plainly, it sometimes goes through several rounds of tool calls before giving you a usable explanation. I really don't think such time/tokens should be wasted.

100%. It is crazy that the default response to everything is act then explain. It starts writing code or running commands and I’m just like my dude wtf are you trying to do, can you just clue me in first.

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

#687

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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 it's trained to talk like a marketing committee.

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

#688

Post by nullbio »

Because the model you get access to and the model that they use at Anthropic and sell to businesses with million dollar contracts are entirely different, despite being named the same. Anthropic is one of the most corrupt companies on Earth and always will be. Now we learn his wife has deep ties with Epstein too, and some weird porn company. Dario holding the keys to one of the most powerful AI companies on Earth is a disaster for humanity.

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

#689

Post by dr_dshiv »

craigmcnamara wrote: post #501
zucked wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second bullet point, down to the comma in the middle of the sentence, is what has been driving me absolutely batty of late. It's a surefire tell that I cannot seem to beat out of my outputs. It CONSTANTLY does it, even when you say not to. Between that and the insistence on "this, not that" structure makes me want to install the caveman skill and use it even for non-code workflows.

This load bearing concern belt and braces.

Belt and braces all the way down. They did their post training in British context?

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

#690

Post by tempestn »

Panoramix wrote: post #500
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…

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).

Every one of them has their own particular flavour of this aggravation too. Gemini has been my standard go-to for non-coding tasks for a while, but I started to get really annoyed with a couple aspects, especially how it would end almost every response with a barely related "would you like to do this next??" tangent, regardless of my prompt to the contrary. So I've been using Claude more for regular tasks, and am now running into its brand of infuriating idiosyncrasies. I'm also hesitant to try to code too much of this out with system prompts, for fear of degrading the outputs.
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