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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?

#731

Post by mrtesthah »

laurels-marts wrote: post #632
artdigital wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s how I see it too. Claude is more “fun” to use, like a coworker I have to talk to now and then to steer it, while gpt-5.6 is a task machine: I give it a task and it is very consistent, reliable and predictable in its execution. I don’t have to interrupt it, it gets the task done exactly how I wanted it, but it’s “boring” and feels more sterile

Sol is an absolute machine. I stopped doing parallel worktrees just because the cost of context switch outweighs the cost of waiting Sol to just finish the task it’s working on which is usually anywhere from 1-10mins. I also like Codex CLI more than the Codex App bc it’s more scriptable and displays all the tool calls and reasoning whereas in the App it’s kind of folded away/obscured. This way as soon as I see a tool…

Yes, Codex has no comparison so far.

Do you use the annotations and forking features in codex CLI? I can't find an easy way to access them.

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

#732

Post by inventor7777 »

I don't mind too much about ChatGPT's writing style, I find it a smidge better than the Fable/Opus outputs I have read.

However, it makes me rather frustrated when it says stuff like "You accidentally " e.g "You accidentally stumbled on the cleanest way!"

Or when it sends a shell command to run, and when it fails (due to a hallucinated flag or similar), it phrases it as if I got it wrong...this has gotten better with GPT-5.6, thankfully.

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

#733

Post by rnd33 »

sshine wrote: post #600
IgorPartola wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 There are sociological reasons why this happens less with humans: 1. You cycle your dumb repetitive jokes with everyone you meet, so nobody hears it twice 2. Those who know you well will notice when you're just repeating ("dad jokes") 3. As a person's idiosyncrasies are beginning to…

I think the last one is by far the biggest reason for why this happens way less in humans. In every conversation, almost for every sentence, people gauge the response their words have on whoever is listening. If something didn't land as expected (frown, confusion, unpredicted response) you unconsciously adapt and try something slightly different.

It's immediately obvious by the fact that you're clearly using way different ways of speaking (tone, speed, vocabulary) when you're speaking with a friend, versus your parents, your colleagues, people you don't know, children, etc.

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

#734

Post by xena »

asa123 wrote: post #654
xena wrote: post #650

I really don't get why people think Opus 5 is bad. In my testing it's been fine, but every other model is converging on also being fine. I have ADHD mode installed in my main Claude Code instance though, so that may be part of why I have a better time with it?

What in the world is ADHD mode? Searching it up I see this thing called an “ADHD” skill? Does that work well? It seems like the skill has some more specific scaffolding for problem solving, so (if that’s true, i didn’t read very in depth) in that case that alone might significantly reduce perfeived performance variability between models

https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd

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

#735

Post by agaj-nimm »

mcmcmc wrote: post #675
agaj-nimm wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four years ago LLMs were sometimes amazing, sometimes wrong, sometimes a huge time sink when it's almost there and you try to herd the tokens but it's like herding cats. Just today I had the exact same experience. Every single testimonial is the same as I described above, just emphasizing a different bit to defend or attack LLMs or to make a case for nuance. The two differences have been: (1) the 1.5 trillion dollar…

They will always be wrong sometimes, but it’s becoming less wrong and wrong less often. Everyone will have their own opinion on “good enough”, but if you expect perfection you are bound for disappointment. No need for that when random chance and Murphy’s law will bring enough anyway.

May be getting harder to catch the mistakes but that makes them worse in my view. I'd much rather they make easy to spot mistakes because I don't expect factuality from them anyway just speedy transformation of information I already have available.

In fact it's the lossiest transformation tool I've ever used and it's still useful despite that. If it reaches one nine of reliability that would be huge but given the pace of growth in investment a first nine would cost an absurd amount of money, and the second and third nine would cost about the Earth's GDP

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

#736

Post by bonoboTP »

paimapi wrote: post #452
saaaaaam wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Claude is very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”[0] which, I suspect, is why it is so popular. It certainly explains why half the internet is huge chunks of Claude-authored gibberish copied and pasted and published. If people didn’t think it…

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…

> it makes me think about how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg I hope Walter White survives) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg Walter White as a motif of a toxically masculine narcissist with specialized knowledge as a larger critique how mass media tends to valorize their male leads in the same vein as many other prestige shows at the time like Mad Men), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg people who now have the Heisenberg tattoo, unironically)

That's not the only smart-person way to read that show. And even if a character has flaws, or even if it's an outright villain, people can still like the character. If I tattoo Scar on me from the Lion King, does it mean I didn't understand that he's not a positive character? I can still think he's cool. I'm sure people also put Darth Vader tattoos on them. Also you're using phrases of political ideology that one doesn't have to subscribe to in order to enjoy the series.

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

#737

Post by chr15m »

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…

> The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user.

Ah, that's it! Thank you. I wonder if they are training it to talk like this because that's what their customers actually want? They want a machine genius to lead them.

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

#738

Post by ed_mercer »

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…

I agree, and I'm actually pro Opus 5 exactly for this reason. In my opinion, agents talking to agents is the future, and humans will move to a higher abstraction layer. So it's the right move to make for Anthropic.

Many of the complaints that people are having with Opus 5 are actually acknowledged and explained on opus's 5 prompting guides (https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...)

It also seems naive that Anthropic, with some of the smartest people on the planet working on AI, would not know about this.

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

#739

Post by bonoboTP »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #621
nonethewiser wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. “Academic” isnt the right term. Its dense like academic language but its also borderline incoherent.

Even more so than borderline incoherent academic writing like Foucault or Lacan or whatnot, for that matter. It’s less “I don’t understand this and I suspect the author doesn’t either” and more “reading this feels like having a stroke.”

Nowhere close. Claude can be overly compact and use a lot of neologisms, but if you unpack the dense language, it actually means something fairly concrete. In obscurantist academic writings, there is often no referent. It's just text, a kind of performance art in itself.

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

#740

Post by bonoboTP »

bwfan123 wrote: post #519
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.

> CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. When you dont know the cause, you dont have a fix. Thats the biggest issue i have with all of AI is that we dont know how it works, and yet we think it will be great ! This is more like a religious belief than a scientific one. There is no causal model of how it works, there is no theory. And the temerity to call it intelligence is annoying.

Where is the causal model of how the human brain works (on the level you're requesting)? If a causal model is needed before calling it intelligence, then humans are not intelligent.
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