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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?

#311

Post by sudosteph »

tempest_ wrote: post #212
yorwba wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.

"seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.

That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.

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

#312

Post by [deleted] »

dofm wrote: post #294
kypro wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk. The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?". It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude wa…

Claude writes like a guy at a firm I used to work with in the 90s; he was my employer's "visionary"; he'd worked at a whole lot of different companies on both sides of the Atlantic in inexplicably high-placed roles given that he was often bluffing, and was considered a lucky hire of a rising star. He'd be called into meetings with high end clients to spout off. He really needed you to know he understood, but very oft…

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by hackitup7 »

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…

Perfectly captures it. Opus writes like it's an insecure person trying to impress a first date. Big words and strange structural rhetorical flourishes for no purpose. Like dude I'm just trying to summarize a few emails and meeting notes, I'm not prepping for the vocab section of the GREs.

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

#314

Post by troupo »

tharkun__ wrote: post #98
Retr0id wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help. My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (huma…

I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them. Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less lik…

As the context fills up the models will happily firget and ignore any number of any sections of your CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md.

Edit:

I've had explicit instructions for communication style in CLAUDE.md, in Claude's project "memory", in global "memory", in "skills": it couldn't care less where it was. It would just ignore it.

When I would point this out it would just say "Yes, I violated communication guidelines, I won't do that again". Only to do that again in the next session.

This applies to everything: code guidelines, communication guidelines, preferences, decisions etc.

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

#315

Post by Foobar8568 »

karimf wrote: post #37
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 100%. I was Anthropic-pilled. I had a $200/mo subscription and I only used Anthropic models. I was frustrated by the verbose output and the writing style. I tried ASD-STE-100, it helped a bit, but it's still too verbose for my taste. Then I tried GPT 5.6 Sol. It's night and day. I think Anthropic just RL too hard on coding capabilities and never calibrated or benchmarked the writing styles.

I didn't like to use GPT for agentic coding, review yes, but with Opus 5, well I really can't stand anything of that model. I feel that sol xhigh is even better than fable.

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

#316

Post by Jgrubb »

jodacola wrote: post #114
Jgrubb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's tin foil about that? It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text.

Because it’s one thing to get me to spend more tokens because of how well a model functions, and another thing entirely to purposefully speak in unparseable prose that requires me to spend more tokens to understand what is going on. I’m fine with the former, while the latter is manipulative, and I rationalize to “surely that’s not actually happening.” Maybe I’m not giving my thoughts enough credit, though: maybe it’s…

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm saying "It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text." - ie, what you don't want to think is happening is very obviously what is happening.

It charges by the unit and it decides how many units it produces. It decides how much money it makes, therefore it decides "more".

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

#317

Post by agentdrek »

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…

I wonder if I am not bothered by the useless verbosity of these things because I've been so immersed in business speak for so long. I am already tuned on quickly "finding the nugget" of useful info in blobs of what people send me. So it's mildly annoying but I can find the signal well enough without actually reading word by word.

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

#318

Post by artdigital »

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…

Do you have some examples of this? I can’t fully imagine how sentences like that actually look like (not native English here)

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

#319

Post by Planktonne »

kypro wrote: post #175
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…

It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk. The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?". It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude wa…

It's not poetic or highly expressive; it's business cruft.
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