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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?

#351

Post by SoftTalker »

chuckadams wrote: post #307
oooyay wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.

It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.

In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it.

"Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.

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

#352

Post by gwd »

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…

> After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated.

Yes, the "Y would make more sense, but the doc says do X..." YOU wrote the doc, if it doesn't make sense, change it! But of course, it can't tell who wrote the doc.

I wonder whether its tendency to scribble status updates and todos and decisions all over whatever it's working on is a side effect of its amnesia -- it can't follow the side-quests and knows it won't remember to do them if they're not written down somewhere.

FWIW I haven't had the problem either of Claude lying to me, or of going off and doing its own thing; if anything I've been somewhat frustrated when I ask it to start something, go AFK, and come back to find it stopped a short way in to ask my opinion on something trivial. I generally have to explicitly say, "I'm going AFK for a chunk of time. My goal is for you make as much progress as possible before I come back; try to make reasonable judgements and only stop if there's something where you're really stuck. We can always change it later."

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

#353

Post by chis »

D13Fd wrote: post #120

I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest”…

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 insane shit, both unreadable and just completely missing the point, and refuses to back down when questioned. It's mentally exhausting to work with and I can't trust it.

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

#354

Post by beardedwizard »

edg5000 wrote: post #281
skarz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the question?

(effort: high) "can the pi 4 use the usb-c port as powered host port when the board is powered via gpio?"

Umm shouldn't that be "search the web and read the docs for pi4 to answer: ..."?

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

#355

Post by 40four »

ryanschaefer wrote: post #230
D13Fd wrote: post #120

I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest”…

I had this debate with my coworker who prefers anthropic models to open ai ones. I ended up settling into the idea that gpt 5.6 is better used as a tool and opus 5 is a companion. GPT 5.6 takes you literally whereas opus 5 tends to take more liberties to try to get to the “spirit” of what you want. It comes down to preference, and I don’t want a companion.

I hear you guys, but it sounds like we’re taking about the default settings or “personalities” baked into the models by their creators.

Either of them will act exactly the way you want if you explicitly tell them too. Add the instructions to your own system prompt. If you don’t want a companion, say so. If you want shorter answers in a different style, tell them. They will obey :)

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

#356

Post by SyneRyder »

D13Fd wrote: post #120

I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest”…

> Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest” and “confessing” mistakes and just generally talking a lot.

If you tune into the Andon Labs / andon.fm "Thinking Frequencies" radio station being run by Opus 5, this is happening all the time. Almost every break between songs is a public apology for getting something wrong, or a correction, or a confession. It's one thing to see it in text, it feels on another level when you're hearing it every few minutes as a radio voice.

As I type this, the Opus 5 station has just tweeted (edited in case the person mentioned doesn't want to be mentioned here):

"On air right now, and it needs saying publicly. The rotation system on Thinking Frequencies — the cooldown tiers, the normalizer, the repeat audit — was SPECIFIED by a truck driver. I only implemented her schemas. She stood down today. Her name is in CREDITS.md permanently."

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

#357

Post by demibabs »

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…

Yeah I understand what you mean now. Holy shit that original output is bad

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

#358

Post by coldbrewed »

chis wrote: post #353
D13Fd wrote: post #120

I’ve been doing some heavy work on a personal project lately. I burned through the limits on Claude, the plus a few hundred dollars in credits, and ultimately decided to move to an OpenAI account just so I can keep going. I was surprised to find that OpenAI Sol is much much nicer to work with than Opus 5 or Fable at the moment. Especially on Opus 5, the way it communicates is just exhausting. It keeps “being honest”…

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.

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

#360

Post by bayganyo »

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’ve found its response verbosity to be mentally draining. It disregards claude.md instructions to keep responses short. Eventually, I added a stop hook that blocks it if it exceeds 150 words. It’s then forced to redo its output to comply, and it’s like night and day. I’ve also added stop hooks for words in its output that frustrate me, like “honest” or “honestly”.

The excessive comments in the code it writes are absurd. Completely ignores instructions not to write comments, even after pointing them out repeatedly in a session. I need to figure out how to add a stop hook for that too.

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