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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?

#541

Post by galaxyLogic »

saaaaaam wrote: post #384
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native speaker, 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. Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

>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…

Reminds me of current day politics. Lots of public statements which are obviously false, and you would think the politician knows they are false, but utter them anyway because they also know lot of their supporters buy what they are saying anyway.

Now politicians also know something about their supporters so they will adapt their statements to what they think they can get away with it. But, I wonder if this leads to a two-party-system where one party attracts stupid followers and another attracts the smarter ones?

In terms of AI, we might see LLMs specialized to attract more stupid audience and others meant to attract those who appreciate correctness and facts.

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

#542

Post by julianz »

wk_end wrote: post #499
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.

Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?

Only some varieties of plum will turn into a prune when you dry them. Many will become a moldy pile of fruit flies instead.

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

#543

Post by preg_match »

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…

Comments are the biggest problem. During code review I ask it to compact comments and its idea of compact is like… removing one sentence in a 5 sentence comment.

Comments are a huge maintenance burden. They can, and will lie and need constant updating. They mislead the own model later on.

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

#544

Post by johnsmith1840 »

It's hard to work with fable and 5.6 level intelligence then havr verbal combat with opus 5. Fable is great but their blocks make it near useless the risk is me working on something for hours then complelty getting blocked.

The ridiculous text though is actually seemingly a sign of "the ai has no idea what it's doing" found it pretty relaible that if I stopped understanding its output it also jacked something up.

Cancled my 200$ plan on claude and now doubled up my OAI plan for more sweet sweet sol.

Maybe this is their water marking tech in action?

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

#545

Post by momojo »

artdigital wrote: post #324
ryanschaefer wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Reminds me of this: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-w...

I think this is such a great reframing. It makes so much sense; I need an AI that acts more as a HUD and gives me superpowers, not just a copilot that can tell me when I've misspelled a word.

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

#546

Post by mlsu »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #515
mlsu wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I should have been more precise about what is 'real intelligence' here. What I mean is that blindsight's scramblers are aliens that cannot share human values. Their structure is completely different to ours, their qualia (or whether they even have it) is impossible for us to understand. In short, they do not have a soul. When Claude does this "slowly revealing a dramatic insight" thing that it does, it does tha…

I think I understand what you are trying to convey but I fear you've made the same mistake again, this time with "soul" instead of "intelligence." I think what you are getting at is that they are deterministic automata. They are machines. We have introduced randomness to add variation but it is an artificial randomness that simply perturbs the path traversed. When we choose words it isn't because of a token distribut…

Fair.

What I am trying to get at is when people talk about "intelligence," beyond academic debates such as this one that mentions qualia, they are talking primarily about value. How intelligent the thing is is how valuable it is (often directly, in an economic sense). My argument is that value is a relational thing that must involves human feeling, intelligence actually has very little to do with it.

When a child slowly reveals to me something he's judged insightful about pokemon, it's valuable to me, even though I'm not learning new facts. When Claude does the same thing, it's not even "not valuable," it's wholly outside of value, even if I do not already know that fact or thing. If ever Claude reveals to me an insight, that insight certainly came from the training data, not from Claude. The soul came from a human being external to Claude -- the training data -- and passed transparently through Claude. Claude is a translator: it feels nothing, adds nothing. It colors the noise. I know this because the facts are the same but the aesthetic structure - how many bullet points, whether it says "delve" or "load-bearing" does change over time, according to the whims of whoever is in charge of post-training.

But the "real intelligence," is the same thing as "real value." It is the soul of the humans in the training data, the books, newspaper articles, etc.

A clever hacker news commenter might argue, well, what if we gave Claude a humanoid body and senses and let it interact with the world, then would it be intelligent? To that I would say, why waste your time and effort? You can get it for free: just talk to a friend, a neighbor, or a family member.

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

#547

Post by jiayo »

Mtinie wrote: post #187
saaaaaam wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, it also has no concept of what context the user has and assumes that it must be the same it holds in its memory, which creates this “I didn’t know that you didn’t know” type of communication. Yes, this is a repeated problem for me. It will drop something in as though we have discussed it before and when I say “hold on, what is this” it realises its error - though on more than one occasion has started to…

I notice the models with reasoning can conflate “internal” (or subagent) discussions with external (i.e. me). So it is accurately indicating “I’ve had this discussion before” but incorrectly asserting who it was with. My understanding of how “thinking”works is limited though, and given the reduced visibility into the thinking traces, it is harder to tell if this is actually happening or if these are imaginary discuss…

Yes. I've not used Opus 5 much directly, but when it was Fable and Opus 4.8, I found Fable did this all the time and it was maddening. It'd say stuff like "Oh, I mentioned that between tool calls" or something.

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

#548

Post by jiayo »

ethin wrote: post #388
saaaaaam wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's interesting - because that's absolutely what's happening in my experience. If I look at the thinking (which seems to have become unavailable in Opus 5 a lot of the time, but was present - and often useful - in 4.8/4.6) you're right - it's having the discussion with itself, and seems unable to distinguish that discussion from discussions with me. BUT it also seems to be related to the length of the chat - t…

The reasons thinking traces are pretty much gone is, supposedly, to prevent distillation. Whether that is actually true or just an excuse is up in the air (because I at least am not going to trust Anthropics claims on why they do it).

And because the thinking, which does makes it better at achieving outcomes, contains naughty words and information (e.g. private information). https://stolen-thoughts.com/

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

#549

Post by waffletower »

wk_end wrote: post #499
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.

Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?

First of all, 'prune' is French for 'plum' ('prugna' in Italian). Plums which are suitable for drying are named 'prunes' and even 'prune plums' in English. My tree is an Italian Prune (Prunus domestica) as you half mentioned. Notice that the Latin isn't "Plumus" and is "Prunus". I grew up with Purple Leaf plum trees (Prunus cerasifera). They would rot. I haven't seen fermented Italian Prunes in my yard, even the ones that the squirrels and crows have taken bites out of. You may have figured out by now that only in modern English is the fruit name conflated with the specific dried fruit product. This conflation is the point of my original comment on a narrow interpretation of the word 'seam'.

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

#550

Post by somesortofthing »

I think Opus 4.7+ being annoying is actually indicative of something else: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to make the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.
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