This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.
I’ve tried so many things and I have to beat Opus 5/Fable 5 over their head every time. With Opus 5, the failure to actually improve the writing is borderline comical. Both models have been building up tomes of memories on top of my core rules, all to be ignored.
Nothing sticks mid-writing! The only lever is to ask to revise after the fact, a particularly futile proposition for anything non-trivial with Opus 5.
In contrast, GPT 5.6 Sol Max absolutely obeys my edicts to write well. I selected the concise writing style and its default writing is really not bad, but tighten it up with a standing AGENTS.md order and it obeys.
The downside is that even at Max, it’s not as good as Fable or Opus 5 xhigh at writing code. Larger work and the 256k context’s forced compactions cause it to lose track/fidelity of critical details. Review passes are essential.
Another reason I’m considering leaving Anthropic are the sporadic refusals… Fable printed a Markdown body with a hex dump to inspect for trailing white space and line endings, boom, denied due to `reasoning_extraction`. Had to tell Fable to never do hex dumps. Asked it a few times “what do you think is typically done for this?”, got another `reasoning_extraction` error. It forces you to lose a whole turn of work when you have to press Esc/Esc to “retry” the last prompt… except if that prompt was mid-turn, you’re losing your entire turn.
The recent BashFirst experiment is hella nuts, where it prefers writing bash over Edit/Write tools in auto mode. WTF Anthropic?
I pity those stuck with Claude in an enterprise/work setting.