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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?

#781

Post by valleyer »

argee wrote: post #415
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.

> Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. This is potentially expensive advice (at least for many mainstream options). Where an English word like "literature" is one token, a couple of Chinese characters that spell a word can be 4 tokens. You'll pay more for input/output and get less of a context window (per word) too.

Incidentally, according to https://gpt-tokenizer.dev, in gpt-5, "literature" is two tokens ("liter" + "ature"), whereas "文学" is one.

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

#783

Post by logicallee »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #758
logicallee wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there a silent majority of Claude users who really enjoy what we call the LLM-isms? Maybe, but isn't Claude also largely aimed at developers? Purely out of my own curiosity, I just asked Claude to have fun with itself by making itself a game it enjoys, to play it, and to write its experience.[1] I don't know if it's true or confabulated (maybe it doesn't really know its experience and is just hallucinating it) bu…

> https://github.com/robss2020/claude-fable-5-having-fun If you haven't already seen it, you might appreciate https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace . That's what this made me think of anyway.

thanks for the link! super interesting.

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

#784

Post by phist_mcgee »

dagmx wrote: post #649
Paradigma11 wrote: post #587

A gem Opus 5 gifted to me today: "A devastating pair of findings, and the first is beautiful in a way worth naming: the anti-vacuity floor is what blinds the gate to a vacuous case."

Oh yes, Claude seems to be loving the word vacuous recently. My test bed side project is full of vacuous this and that now. I even try and get it to define what it classifies as vacuous and it can’t do so without getting stuck in some kind of trap. It’s like a word with some kind of huge gravity for it.

Like how opus 4.7 or so started talking about the 'seam' between different things.

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

#786

Post by cromka »

indemnity wrote: post #635
oefrha wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did release an Opus 5 prompting guide saying you need to explicitly prompt it to be concise or it will be very verbose. YMMV but it got better for me to some extent. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

And where would we put this? I don’t want to write that out every prompt. CLAUDE.md is a joke, it has little to no effect. Basically, I’ve gone from supporting them to hoping someone else wipes the floor with them.

Funny, I'm the same. And if find Sol way more pleasant to work with, not to mention way faster. And Sol's compacting is superior, I haven't yet run into it forgetting something crucial from the pre-compact conversation, meanwhile Fable does that notoriously.

When they eventually make Fable available to cheapest plan, I'll downgrade. It's worth keeping for reviewing the code and the UI tasks, but nothing else.

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

#787

Post by rayiner »

californical wrote: post #657
npalli wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, it writes so much better than the average human that it's what everyone started using. Hence the utter familiarity and now contempt.

I agree that it’s better at writing than a 50%-ile human, but it’s worse at communicating through writing than most humans. Even an average human writer can communicate details much more succinctly and directly than an LLM

Not at all. I think you have a mistaken view of who the average human is. They are terrible at turning their thoughts into written language. It's just nebulous clouds. Claude is like 75th percentile at communicating ideas.

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

#788

Post by cromka »

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…

One thing I noticed working with Sol and Fable is that I can speed read, literally glimpse over Sol output and understand what it's saying. With Fable/Opus it's the exact opposite: I have to read every god damn sentence, sometimes twice, and often already losing the bigger picture in the process.

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

#789

Post by [deleted] »

kingleopold wrote: post #465
edg5000 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can use OpenRouter pricing to get an idea about what competitive inference pricing is like without R&D or other costs, and indeed we'd be screwed if we had to pay those rates. We'd go from 100-200 USD to 2000-4000 USD/m.

no if prices were that high, millions of developers would switch to hand writing, open source LLM help and outsourcing at those levels, AI companies know this, you should too.

[deleted]

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

#790

Post by bob1029 »

I've been working on an enterprise chat bot for a client for about half a year now. I couldn't help but notice that the parts of their technical team who were adamant about supporting anthropic's models (in addition to or opposition to OAI models) have fallen completely silent.

In February/March it felt like they were ready to cancel the contract over it. Holding my ground was almost impossible because of the intense marketing push that everyone was being exposed to.

Today, I think we all silently agree with the original direction. I can tell that no one wants to die on this hill anymore. I am willing to accept the consequences for the 5.6 model family doing slightly weird things. I've made that clear to the client. I am not willing to do the same for other model families anymore. Not in this context where the client can walk away from me the moment they are unhappy with the performance of the system or the direction it is headed in.

For better or worse, OAI feels like it's become the MSSQL or .NET of the AI world. Annoyingly effective, not (fully) open, sometimes expensive, ran by an "evil" organization, but otherwise wildly predictable. I can actually build a roadmap around this and walk a client through it without them losing track of the rabbit.

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