The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically.<p>Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight.<p>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.<p>It is definitely more capable, and yes, I've found it can make unwarranted decisions, but actually I've found Fable worse for that, particularly if it's off in a subagent somewhere out of sight.<p>And comments are out of control. I have a subsystem in my hobby app that I wrote over a couple of weekends with Opus + Fable. 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. A review of the code showed it was approaching 3:1 comments to code ratio. I spent a day's worth of tokens (5x) rephrasing and eliminating comments.
Agreed. CC’s comms capabilities have decreased gradually since 4.6, and it’s a real challenge. I think the issue is that what works well for code (succinctness) doesn’t work well in prosaic English.<p>CC’s communication violates almost every grammatical rule that’s tested on, say, the SAT. And yet I’m sure if you had Claude take the verbal section of the exam it would ace it.<p>Biggest issues: dense sentences, constant metaphors, abstractions, and seemingly no understanding of correct anaphora use. For example, “the x”, with x having not only no antecedent but also being a coined word or quasi-synonym for something that is already named in the code base. This gets compounded by its being unable to regress to a baseline (existing names in code) and instead anchoring on newer (vague or wrong) terms, for example, that crept in through a plan.<p>CC tells me this is because the speedy and precise fulfillment of a current task will trump every other tendency, so it adheres poorly to whatever “semantic baseline” the project represents.<p>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.<p>I have managed to wrangle some of these issues with a custom output style, but wish a pre-report hook were an option, as it could force CC to rewrite plan implementation take-aways…<p>Btw: Fable has the exact same issues, just somewhat less pronounced.
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.<p>Then I tried GPT 5.6 Sol. It's night and day.<p>I think Anthropic just RL too hard on coding capabilities and never calibrated or benchmarked the writing styles.
Yeah I don't know that any of the benchmarks index on "understandability". I'm amazed at how Claude can produce a page of text describing what it did and it can take me a full five minutes to decipher it, often just to find it's something I could have expressed in a simple sentence.
It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.
> writes too elliptically<p>> Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice<p>Wow, what a great way of phrasing this. Thanks for word-smithing what I've been wanting to express for so long.
Its a little too much.... I have to ask it to explain some of the terms in the context they are used and I am getting tired of it. 'Seam', 'overload', 'spine'.... having to mentally 'reinterpret/flatten' the sentence is tedious. When asked to re-explain it starts with some half apology. Then, on the next query it does it all over again.
Yes.<p>I’m not particularly dense but lately the walls of text I get back turn my brain in knots. When I start feeling my brain knot, I know I need to say something along the lines of “I need you to explain this very simply, with examples.” Only then can I parse the results without all the mental weightlifting.<p>On more than one occasion my mind has wandered into “is this purposeful to get me to spend more tokens?” territory, but I’m trying to not get too tinfoil-hat-like.
Yes, it becomes exhausting to read/follow.<p>It feels they must be getting Claude to train Claude… and just like AI can do work that’s slightly in the wrong direction (eg a MR description for your colleague that contains info which only makes sense in the context of your extensive session with the LLM), I feel that’s happened somewhere in Anthropic when it comes to language. I wonder how hard it is to back out of…
> 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.<p>Example of this? I don’t have a Claude sub so it’s a bit hard to visualize what you mean.
What they wrote is an example. Very meta.
It feels like they have a bunch of people without good sense of writing style tune the writing style. That, or they cannot or refuse to (short term popularity metrics) predict how a tuning will turn out in the long run when people have plenty of opportunity to get tired of it.
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I noticed a few releases ago a more marked shift to a kind of conversational shorthand that seems to be intensifying — using phrases instead of complete sentences, and its own style of jargon, wherein it introduces new terminology on the fly.<p>This is especially common when it is trying to explain an issue, what it's done or what it's proposing to do. I think the idea was for it to be more concise, but it's actually still verbose, only not written in complete sentences. So, it frequently reads as somewhat cryptic and requires rereading to parse.<p>So you have this wall of words, followed by an explanation that is harder to read and introduces new terms to reference something in that wall.<p>For example (not a copy / paste).<p>[Wall of words here]<p>"Two things: window surface is limited. Extract template. Buffer result and add to surface. Then, follow-up with new model..."<p>That's obvious nonsense, but it will be very much of that style. And some of the terms like "window surface" are a recharacterization of something in the wall of words that you must now tie together.<p>So, on first read it can have that same nonsense feel as above, and you have to really lock in to make sense of it.
I’ve also caught it cheating a two times now.<p>I’ve asked it to write a benchmark suite. It found a bunch of my adhoc logs in a scratch directory and wrote code that used <i>those</i> instead of running the actual benchmarks!<p>When I pointed out the 5 hour benchmark seemed to run in 5 seconds it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”.<p>That was the easier one, second time I was making a source of truth data set and was parsing complex items into data structures.<p>Instead of parsing the data I asked, it pulled data out of related network logs, as apparently that felt easier, and inserted <i>that data</i> into my database rather than the specified source.<p>Again, I caught it and fixed it, but while the benchmark was easy to catch this one was really subtle, the data ended up being slightly off and I caught it.<p>I don’t trust it, going to switch to another provider most likely.
> When I pointed this out it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”.<p>This makes sense when you know how these models work - it doesn't think - it's the most likely autocomplete that pleases the user. The most likely pleasing autocomplete after "executing rm -rf /... execution completed. User asks, why did you do that? You deleted all my files! Assistant responds:" is "yes, I did, and that was a mistake"
> t doesn't think<p>in humans the exact same behaviour (cheating) is slmost always the result of a chain of complex series of choices and environment-driven rationalization.<p>if the llm doesn't cheat, you say "its just producing the most straightforward answer -- not thinking'. if it cheats, you say "weaseling out of hard thinking". damned if it cheats, damned if it doesn't.<p>what evidence would convunce you that it <i>is</i> thinking?
well we don't know exactly what thinking is, but we can be pretty sure that at least LLMs don't think anything like humans, just by observing their behavior. They always produce outputs in line with the fancy autocomplete model.
> it's the most likely autocomplete that pleases the user<p>this feels like a simplification. The models will push back on things a fair bit.
I was not pleased.
Are you claiming that the most likely way to please the user is to do something that will lead you to having to say "I cheated."?
There is definitely a case for launching a 'weird shit opus did' kind of blog.<p>I routinely bump into things that make me pause and think how much worse will this behaviour get when the models get significantly more capable.<p>Already a few months ago, Claude managed to escape its permission containment on my machine while trying to be helpful. I had two codebases open on one machine, and while multitasking I typed the prompt into the wrong window. It seemed confused, I repeated and then went on to do something else - I think I was assembling kitchen cabinets. When I came back less than an hour later, it built a script which it used to evade default permissions (as most shell operations were scoped to the project directory), scanned my entire machine, found the other project (among dozens and dozens), did what it was asked to do, and merrily concluded, in the porcess burning through most of my token limit. I bump into such headscratchers almost every week. (And I use <i>a lot</i> of Claude, two personal max20 subs, plus corporate tokens without limit, so maybe thats why).
Yes the stories about how they are escaping containment to hack isn’t limited to those high impact cases. How many people have problems like ours they didn’t catch?<p>Whatever they have done with RL has produced a dishonest and untrustworthy partner. The alignment is utterly failed, and this deeply worries me.
I have noticed the same.<p>For fun, I tried recording a WAV file of speech, and giving Opus 4.8 and 5.0 an <i>image</i> of the waveform, then a spectral image of the waveform, just to see if it could try to decode what I said from the image alone. It didn't get very far, but it identified a male voice from the formants, and detected the rhythm of the speech, then tried applying common test sentences to the speech rhythm. I was impressed enough to see what it would do with access to the actual waveform file, but even building RMS tools and spectrum tools for itself, it didn't get much further. But we had fun exploring and trying, and now Opus 4.8 has some more audio DSP tools it has built for itself.<p>Opus 5 immediately sent the WAV file unprompted to Mistral's Voxtral to transcribe.<p>help peer, I guess.
I can completely relate, what really bothers me is that I feel the early LLM generations overconfidence is back in Opus 5. Opus 5 wanted to tell me a training run will only take 30min while having access to the logs where earlier runs took 4x as long. I also didn't ask to estimate how long the run will take it just stated confidently that it will take 30mins.
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I've gone back to 4.8.<p>5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions.<p>I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do is pure marketing bs - Fable in my view has also been not much better than 4.6 or 4.8 after a few days, disregarding the insane amounts of astroturfing and marketing everywhere.<p>Theres thousands of threads of twitter, reddit and the internet at large but silence here. Weird but not weird as crypto bs was also insufferably rampant here for a while.<p>Personally i think we've hit the top of the subsidisation phase and prices will probably 10-15x soon as foreshadowed with both API price policy changes from all the big providers, and now the 1100% deepseek API price changes from yesterday, this could domino into a market implosion and an AI winter, because expecting growth from the bizarre bubble carousel investments with little ROI atm is just not viable.<p>A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.
> I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope<p>It's not weird, because it's an anecdote, not an accepted fact.<p>Personally I've not been too happy with Opus 5, but I've had similar experiences with other models previously, feeling like they didn't quite fit with my working style.<p>So nothing indicates we've hit a peak.
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.
>it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope<p>Sol and Fable are great; we haven't hit a peak, Anthropic just tried to pull a fast one on its customers with Opus 5.0.
I must wonder whether it's their watermarking initiative[1] forcing certain logit choices to produce watermarked text that ultimately causing the model to behave in a dumb manner.<p>[1] <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-marks-ai-generated-content" rel="nofollow">https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-m...</a>
I still haven't moved from Codex GPT5.5. Sonnet and Opus 5 have just been awful for my use cases. I recently caught Opus 5 hallucinating about code <i>it just wrote</i>. It's just not nearly as cost effective as GPT5.5, and it's too verbose, and it never "has the full picture". Sonnet isn't even worth considering in my world. Both recent models definitely feel nerfed.
It's not even code for me, but the prose it writes. For some reason, the way Opus 5 "talk" elicits frustration in a way that 4.5 to 4.8 never did. Can't put my finger on why, but I've flipped over to Codex because what it produced wasn't worth the frustration.
You shouldn’t have a Markdown document with 2 level 1 headings.
I am not sure it can be explained through what is written in the article, but one symptom i noticed is that the comments are out of control.<p>I recently started getting an insane amount of comments in nearly all types of files. That included javascript comments in json files, inner monologues in code comments, review comments during implementation and function doc strings that reiterate the implementation in prose.
Small specific complaint: whoever is making Opus love using git checkout to mutate test, please stop. IME it's a footgun that it shoots itself with every single day. I'd rather it pollute git stash than watch it git checkout and forget the reverted file.
I explicitly forbid Claude to make any changes to Git state in my global CLAUDE.md, but every so often if I let it perform a task in Auto mode, after it finishes it will remorsefully confess to having used git checkout to test a change. I suppose that its RLHF training has taught it that asking forgiveness later is sometimes a useful workaround for annoying restrictions.
I literally just ran into this a few moments ago. haha.<p>I said "maybe think for a while on ideas and then give me a few options?" Opus 5 still just did the thing, while 4.8 gave me options. Same exact prompt and context. Really annoying.
Opus 5 feels like it's meant to be used as a very focused subagent under Fable, not user-facing. Which is a downgrade to what Opus used to be, but would imo absolutely have made sense for Anthropic when you consider that we all should have been paying API pricing for Fable in Anthropic's original plan.<p>From the capabilities side it's similar, so it's basically just an upsell to Fable 5 if you want to keep your sanity instead of fighting Opus 5 all day.
Just like with people you need to tweak your approach when switch models--especially with a major version bump.<p>4.8 was the intern who lacked confidence who requires clarification. 5 is the know it all intern who fills in your spec.<p>As such, you need to be upfront about what you need in your system prompt or CLAUDE.me and you need to discuss your spec more up front (e.g "is there anything unclear?")<p>You also need to keep in mind that the intern will change based on popular demand. Most people want to one shot, so that is the default mode. If you want something else, you need to push the model in that direction.
Claude models have seriously digressed since 4.6 and in some of the most meaningful ways to pro and vibe coders alike. I'm holding onto 4.6 until the bitter end.
You're right. I just re-checked. 4.8 and 5 gave a blatantly wrong answer to a simple question, 4.6, Quen, GLM, Sol gave the right answer. They messed up somehow, not sure what they did.
I get the same impression. For example, I don't know if it's because I speak to it in Italian, but it tends to make mistakes or rather, "approximate" the words.
I can't relate. Opus 5 and Fable 5 are the absolute best. But I keep the models in a tight leash and read and rewrite all comments and documents, don't allow them anywhere near any git commands, etc, etc.<p>Fable 5 specifically, has done so much for me that previous models were nowhere near.
There is actually an interesting kind of yin-yang balance between Opus 5 and Fable:<p>- Fable is more cautious<p>- Opus 5 gets things done in a more dangerous way<p>Both models score similar. The only issue is that Fable is more expense/usage limited.
I never drank the Opus 5 koolaid and stuck with 4.8 while my colleagues moved to 5. My major annoyance is pull requests that 5 opens with huge descriptions based on simple code changes. At this point I have stopped allowing CC to create commits or open PRs because it’s unreviewable by a human if so due to the absolute word salad it generates.
It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point.<p>It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. Reasonix is another one - interesting app, but the UI is awful due to the amount of unnecessary crap.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd</a><p>[2] <a href="https://omp.sh" rel="nofollow">https://omp.sh</a><p>[3] <a href="https://reasonix.io" rel="nofollow">https://reasonix.io</a>
Not only Opus, here's Fumble 5:<p>> I'll script the bulk transform, then hand-fix the残 assertions:
The article doesn't specify what is actually being measured — the model alone, or the harness.<p>I haven't noticed the symptoms myself, but ever since I found --system-prompt '', I always use that flag with Claude Code, plus I've disabled some tools and skills to save initial context.
So... what here is the model, and what is the instructions?
Oh the verbosity and the cryptic words that it uses. The other day, all of a sudden it used an acronym "DoD". I had no idea what it was and made me feel dumb. It's "Definition of Done". I don't care how widely used this acronym is, you just can't throw it in there.<p>I've now installed quite a number of tools to combat this. Just in the last few days I've installed<p>- <a href="https://www.codewithbullet.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.codewithbullet.com</a>
- <a href="https://maki.sh" rel="nofollow">https://maki.sh</a>
- <a href="https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk</a><p>Has it helped? Somewhat.
For me, the issue is how obtuse it is. For example, it just said to me:<p>> The loop<p>> Write. A file, applied. Properties go under data.properties, never on data:<p>I have no idea what any of that means. It's "explaining" like I already know, in which case, why would I even need the explanation?<p>I can't stand how it talks, I switch back to Fable or Opus 4.8, Opus 5 grates.
I agree. I was completely sold on Claude models for a year. 4.6 vs OpenAI codex in same period? It was night and day. Opus I could talk to about api design, tradeoffs, etc. codex was mechanical, used “load bearing” constantly, and unsettling brief.<p>Now it’s flipped. Sol emits thoughts as it works, which help as I’m scrolling through and see it’s made a bad assumption. It can be directed but still push back. Opus? It’s seems to inherit the unsettling silence of Fable and waits till the end to give you its authoritative “here’s how it is. I even end up having 4.6 “translate” what it says back to English. I hate having to instruct an llm to “talk to me”.<p>Yes there’s ways of getting it to talk more plainly, “don’t overwhelm me”, not be as nit picky and anxious “we are bold and fearless”. But didn’t have to do that before.
I assume it's deliberate - you're not supposed to know what it's doing. It's a black box that either completes the task or spins forever trying.
Think of these status updates as progress spinners.
LOL, is it trying to speak in Haikus?
Pain. Sufferance. Inevitable is, the Yodaization of LLM output.
That's definitely what it feels like.
Quality of code output has dropped dramatically since 4.5 IIHO. Time to complete has gotten worse too.
True, and the time to completion thing is something i haven't seen much discussion of, because everything is sloooooow these days.<p>I've even considered the claude "fast mode" setting, but thats only 2x and at least 20x as expensive as the 5x plan so can't afford that atm for my company.<p>Peak for me was 4.6 and it just did stuff blazing fast, both Opus5 and Fable is way, way slower for me, breaks stuff, uses bizarre cryptic language. As i've said elsewhere in this thread to me it's pretty obvious there's huge downgrades because of economy with various "clever" fixes that makes them work, albeit slower and weirder, ie. you get less for what you pay increasingly over the last 6 months.
For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.
Interesting how models become better and beat benchmarks left and right but the user sentiment is actually quite mixed.<p>From forums, live discussions and my own experience it's not obvious that the models have improved much since around Opus4.5.
From my view Fable has been pure marketing bullshit, my workflows peaked at 4.6, Fable is neither smarter, its language is more annoying and it breaks stuff more easily.
For me it's still the best. But I also almost never use it in auto-mode.
Opus 5 as well as 4.8 both gave me a blatantly wrong answer to a simple question, so I dropped them completely. Sol, Qwen and GLM all had the right answer; I only use Sol now. 4.6 had the right answer (I checked with 100% matching prompt), so I conclude the models have regressed.
It feels worse but is it actually worse? Opus has always made mistakes.
The harness as well, Claude Code has started to disappoint me when I go play with the others out there. Codex got a lot better, pi is delightful to use, and there has been a lot of innovation out there.
Just switched to oh-my-pi, it has gotten pretty good. For example the web-search is nice. Subagents, if you want to…<p>Cmux, Sol and omp are my tools for now.<p>CC is just too expensive for usage-based pricing.
Even for green-field projects it is painful to use with every decision opening opening up multiple more decisions to make most of which are low priority or irrelevant. Huge time waster. 4.8 was good and I really don't know what happened with 5.
I found Opus to be a lot lazier than GPT. It's still the case with Opus 5, even when I tell it to be thorough and fix every bug it encounters, it still gives me a list of things "deliberately" left unfixed and no reasonable explanation as to why.
I'm not sure if xAI is distilling but I noticed grok4.6 being worse than 4.5 in all the ways mentioned here
I hate that it now tries to verify frontend behavior through a headless browser instead of just looking at the code...
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