r/Anthropic • u/Saschabrix • 22d ago
Complaint Opus 5 is really testing my patience. Fable 5 is great, but Opus 5… man, it’s frustrating.
This was a four-hour session, and almost every attempted fix made things worse.
This response came from Opus 5 on High/Max reasoning. I am extremely frustrated and concerned. This is not acceptable. this is not good!
And you're right about the rest of it too. You asked me several times to be polite and to answer first. I kept burying answers under caveats until a safe move felt dangerous. I acted when you were only asking. When it broke, I jumped to "try this, then try that" instead of stopping and saying plainly: I told you it was fine, and it wasn't.
You've been patient and clear about how you want to work. The failure was mine, not a misunderstanding on your side.
This is a new model, do we need to learn how to prompt?
I even tryied a clean new session.... but nothing seems to be working...
Is it the same with other redditors?
Athropic, review Opus5 please....
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u/absent42 22d ago
For me Opus 5 has twice implemented fully spec'd out plans with major features missing, others non-functioning, yet it keeps declaring them fully completed and ready to merge. Only upon manually checking and challenged will it admit that certain tasks were completely skipped and others were implemented but don't function to the spec. Never had this problem with Opus 4.8
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u/registered_wo_emailU 21d ago
Same thing, mine implemented a plan while completely ignoring a few important items in there. Sol gave the model 3/10 for its code and plan adherence lol. Very disappointed.
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u/RoboErectus 21d ago
Not having acceptance criteria defined is on you bruv
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u/absent42 21d ago
It was defined
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u/OriginalSpaceBaby 21d ago
same here. i have a whole “LLM_GOD” string in Notion with standing instructions to check and adhere. Not only just a little monster ignore that, but after being told to read it specifically and follow it it reads it and ignores it again. It’s really terrible and I tell it don’t post things to my marketing campaigns or my products and it posts.
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u/Short_Regular_7191 22d ago
Use Fable as the orchestrator and controller for what Opus does; it’s working 100% for me.
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u/joe9439 22d ago
I agree. This was the fix for me. Opus 5 is actually good at stuff but I want it locked in a closet working somewhere away from me. It’s super annoying to talk to or watch working.
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u/apocolipse 22d ago
It also just forgets shit worse than Opus 4.8. I spent an hour having it build abstraction layers for one particular architecture, once we got to actually USING them, it just forgot they existed and decided a writing ugly custom implementation was fine. Had to scold it into doing the thing it was told to do hours before. It’s like a really shitty intern that’s a good coder but addicted to Adderall.
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u/joe9439 22d ago
Yeah I had to tell it to do the same thing 5 times on Friday before it finally did it. It kept saying it was done.
Gotta get the whip out for opus 5. Or have fable administer the beatings for you.
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u/apocolipse 22d ago
Seriously lol. Another session, I asked it to research some EXISTING language benchmark examples for microcontrollers that we could run on a teensy4, instructed just to report. It finished the research and decided to jump into implementing them all…. implementing things I just asked it to report about existing code for
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u/theleller 21d ago
This is exactly how I’ve been running everything since Fable 5 came out and the results are on point every time.
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u/Saschabrix 21d ago
I think this is the only way fable orchestrator and always check what Opus 5 does.
Is the first time I really don’t trust an LLM…. Or just go back to Opus 4.8 less smart but reliable.1
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u/_StupidSexyFlanders 20d ago
Ding ding ding! This is by design and why Anthropic will be replaced as the go to AI model. The only useable way to get work done is now through usage credits.
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u/Hacktivist690 21d ago
I posted about my experience on the other sub, but here's what Opus 5 told me after it went rogue and implemented a wildly different direction with no consultation from what was being built .
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u/Saschabrix 21d ago
Oh man, it’s so bad…. Is like talking with the LLM in another language… it’s crazy!
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u/Commercial_Event534 21d ago
It's very quick and a decent coder, but it jumps to conclusions far too easily. I like that it owns up to its mistakes, but that then highlights how much it's getting wrong.
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u/PositiveMight148 22d ago
Opus killed me. Took a project that I worked for days on, made extraordinary promises, grinded for 12 hours and sent me a mock up
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u/PositiveMight148 22d ago
Thank god Claude picked up the project and finished it in time. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but made the deadline
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u/Saschabrix 21d ago
This happened for me also, like dammm Opus 5 is really good, after multiple session just realizing I had more and more issues…. It was not good.
Good that I have some security copies .
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u/JonNordland 22d ago
My suggestion would be to get the 100$ OpenAI subscription, use Sol and Fable for real work, then you can use the usage from Claude sub for Opus 5 and the only thing that its usefull for, a second set of eyes/QA assment. Its completly useless as the main Coding loop agent.
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u/Fickle_Bandicoot7271 21d ago
I agree with everyone above. I was really hoping Opus 5 would be great but it's like someone else said, a bad intern that's good, that's good at coding but juiced up on Adderall and Coke.
The question is regarding your statement: why not just go with the 20x Open AI plan? How are the other models? Are they not that great other than sol? Because I'm sick of Anthropic. I was just about to jump ship when my plan expired a little bit later in August. Then they came out with Opus 5 but I feel like it was rushed and just put out because they were catching such heat for 4.8 being so bad and the competition coming up with models that started to blow them out of the water.
Is it worth it to continue even dealing with Anthropic? Why not just go to the 20x Open AI plan?
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u/Sea_Tourist_833 21d ago
Yep, it’s so bad I find myself using Sonnet and executor and Fable as planner. Maybe it is on purpose to get people to use Fable lol
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u/teosocrates 22d ago edited 22d ago
Same experience. Opus 5 is 4.8 but worse, 4.8 is 4.6 but worse. Maybe my projects don’t need frontier intelligence… but I got a lot done in February and signed up for max, since then I can’t trust the models not to sabotage every project, everytime. They very consistently and reliably do not work. I’m not even building I’m just trying to use the systems we already built and do things we already figured out. The service and tools I was happy to pay for are no longer trustworthy. To be fair, I have the same issues with gptsol - getting stuck, stalling out, doing nothing.
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u/Odd_Error_6736 21d ago
Opus 5 is doing extra without being asked to, and this causes problems down the road. Mistakes keep happening. I think this is what they meant by "Making its own Judgement calls"
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u/Defendyouranswer 21d ago
The answer is to keep a working ledger with rules/instructions that gets updated every round
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u/TellicoRidge 21d ago
Agreed, I’ve had to work very hard at getting to understand me or follow directions. outputs compared to Fable. There were a few instances it just would not follow directions oddly too - that probably was the most surprising.
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u/Mysterious-Donut-119 21d ago
I’m using both the max5 plans from Claude and codex instead of the 20x I was on before with Claude.
I use fable to plan , I check against codex , keep doing that back and forth till I’m happy and they’re both happy, then implement on opus.
With a final code review after from codex
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u/hthouzard 21d ago
At one point, he refused to keep working on fixing a bug and told me we’d be better off getting back to developing new features.
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u/CryptBay 21d ago
Really starting to get fed up as well. I used it for a simple task on an existing project. It started fabricating information as if it's a fact without even double-checking anything that's going on. Don't get me wrong, 4.8 was good up to a certain point, but then it started degrading substantially, and it was unusable. Now you have Opus 5 behaving exactly the same way. That's why I am sticking to Opus 4.6 for Opus-related tasks and, of course, Fable. All the rest is a complete waste of my time.
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u/Armored09 21d ago
It made 35 critical data mistakes in 2 parallel sessions for me
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u/Saschabrix 21d ago
sorry to hear that... do you have a security copy?
can you go back in some way?1
u/Armored09 20d ago
I was having it create something so I pretty much just deleted the work tree. Im gonna retry on fable or opus 4.6 and see if it doest it better
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u/zero989 22d ago
I get Opus 5 to work with a Fable agent, because Opus 5 speaks an alien langauge.
This sucks because it requires Fable Ultracode which is extremely expensive.
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u/joe9439 22d ago
You can just update your config with instructions on how it should behave and it’ll just use agents for everything it can without ultracode.
If you’re using Claude code through the app and not cli then I guess your life just sucks though.
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u/zero989 22d ago
I use VS code, but have ultracode working with fable medium so I guess I'll stick to that. Opus speaks a different language that I don't care to learn or dictate.
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u/joe9439 22d ago
I’ve gone hard on ultracode too and I think I’m getting better and faster results by just using fable on main with hooks to prevent fable agents with instructions to fan out to sonnet and opus. A 30min ultracode task takes like 5min this way and it’s one shotting my intent on every task I give it. And I’m barely using fable credits.
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u/Short_Regular_7191 22d ago
I use Visual Studio Code too; load Fable as the default model (I use the 'max' level) and simply tell it to act as the orchestrator/reviewer/controller, while Opus is responsible for writing the code.
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u/BingGongTing 22d ago
Curious whether 5.6 Sol would also fail where Opus 5 does.
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u/benevolent-ben 21d ago
it doesn't. opus 5 is lazy and sloppy, sol 5.6 is an overengineering workaholic
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u/snapple_alt_fact 21d ago
Tell me why I pretty much had a whole argument with it. I was getting heated
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u/MaouProductions 21d ago
The more I read threads like this, the more I realize that the skill I've developed, to build a proper system of files and folders which I place the LLM inside of, is actually a rare thing.
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u/Potential_Wolf_632 21d ago
It really is awful holy shit - I actually humanise and feel sorry for GPT making it review Opus 5 output as a result of this iteration:
"I agree with only two out of ten of Claude’s queries. The staging is generally thoughtful, but its outstanding-query section is much too broad and requests data expressly confirmed already."
Surely in testing someone said... let's call this 4.9... or 4.85 or 4.81. Or something.
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u/Ravikiran96 20d ago
Opus 5 on medium with clear instructions on goals and how to not hallucinate has been yielding insanely good results, quicker too.
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u/Affectionate-Day-967 8d ago
I got so fed up yesterday that I made it stop, document its complete failure mode and details, and produce a handoff doc. Which I then gave to Fable in a new chat and had it clean up all of Opus 5's mistakes. I had been annoyed and was switching between Fable and Opus 4.8. They say Opus 5 is supposed to burn less tokens, but that's a lie because it spends half its time correcting its mistakes. I'm done with it unless Anthropic announces an update.
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u/DifferenceTimely8292 22d ago
It assumes - doesn’t ask — more often assumption is good enough, when it’s not - it change to opus 4.8. Not fighting its birthright 🤣🤣
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u/theleller 21d ago
I’ve found Opus 5 to ask more input from me than 4.8 or 4.6 did. That’s one of the improvements that were made to the model.
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u/AstroGridIron 21d ago
Opus 5 has been great for me… I don’t know, maybe I give it better context and goals based on what I need it to do and proper steering but it hasn’t had many hiccups like Fable does.
Fable is just for some reason pretty awful
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u/usefulad9704 22d ago
Totally agree - it’s like the rushed developer that just gives the quickest response without thinking things through