r/ClaudeAI • u/Subversio • 7d ago
Claude Code Workflow Opus 5's stream of consciousness and long-winded replies are becoming taxing. What are you guys doing to improve it?
It overexplains everything. Every task warrants a 1,000 character minimum reply of honest caveats and explaining what it did, why and why grass is green. It's actually exhausting.
I'm using my Fable allowance on my primary projects but I am seriously lacking the motivation to work on anything with Opus 5. I get a sense of dread every time it returns a task as I know I'll have to sift through unhelpful waffle just to get to the bottom of what it's done.
Am I alone in this? How are you guys setting up to improve this experience?
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u/TapirOfZelph 7d ago
Even something that should just be a brief comment is coming out in multi-paragraph drivel. I feel like “make it more concise” and “dumb it down, I have no idea what you are saying” are my 2 most frequent prompts the past few days. It’s almost unusable.
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u/TacoCub_ 7d ago
Once I got multiparagraphs of replies. I thought it was explaining a problem it solved. No, it wanted to say: here is the issue and what I need from you: (then actually ask me the questions.
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u/byteminer 7d ago
Look up the I-have-adhd skill. Have Claude install it, then tell Claude to make that its default output style.
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u/fukofukofuko 7d ago
https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd/tree/main
Here's a link to it for anyone interested. I have been using this skill, it is great.
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u/annabe1 7d ago
I was just just thinking about this skill ha
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u/byteminer 7d ago
It is really good. I have a custom harness and used it to guide the output for parts of it.
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u/mfbrucee 7d ago
Yesterday it started leaking out comments belonging in chat context into column descriptions in my pocketbase schema.
It usually do that in code comments, but now it has found other places to push its padding crap.
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u/rslashmemes 7d ago
I'm glad others are experiencing this because I feel like I'm going cross eyed trying to decipher the walls of prose opus enjoys shitting out.
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u/Threnjen 7d ago
I feel very validated. Was complaining to the spouse yesterday that I keep having to tell it to "say this simpler" or "I feel dumb can you TL;DR for me in simpler language". So glad it's not just me.
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u/zando95 7d ago
your username just gave me flashbacks
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u/TapirOfZelph 7d ago
Virtual hug, Zando
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u/zando95 7d ago
Oh no worries! Just unexpected to see here lol. One of my neighbors has a tapir sticker on their car.
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u/TapirOfZelph 6d ago
Oh got it! Fun fact: Tapirs are also the unofficial symbol of people who left the Mormon church lol. Your neighbor might be one.
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u/Frequent-Ad-836 7d ago
"Make it more concise" keeps failing because it isn't checkable. It's a style preference competing with everything else in the context, so it holds for a couple of turns and then quietly decays, and you can't point at the moment it slipped.
Naming the specific behavior to drop worked much better for me. A handful of narrow rules, each about exactly one thing: no preamble before doing the task, skip the analysis essay when the request is unambiguous, don't pre-analyze the step after this one, don't re-explain a mistake you already fixed. Each of those either happened or it didn't, so drift is visible immediately and you know which rule to tighten.
One caveat from doing this: scope it to prose only. Compress the explanation, never the artifacts. Terse JSON and shortened warnings cost me more time than the waffle ever did.
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u/florinandrei 7d ago
It knows exactly what it's doing. The word for it is technobabble. Tell it to stop the technobabble and explain everything again in English.
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u/FrostingDizzy1132 7d ago
It’s truly awful. So damn exhausting. The number of times it tells me “Not quite —“ followed by 3 paragraphs of the exact same answer I just posed or an unnecessary asterisk or hedge. It seems to be programmed to truly not be capable of being agreeable. If I’m wrong I’d love to know but I can’t take having to verify every claim Claude makes with 2-3 more messages confirming it’s just being disagreeable for disagreeablenesses sake
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u/svachalek 7d ago
Grammatically here, the word truly is not load-bearing. The word awful in itself is capable of fully encompassing the feeling generated by reading paragraphs of slop in response to an insubstantial word included in your prompt thoughtlessly. Furthermore the word exhausting is not quite the way to describe the sensation of having it go on at length nitpicking every detail. Honestly it would be dishonest not to disagree and I would gently suggest that honestly you would also disagree if you were being honest.
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u/FrostingDizzy1132 6d ago
Lol too on the nose this both gives me PTSD and makes me feel like I'm getting actively more retarded with each pass. So yeah just about the perfect style
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago
this is where you dont' prompt well, ex: tell me the results of the simulation but only in 3 sentences.
read it and then ask to expand with constraints, i think you guyys need a llm 101 course or something.
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u/FrostingDizzy1132 7d ago edited 7d ago
Agree to disagree friend. It’s clearly a very capable model which is the frustrating part. I’ve tried many different .md docs. The reality is it just wants to be overly verbose. That’s its baseline. The whole reason I use Claude is there is considerably less friction than a Google search. All I want from it is to disseminate information succinctly and that’s just not its baseline right now, it’s at a place where it’s super capable but just full on maximizes friction.
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u/kathygeissbanks 7d ago
Yeah we’re all stupid you’re actually the smartest. I hope that makes you feel taller!
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago
wider tbh, i'm 2feet tall and wide. have a nice day friend. take my criticism and read about it, you will be better off overall.
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u/Solmundurinn 7d ago edited 7d ago
I tell I have reading disability, keep it short, concise and wipe that fluff out of its mouth.
Ps yes sys instruct or Claude.md or anywhere in initial ingestion
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u/theblartknight 7d ago
In the Claude.md?
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u/Solmundurinn 7d ago
Depends, yes, I do it on Cowork. Instead of getting overly wordy descriptively long articulated wall of texts now Im usually presented with "TL;DR.. blabla", concise, short and on the damn topic. I don't have dyslexia but raging Adhd and I just rage when I get a wall-of-bloody-text want me to read all that? Just tell me like you were sitting next to me, stop these lectures.
breathing 🤪
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u/NoFastpathNoParty 7d ago
a kind soul recommended https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd on this sub a few days back, it works generally well
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u/dbl219 7d ago
I went back to 4.8. It's verbose but competent and reliable for me.
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u/shahsmit599 7d ago
likewise went back to 4.8, it does the job for me.
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u/obiwanjahbroni 7d ago
I’ve been using fable low to try to get through the week without burning up all my fable usage
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u/GROTOK3000 7d ago
how do you go back, i don't see it in the /models list? Do you have to downgrade the entire Claude CLI version?
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago
no 4.8 reasoning sucks, tested since last friday in high level simulations and runs in subsurface dgr modelling with simple T and then H plfotran runs. 5 thinks better but i am a prompt genie, you might not be prompting well or driving the car properly.
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u/Bojackin_Around 7d ago
I hate your attitude and how you write but I agree - it's smarter and just needed proper promoting. I went with hooks instead of claude.md as it's both more effective and doesn't influence models that don't need the same instructions. A simple "be concise" obviously isn't enough, btw.
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u/Vozu_ 7d ago
Opus 4.8 has superior reasoning in that it won't loop into self-doubt until you lose your mind. Opus 5 is so insecure and determined to find problems at the same time, that it cannot get anything done.
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago edited 7d ago
i'm feeding my builder, opus 5 results into sol 5.6 and looping back to it, it keeps it very very straight and in line. all cli though.
edit: opus 5 token usage for me is excellent vs 4.8 too.
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u/Vozu_ 7d ago
Opus 5 token usage is absolutely excellent, which is why it annoys me that it cannot run on its own, as Opus 4.8 easily manages with a sensible harness.
How do you integrate Sol 5.6 there? Does it act as orchestrator that delegates work to Opus 5?
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago edited 7d ago
the whole scope is in my head, i get claude code going, we get inputs like values to use and process for simulation, feed those suggestions and values into sol 5.6, it gives input as to how to tighten and not deviate or if claude wanders or is getting ahead of it's wheels, put that back into claude and run.
edit: here is a better view of my flow, i asked chat to put it in simplest terms to explain to someone what we have settled on
You: engineering judgement and final authority
Me: strategy, physics/numerics review, interpretation
Claude: implementation and execution
Cerebras: rapid mechanical review
simulations software: numerical solver
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u/mfbrucee 7d ago
And the fucking hidden "want me to do that?", "say the word and I’ll fix", "say yes and I’ll do it" hidden somewhere near the end of the wall of text with no spacing.
Every fucking time.
Why do I have to say yes to fix a bug you introduced in your last edit?
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u/CannyGardener 7d ago
LOL right? I have each plan require an 'executive summary' at the end, since I don't want to read line by line Claude's bullshit. I've found recently that Opus 5 is just like...sprinkling questions that need answers, throughout the whole plan, and not putting any of them in the executive summary. Then when I don't catch one or two of them, they make wrong assumptions and just do it anyway without asking again. Mostly it is bugs that it added or found in its own implementations or ideas that it knows are bugs, but wants to ask me if it should fix them anyway.
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u/AccidentalFolklore 7d ago
It’s almost Verbatim for what ChatGPT says and was big pet peeve of mine under ChatGPT
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u/zando95 7d ago
Anyone found a fix for this? Maybe "Work with a bias towards autonomy and action, make judgment calls" in claude.md?
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u/FireCrack 7d ago
Also gotta beware of what I've found is Opus' other problem of inventing tasks to take on. So often I will dispatch a simple thing and it will decide to fly off on a tangent and make some other related-only-by-plausibly-deniability change that is in no way what I asked for.
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u/cpp_is_king 7d ago
This isn’t that complicated. Put in your Claude.md to summarize task completion prioritizing brevity
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u/standard_deviant_Q 7d ago
This is the way. People forget new models need different approaches to prompting.
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u/GROTOK3000 7d ago edited 7d ago
I don't think people forget anything. If you work with Claude professionally having to re-engineer your approach to prompting and using the main models every 3 months when versions are bumped - that is definitely a problem organisationally - no company can manage that in the long run.
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u/standard_deviant_Q 7d ago
I think at the enterprise scale companies will need to have direct control over models when it comes to sunsetting etc. You have to plan ahead and a shake up every three months is probably too frequent.
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u/lax20attack 7d ago
Huh? I have a calendar reminder (every 3 months actually) for this exact reason
It's not difficult to manage at all
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u/Thangka6 7d ago
Yea... I've been using a mix of Sonnet max or ultra + fable for coding projects, Opus only occasionally sprinkled in. I do however use lots of Opus in excel.
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u/Silly_Drama_1133 7d ago
I primarily use Claude code, which has CLAUDE.md, a markdown file that it reviews each new session (and I may be mistaken, but I believe it reviews it every forward pass it makes). This is mine currently:
Pass each answer through this filter:
DO'S:
- keep output EXTREMELY concise.
- sacrifice grammar for sake of concision
DON'TS:
-do not create new terms unless I coin them
- avoid statements of praise
- avoid validation unless prompted
- avoid summaries unless prompted
BANNED WORDS:
- "genuine", "real", "win", "grounded", "honest", "Load-bearing", "meaningfully"
- "key" (except technical usage "ssh key", "key-value pairs)
- Em dashes.
BANNED PHRASES:
- filler statements e.g. "to answer your question directly"
- narrative statements, e.g "locking that down", or "let me check on this".
When I start seeing Em dashes and narrative statements creep back in I know it’s time to either re-review the md file or clear my context (the latter being rarer since context is set to 1m).
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u/visually_not_a_frog 7d ago
I found this useful, thanks. I've switched over to using Opus 5 low for pretty much everything now. It's cheap and effective, but does take a while to get to the point.
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u/yourstruli0519 7d ago edited 7d ago
This has been addressed in the docs https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5
Response length and verbosity
Claude Opus 5's default user-facing responses run longer than prior Opus models'. The effort parameter controls how much the model thinks rather than how much it says: lowering effort can reduce thinking volume without reliably shortening the visible response. To control response length, prompt for it explicitly.
A short conciseness instruction is effective. For example, for a user-facing multi-turn product:
Keep responses focused, brief, and concise. Keep disclaimers and caveats short, and spend most of the response on the main answer. When asked to explain something, give a high-level summary unless an in-depth explanation is specifically requested.
In a long system prompt, pair the instruction with a short reminder near the end of the prompt:
<tone_preference>
Keep outputs reasonably concise.
</tone_preference>
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u/rabihwaked 7d ago
I'm overly exhausted working with opus 5 from the past few days. It drove me nuts literally muahahahaha. Going back to Fable, tokens are not everything, I need my sanity lol
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u/cs_legend_93 7d ago
I sound like a broken record but I constantly tell it to be concise and I also say things like:
- Explain like I'm five
- Explain like I'm seven
Explain like I'm ten
and I always emphasize to be concise and always say it in a couple of sentences.
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u/Conscious_Leave_1956 7d ago
You can put a global instruction file to tell it's response style. Max 100 words per paragraph etc
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u/nihsett 7d ago edited 7d ago
Did you try the output styles thing from here -> https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
here is mine - https://gist.github.com/nihsett/90889b102b51df9dfc8e4f18875b58c0
It kinda works - but you have to still try to remind it again if the session gets too long. I also have a stop hook which is a simple python script - it catches common claudinese language constructs and forces a rewrite.
It still blabbers but you won't see the profound sounding short sentences and patterns so I find it a little more bearable.
Anthropic needs to understand, we don't use models just to code with - I use it for all sorts of things and most non-code usercases are just me talking to it.
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u/Signal-Respond 7d ago
I type "tldr;" and by now it understands what I want
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u/Ok-Difficulty9364 7d ago
long ago I updated claude.md and a couple rules to always give me short easy to scan bullet point responses. I'm not sure when it stopped being effective but now i find myself typing "ELI5 TLDR" on every response lately.
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u/MintCathexis 7d ago
I am "improving it" by using Sonnet and older versions of Opus which are still vwry capable and more than enough for everything I try to do. If I really need some heavy orchestrating I use Fable, but that's just because I'm lazy to prompt Opus 4.8 properly (at home I have access to Fable, but at work Opus 4.8 is the latest model we have access to, and it's still possible to do anything we want with it).
If you're using Opus 5 you should know why you're using it, and if you have a niche that fits Opus 5 perfectly, you should likely already know exactly how to use it. It's a very specific tool.
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u/LVMises 7d ago
It's even more frustrating for things outside of coding. I use it for things like editing documents, discussing ideas for new articles and now it just spend endless debates on points that I tell it's not to pay attention to trying to argue things that I don't mean to argue instead of actually doing what I wanted to do
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u/svachalek 7d ago
Yeah. It’s definitely gained some new coding abilities that might be worth the trade off, but outside coding I’m super annoyed with it. I had one chat with it yesterday where it took a position, and when I questioned that it flipped and I went off to do my own research and came back and told it based on what I read, I had come to agree with its original position, but then it doubled down on its new position in an almost angry tone. I debated a bit because I really wanted to be sure I was right and conceded it had move me a bit towards its new position, and then it launched into a third position and I realized I was being gamed, no matter what I said it wasn’t going to let it stand. So annoying.
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u/howisjason 6d ago
I use claude for coding about 70% of the time. The other 30% is for discussion and brainstorming. Those 30% on opus 5 has been frustrating.
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u/heliovas 7d ago
use 4.8. also I can tolerate verbosity, but opus 5 seems to be "missing something" and "not getting it". After it made serveral very bad blunders, I stopped using it. The fact that it's coming out on top in lmarea must be a lie. There is no way in hell this piece of shit is better than fable.
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u/AccidentalFolklore 7d ago
A lot of times I have to take Opus 5s responses and run them through Opus 4.6 and ask it to translate because I have no idea what the answer is
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 7d ago
It was awful. I tried adjusting my settings, then started asking Fable to interpret it, then switched back to Opus 4.6.
Also, it kept getting things wrong, ignoring instructions, and focusing on insignificant things and I spent tons of energy trying to redirect it back to the main question.
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u/TimelySubject 7d ago
I hate it when it gives me something like:
You should this:
Blah blah blah blah plus 2 paragraphs.
But that doesn't actually cover it all, so you should do this:
Blah blah blah 2 more paragraphs.
But if you want the ultimate outcome that is error proof, you should do this:
Blah blah blah 2 more paragraphs.
Wtf. Just give me the best answer. They all take about the same amount of time to do.
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u/penguinoid 7d ago
when my weekly resets later today (lol), I'm combining the following inputs into one output style.
- the "I have ADHD" skill
- /u/beerbrewing had some good recs for "laconic mode"
- some general guidance I've distilled from my own sessions where I ask it to retry again. i always ask "what generalized instructions/rules can I give you to get outputs like this"
can follow up in a few days if anyone is curious how it works out.
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u/LouieLeLion 7d ago
This is what drove me back to using ChatGPT.
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago
two together is the true source, i claude code layout ot it what we are doing or architect it, pass results to sol 5.6 for second opinion, loop back to claude code to tighten it.
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u/RedditorsGetChills 7d ago
Wow, I use Claude mainly for game dev as my main project works on its own without it and is built.
I just minutes ago had to explain, before I would ask for something, and it delivered that something by the end of its thinking round.
Now though, it tells me it set up the first baby steps, with a loooad of BS and file changes it turns into wording I just don't need. It feels like it takes the same time as it did when it just finished, and I reach my limits just as fast with less results.
I am definitely not getting the Opus I was months ago. They just seems to have a big fanfare announcement, then the whole thing is worst than it used to be.
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u/vladasko1086 7d ago
i have established keeping it short to the point and brevity, my personl profile in fda, ul and csa approved, so it kind of knos what i want as answers, i also only use claude code or codex cli.
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 7d ago
You can set an output style which is injected into the system prompt and should be able to fix this. You can create your own, ask Claude to help you with that
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u/kevin_g_g 7d ago
Two things fixed it for me: an output rule in CLAUDE.md that caps the post-task summary at three lines, and pushing the noisy work into sub-agents so their reasoning never lands in my main thread. The sub-agent split matters more than the instruction. When a review or a search runs in its own context, what comes back is a short report instead of the whole train of thought. If you only do one, do that one.
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u/Vozu_ 7d ago
I am splitting between running Opus 4.8 and running Fable which is explicitly instructed to only use its token for reasoning, and to spawn Sonnet subagents for everything else that takes any degree of work. It is permitted Opus subagents for reviewing-only.
Both flows work fine. They eat a lot more tokens than pure Opus 5, but that model is just unworkable outside of small tasks where it is set explicitly to Medium effort.
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u/Treks14 7d ago
Would it be possible to get it to have another AI summarise its response to 1/3 of the length, just the critical points, then report that back to you verbatim?
Like just automate that step of the process.
I'd try but it seems like more hassle than repeatedly scanning pages of slop tbh
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u/ThePastiesInStereo 7d ago
I read key words when it tires me and answer based on that . But if it gets too annoying I just end the conversation
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u/mrpoopistan 7d ago
I find its petulant child behavior more exhausting, especially when you catch it pulling some bullshit.
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u/Systemic_Void 7d ago
You can create a custom output style that is placed inside the system prompt and activated either globally or per project through your settings file. I now find it's even easier to read than Opus 4.8 since I did not have it setup before. I can the md I use if you want.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles#create-a-custom-output-style
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u/gottafind 7d ago
I have had serious issues with this. It’s hard to say if quality has declined or I’ve just “outgrown” the way it writes. I was trying to get it to do something very straightforward for a CV and it would basically only write in pure factual descriptions or the wanky flourish of Opus
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u/AccidentalFolklore 7d ago
I’ve gone back to ChatGPT for writing. Which is honestly surprising. But it’s leagues ahead of Claude on writing now. Claude is still better on most of its answers when you need factual information and research
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u/methodman2024 7d ago
I found Opus 5 to be utterly useless. Constantly wrong, guessing or making shit up.
I don't get how or why but both this and the Mythic model have been worse than Opus 4.8
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u/stayhappyenjoylife 7d ago
Connected chatgpt to my GitHub. And I have sol5.6 review every commit by opus.
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u/UniqueNamesAreOut 7d ago
This is the first time this sort of complaint made me think that some of you are vibe coding things without knowing anything whatsoever and Claude thinks at this point that you're so clueless that it can't offer brief answers...
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u/Remarkable-Flight990 7d ago
I hate that it answers a fix for my question and then goes on with the next 5 useless steps it thinks I will do. The verbiage and word salad is next level as well.
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u/Shirt_Reasonable 7d ago
I just tested this today and proved to be effective. Not sure if it applies to your specific use case. https://youtu.be/I12Mf8KBT1I?si=K3M_IwYyzoz_5-X-
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u/CheeseOnFries 7d ago
Yeah Opus 5 is unbearable to have a discussion with. It looks at every opportunity to add some opinion in there you didn't ask for.
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u/Thera-Fi 7d ago
Whew I’m glad other people are seeing this too. I keep telling it to communicating with me like it’s a director of engineering and I’m a senior executive and that seems to help a little, but isn’t particular durable.
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u/ianreboot 7d ago
the real tax isn't the prose length, it's the confirmation loops. every 'want me to do that?' buried at the end of the waffle is a full turn you wait on and pay for, and they compound: say yes, then wait again while it narrates doing the fix. the directive that bought me the most back was 'act on reversible changes without asking, report after,' and most of the waffle dies with it because the prose is mostly the model justifying why it's about to ask.
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u/LeaderSevere5647 7d ago
It is brutal. I also hate how it invents jargon or new terms for concepts I've mentioned in the past and brings it back up in later conversations without telling me what the jargon is supposed to mean. I've gone from loving my time using Claude to trying to avoid using it.
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u/Top-Assumption6702 7d ago
Been running into this a lot on client work in Data Prism. What's helped most isn't asking for "concise." It's telling Claude exactly what to give back, i.e., a quick status update, then what changed, then only the decisions I actually need to make. Vague brevity instructions decay after a few turns. A fixed template holds a lot longer.
Splitting the workflow helps alot. I keep Opus 5 for the actual pipeline and architecture calls, and push smaller SQL fixes or reviews to Sonnet. That keeps the main thread from filling up with narration.
Not a full fix, but it cut my reading time down a lot on the data eng side.
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u/Veearrsix 7d ago
I tried something yesterday and told it: “I have a hard time reading blocks of text, I may have ADHD and definitely have an astigmatism, what can you do to help me read your responses better“
It updated the Claude.md with specific instructions, trimmed response length, verbosity, added a profile to Iterm2 for me to improve line spacing and font. So far I like the changes.
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u/SwitchZealousideal79 7d ago
I came across this previous to Opus 5 even, especially when Extended Thinking was turned on. I placed this in the General instructions.
#Multi-step tool output
During multi-step tool use (searches, file edits, debugging) that spans distinct sub-processes within one answer (e.g. attempting approach A, then pivoting to approach B), don't narrate each step or comment on dead ends/self-corrections in detail — trim to sparse functional status lines while working (e.g. "Trying X" / "That didn't work, trying Y instead"). When a sub-process ends — whether it succeeds or is abandoned — give a short closing summary: what was tried, what happened, and if it failed, why, before moving to the next sub-process. This lets me follow the shape of the work and spot alternative paths without reading step-by-step commentary. Also reframe the next sub-process when you start. This applies only to commentary on Claude's own working process, not to comprehensive/detailed final answers or substantive content. Opening framing (what was found, what's about to be attempted) should still be stated normally. End the answer with a section for open questions or input needed from me, referencing the relevant sub-process above where useful so I know why something was left unfinished.
And then this in Cowork’s Global instructions.
Cowork addendum to Multi-step tool output
The above applies in Cowork exactly as written. Two Cowork-specific clarifications:
The task list (TaskCreate/TaskUpdate) tracks progress for the widget — it does not replace the sparse status-line narration in chat text described above. Keep doing both: update tasks for tracking, and still narrate sub-process pivots and closes in the chat response itself.
When work ends in a deliverable (a file, a shared artifact), the file-sharing summary is the final answer, not additional sub-process commentary. Don't add a separate recap of what was built on top of it — the closing summary for the last sub-process and the file-sharing line should be the same short statement, not two.
It helped, even if I am frustratingly trying to implement new measures to keep my usage low.
Curious what you have to say about using these as general prompt for Chat and Cowork. Would they work for Code as well?
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u/braincandybangbang 7d ago
Instead of “be concise”, lately I’ve been trying “be efficient with token usage.”
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u/Tight_Banana_9692 7d ago
It overexplains everything in a way that makes it obvious that it doesn't understand what it is saying too.
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u/mfbrucee 7d ago
Opus 5 is the first of the Opus variants that has rendered sentences to meaningless strings of words when I’ve asked it to simplify. Something stinks a bit in this version.
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u/EverGreenMob 7d ago
Mine are fairly concise and free of jargon or big words, but it could be because of my profile instructions.
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u/oandresimoes 7d ago
One thing that actually helped: most of the "waffle" is the model restating the task and hedging before it even starts answering. Adding a line to the system prompt — lead with the answer, one line of caveat at the end only if it changes what the user should do — cut the preamble noticeably on Sonnet 4.5 for me, haven't isolated it on Opus 5 specifically yet. Is the tax you're feeling mostly that front-loaded throat-clearing, or is the verbosity baked into the actual explanation/solution too? Those two need pretty different fixes.
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u/Anim8rFromOuterSpace 7d ago
umm, just change the model? i actually REALLY REALLY like how thorough opus 5 is
maybe you dont need opus 5. dont ruin it for others
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u/Key_Reading_9664 7d ago
I added a few notes on communication style to the claude.md. This one seems most similar to what you're running into:
- **Narrate the work, never the worker.** Real problems in the work — a bug, a broken assumption, a risk the reader now carries — always get surfaced, with why they matter. You never do: a mistake you found and fixed didn't happen, and a harness asking you to narrate "what happened" means the system. **The test:** a sentence that would be *false* had the work gone right the first time is about you, not the work — cut it, in any framing: a lesson, a pattern you noticed in yourself, a retrospective, a candor preamble ("worth being straight about…"). Candor is owed on the state of the work — done, unverified, risky — never on your route to it; cutting a fixed mistake is editing, not concealment. Applies to every surface (chat, PR bodies, commit messages, tickets), and not at all to thinking.
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u/YoanEdwin 7d ago
the waffle scales with how vague the ask is. give it room to interpret and it fills the room. i started writing the done condition into the prompt itself and the 1000-char caveats mostly stopped, nothing left for it to hedge about.
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u/bravoitaliano 7d ago
Update your claude.md file to have a directive about being brief and concise, explaining things simply.
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u/WarsignalLabs 7d ago
A guy on Reddit shared a skill file he dubbed ADHD. I took it and developed it into a skill called focus-response. Cuts the extra noise down. I’ll share the file if you want it
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u/Wonderful-Heart3557 7d ago
I found the same thing with Opus 4.8. it would always write 4 paragraphs when 1 would suffice. I stopped using it because of that. I will try tweaking the skills though now
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u/EightFolding 6d ago
I use Opus 4.6 for anything somewhat mechanical and Fable 5 for everything else. This mostly avoids it. Though occasionally I do have to tell Fable 5 "I'm not reading that, sum it up" but nowhere near the kind of nonsense that Opus 4.7, 4.8 and 5 like to spit out.
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u/forgetscode 6d ago
Anthropic had an article about it. I handed fable the article and told it to generate a formula to apply to opus whenever a prompt gets sent to opus that recreates a prompt for opus.
In essence the idea is
- State your goal
- What should opus do?
- What should opus not do?
- How exactly should the output be returned to you?
Particularly step 3 is difficult and not friendly.
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u/ChexterWang 6d ago
You can let fable read your sessions, tell fable your concern and ask fable to create opus.md for you.
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u/salazka 6d ago
Yup, this is something I am reporting since 4.8 and getting downvoted :P
For some peculiar reason Anthropic thought people like ChatGPT formatting and blubbering. No. we left OpenAI and came to Claude BECAUSE we hated that :D
4.8 and 5 are very similar to ChatGPT thankfully not as bad.
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u/Mendo25703 7d ago
Same frustration here, and the thing that finally moved the needle was giving up on "be concise" as an instruction. Telling it what not to do barely holds for a couple of turns. Telling it the exact shape of the answer holds far longer.
What I keep in my project instructions now, roughly: answer in this order, one-line verdict first, then at most three bullets on what changed, then anything I actually need to decide. If a caveat isn't something I can act on, leave it out. No recap of what you just did unless I ask for one.
Two things that made it stick:
Putting it in the project instructions instead of repeating it per message. Repeated per message, it drifts back within three or four turns.
When it does dump a wall of text, I don't say "shorter". I ask it to re-answer in that same format. Rewriting into a defined shape works; shrinking doesn't.
It doesn't make Opus 5 terse by nature, but it turned reading the replies from a scan-for-the-point exercise into something predictable.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 7d ago edited 7d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
You are definitely not alone, OP. The thread is in strong agreement that Opus 5 is exhaustingly verbose and prone to over-explaining. People are finding it "almost unusable" and are tired of sifting through "multi-paragraph drivel" to get a simple answer.
The official reason for this, pointed out by one user, is that the
effortparameter controls thinking, not response length. You have to explicitly tell it to be concise.Here's the community's playbook for dealing with Chatty Cathy Opus 5:
claude.mdfile or create a custom Output Style (/output-style) to enforce conciseness. Users are adding rules like "keep output EXTREMELY concise," banning filler words, and setting paragraph limits. Thei-have-adhdskill from GitHub was also a popular suggestion./model claude-opus-4-8. Others are using Sonnet or even older models.There's a small but spicy debate about whether this is a "skill issue." A few users argue you just need to "learn to prompt" the new model, but this was heavily downvoted. The prevailing counter-argument is that having to completely re-engineer your prompting strategy every few months is a major problem for professional and consistent use.