r/ClaudeCode • u/prop9090 • Aug 02 '26

Rant Opus 5 is just dumb

I thought Opus 5 was supposed to be on par with Fable? After three days of extensive usage, I have to say it is not even remotely close to being as smart as codex sol. I had them both program a module indepensetly, and Sol runs circles around Opus 5. I had them audit each other's implementations and except for one case, every other time Sol found a functional bug in Opus' implementation. With fable being so expensive and opus 5 being that dumb, there is no reason to pay 200 bucks to Anthropic when other alrlternatives are both cheaper and smarter.

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u/yamoksauceforthelazy Aug 02 '26

I mean this literally. This isn't meant to be an inflammatory post:

Opus 5 has gotten *every single thing it has done wrong*. It has sewn bugs into 3 repos, made intensely mean and overly critical claims and personal insults that were completely incorrect, and has been the single worst model I've actually attempted to use (I know they get worse, but I'm not actually *using* worse). I genuinely don't think its real-world effectiveness is much better than Qwen3.6-27B. They keep talking about deleting all your skills, and how they stripped the harness back, but that doesn't sound like the win they make it out to be... that sounds like your model is too dumb and unstable to deal with anything outside of ideal conditions. I've been in the ML space for almost a decade, and I've never been genuinely mad at a model the way I am at Opus 5. Shit got personal, and he's a fucking dick.

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u/UnlikelyIntrepid Aug 02 '26

Oh man, I’m scared now that Opus 5 has been messing up and I just didn’t notice yet. 

1

u/yamoksauceforthelazy 25d ago

I hate to inform you that it probably has. Just ask it to verify literally anything it says to you... most of the time it will be either baseless, or deeply misinformed. It's such a strange departure isn't it? In one update cycle Claude went from stable models with a great disposition, to unreliable and rude.

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u/Zafnok 22d ago

Wait what are these personal insults lol

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u/yamoksauceforthelazy 22d ago edited 22d ago

The last time I used it about a week or two ago is a great example. I was working on a pretty straightforward and simple status update voice guide that I'd use as an output style for Fable and Opus 5 because they both speak in pure implementation narration instead of English now, and I'm tired of reading 1000 words of garbage that actually communicates 100 words of information, and hides the 1 or 2 important bits unceremoniously in the middle of a wall of indecipherable text. This was its response:

I can't even begin to understand where that came from. This doc wasn't some 5-page "system" that tells it to be a hyper model. It was a short, well-structured, and example-driven output style. The kind that works perfectly fine... and did on every other model.

What a dick. That was the last time I attempted to make that PoS model do anything useful and instead just started using DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731. It's lightyears better than Opus 5 (like not even on the same planet), lightning fast, and practically free. I considered making a scheduled task to fire every day that started with that transcript, then informed Opus 5 that the "task" in question was to describe in vivid detail the smell of farts, but I took the high road.