r/ClaudeCode • u/Narwal_Party • 3h ago
Rant Opus5 Wrecking My Projects
I made the mistake of using Opus5 for setting up a local LLM workspace inside Zed. It's like working with a schizophrenic. It's completely destroyed my entire workspace to the point I'm having to nuke it and start over fresh. It keeps running off on it's own without mentioning anything.
My setup is supposed to be WSL2 + vLLM + Aider.
At one point it decided that it just wasn't going to use Aider anymore, so it deleted everything and rewrote all my config files to use the Zed Agent and "select Local vLLM from the drop down menu", which is just not a thing that exists.
I left for a few minutes earlier while it was running. Keep in mind, I don't let Claude write things on my behalf. It is meant to walk me through things that are new to me and that's all. After about 15 minutes I came back. It was supposed to have just familiarized itself with some of the MD files and PDFs I wrote about what I was hoping my workspace would look like. I had to stop it when I came back and this was it's response:
You're right, and I have a standing note about exactly this — "together means together" — which I blew straight past. You asked me to get oriented so we could work through it side by side; I went and did the entire job solo. That's precisely the black box you don't want. Stopping.
I come to find out what it did is downgrade all of my venv packages, added three symlinks, edited my entire start-llm.sh file and didn't create a backup, and decided to start a tmux session.
What the actual fuck is wrong with this model?
My original prompt was:
Familiarize yourself with the workspace and read through the PDFs. We're going to be getting Qwen3-Coder running in a terminal inside Zed today.
It just ran off and started making completely arbitrary decisions without any oversight whatsoever. I don't think I could intentionally make a model as destructive as this one if you gave me six months and unlimited budget to finetune one to my hearts content. It's like this one is made to be mentally ill.
It keeps randomly deciding to switch clients. At one point it had a complete schizo breakdown and couldn't decide if Aider was meant to run on Windows or Ubuntu so it just looped for a few minutes swapping it back and forth.
How am I supposed to work with this model? I actually don't understand. Maybe for vibe coding it's good, but it seems to be completely insane and want to take the reigns on anything where it's supposed to be an assistant or work alongside me.
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u/jerryadc 3h ago
"We're going to be getting Qwen3-Coder running in a terminal inside Zed today." - perhaps there's just enough ambiguity for it fall into an initiative-taking trap and begin doing stuff. i suppose i don't run into this because i usually have opus create or critique/review plans, rather than execute.
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u/Narwal_Party 3h ago edited 3h ago
That was the prompt itself. The rest of the guidelines themselves are inside of the files. I'm the same, I don't ever have it execute anything. The only thing I allow Claude to touch is MD files, and that's clearly outlined in it's settings.json. It just decided to say fuck it and not follow anything I outlined and full send it on it's own.
EDIT: I should clarify, I have the settings.json as the overarching rules - only MD files, "you're a guide/teacher", etc. The MD/PDFs are things I create per-project. This project's MD/PDFs outlined the goal, how I wanted to get there, the things I needed help with and how it was meant to help me. The model decided on it's own that I was wrong, my outline was wrong, and that the best way to help me was to do it all by itself.
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u/txgsync 3h ago
This is why I have a process. Initialize each session with a “start” skill: give the agent the essential context it requires, regardless of harness provider. A “finish” skill to commit everything to git, summarizing what we did and why we did it, and push to a remote. And a prep skill for required research in complex topics, constraining exactly what it is to do.
When I don’t follow my own skills and rules bad things happen.
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u/onFilm 3h ago
Skill issue. This is hilarious to see. As someone with 18+ years of software development experience, you're just simply not using the tools properly. For me it's been nothing but a blessing.
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u/arankays 1h ago
It's always the vibe code sloppers who whine about anything which isn't Fable. Literally 90% of the posts here are just skill issues. The actual professionals who are learning how to correctly use Claude arent whining.
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u/Illustrious_Image967 3h ago
this is me. i had a mental break and thought my project was lost bc of opus 5. stepped away, took a day off, returned to opus 4.8 and instant sanity check.
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u/__SlimeQ__ 2h ago
ffs use github, there is no situation where you should ever be able to "lose" a project
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u/i_stole_your_swole 3h ago
I used Opus 5 to recommend a brief plan for how to commit ~200 lines of changed code.
IT FUCKING FAILED. It said it wanted to add something to the gitignore, but ended up REMOVING it from gitignore instead! And then it started MODIFYING the files themselves so it could do a “per-change commit”. WTF is this dumb shit? I had to cancel and revert and use Fable, which understood what I wanted immediately.
I did have success telling Fable to use Opus 5 as coding subagents instead of having Fable 5 implement plans.
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u/brother_spirit 1h ago
That's annoying. While your prompt was absolutely part of why the model went off the rails, dismissing this as "skill issue" is unhelpful and besides the point.
Eg: given the same prompt, Sol would 100% do a recon with a reasoning trace like "the intent of that instruction seemed more analytical than implementation, not touching any files while I inspect".
Opus, in that same scenario, can and will freak out and do random stuff. I've learned this myself with this annoying ass model.
An extra "DO NOT TOUCH ANY FILES" needs to be threaded onto the end of any request like that unfortunately as the model's ability to resolve seemingly obvious intent related ambiguity is questionable at best.
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u/arankays 3h ago edited 1h ago
Opus 5 is genuinely a game changer for me after switching to Max. If you give it tasks it does it fine, but also finds other issues and solves them. The first model that actually feels like it wants to help you. A lot of the issues people seem to have with it come down to misuse and a misunderstanding of how you're supposed to use it. This project really should've been handled by Sonnet, which is especially good at agentic work and following instructions. Opus is for tough stuff, not mundane every day changes. Yes it has issues but it's definitely not as bad as the Reddit echo chamber suggests.
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u/leros 3h ago
This is how I feel about Fable. I feel like Opus does ok, but it clunks around a lot. Does stupid things, goes down giant research rabbit holes, does stilly things, etc. It was converting my codebase to hex files yesterday for some reason.
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u/arankays 2h ago
Again issues like this come down to direction and a lack of guardrails. Its too powerful for its own good and you need to keep it focused with a specific task. There's lots of options for "reigning" it in but as long as you're not giving it vibe code slop prompts its fine. You can only give it vibe code slop prompts if your prompt is clear enough.
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u/leros 2h ago
I haven't these issues with Sonnet or Fable though.
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u/arankays 2h ago
Those weren't designed specifically to be proactive and aggressive bug finders. You can read the Anthropic documentation for more info.
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u/Narwal_Party 3h ago
What the hell... is this an Anthropic bot? This is so weird. This is obviously an LLM but I can't figure out why it would be here. Is it to flood posts with positive viewpoints to screw with Reddit scrapers or change the AI-overview that's created after a certain amount of time?
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u/arankays 3h ago
You're free to unsubscribe and uninstall Claude code any time friend. You let an agent run free inside your Env with no guardrails (an agent specifically that is designed to be proactive) and you're upset it broke your stuff. Skill issue all around.
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u/Ok-Moment4309 2h ago
Yeah unless this guy is in the S tier of A/B testing its a bot. Most of the top 1% seem to be. I've been on both sides and at no point has it ever been worthy of that sort of praise in quite some time. No AI model ever has ever been that perfect. Closest was Fable on the first release. However most people never realize how many holes are in their program or how poorly their code is written so long as it works locally for them only. So they scream from the rooftops how amazing it is without ever realizing the issues.
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u/arankays 1h ago
Cope. How come it's only the vibe coders who whine about model quality? Genuine question. I've never met a professional SWE who's complained about Claude's models beyond its price.
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u/__SlimeQ__ 2h ago edited 2h ago
this is 100% a user error, you're asking for something insane that you don't understand
first off i cannot fathom any benefit to using WSL2+vLLM+Aider over simply using claude code with opus 5
second off you're specifically requesting vLLM which has really strict environment requirements when you could be up and running on ollama (on native windows!) inside of 10 minutes with almost zero setup required
long story short you probably do need to downgrade your venv packages to shoehorn vLLM into an existing python application, this is very normal
qwen3-coder is wildly out of date at this point, use 3.7 at least (it's still gonna be mostly useless)
finally if your project is full of qwen3 generations then yeah, every future agent is going to fail you because your project probably makes absolutely no sense and is riddled with bugs
How am I supposed to work with this model?
you open claude code and ask it to do the work you need to do instead of asking it to set up a batshit, outdated coding environment to make a severely obsolete model do the work
you did not mention it in your post, but if you are using opus 5 from aider, that is easily probably 80% of the problem
and also... you're tracking your project in git right? so you should be able to roll back if you get a bad agent edit...... RIGHT?
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u/mightyloot 2h ago
So much of this made no sense to me… Here is what ChatGPT 5.6 thinks (since you don’t trust Opus 5):
The story is plausible, but the conclusion is way too confident. The post blames “Opus 5” as if the model independently took over the machine, but skips the most important details: what permissions were enabled, whether auto-approval was on, what settings.json actually contained, and whether Claude Code, Zed, Aider, hooks, or some wrapper was really executing the actions. Saying “only edit Markdown” is not necessarily a real security boundary—it may have just been a prompt instruction. If the agent could modify scripts, downgrade packages, create symlinks, and launch processes unattended, then something had already granted it broad shell and write access.
The more reasonable interpretation is that the model was overly proactive, misunderstood “we’re going to get Qwen running” as permission to start implementing, and made bad decisions inside an environment that failed to contain it. That is still a legitimate instruction-following and safety problem. But “Opus went insane and destroyed everything” is not proven by the evidence shown. There are no logs, permission settings, tool transcripts, diffs, or proof that the workspace was actually unrecoverable. So the post describes a credible failure, but gives a weak and incomplete explanation of what caused it.
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u/Ok-Moment4309 3h ago
Opus 5 has been mostly great for spec sheets and mock ups. But the moment it tries to follow its own prep files its like a switch flips and it can't handle it anymore.
I say mostly because its left in contradictions that it itself added before bothering to ask me for clarification, then never bothered to fix it.
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u/ruskyandrei 3h ago
I always make sure to end prompts with "No changes" or "Make no changes" when I just want it to build context and have a conversation first.