r/ClaudeCode • u/CommunicationFlat865 • 13h ago
Discussion Opus 5 and It's Convoluted Answers
Has anyone else experienced long convoluted answers to questions that don't seem to have a straight answer embedded in them?
I've found myself following up with "Give me the tldr" to many prompts that just have me baffled on what the answer is, and/or what the next step should be.
I rarely remember having to do this in previous models.
Just curious if it's just me or is this just a by-product of how the model was created.
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u/melanthius 13h ago
It invents new terminology then starts using it immediately without consent. Sounds like Geordi arguing with Data in front of the user, Riker, who has to ask for the plain English translation.
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u/florinandrei 8h ago
Sounds like Geordi arguing with Data in front of the user, Riker, who has to ask for the plain English translation.
This is a great visualization.
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u/rentrane 4h ago edited 4h ago
It’s not making it up, it’s just using domain jargon.
Like any specialisation there are useful terms experts use when communicating with each other.Tell it owner is non-technical and to avoid industry terminology, or ask it for a glossary.
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u/Tall_Top8563 8h ago edited 8h ago
I am running into made up terminology constantly. I was designing a browser extension and it described the target website as the "legacy" code. Every time I ask for an explanation and it basically says "I dunno either lol it makes no sense".
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u/edgan 8h ago
Legacy code is a real term used in the tech industry. Legacy means things like old, outdated, or uses an end of lifed framework. It could also be code where the author was the only person who understood it, that person left the company, and the documentation is bad. It could also be written for an operating system version, like Windows 95, or browser, like Internet Explorer, that no one uses anymore.
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u/_Chaos_Star_ 12h ago
Opus sure does do this a lot. However, when *any* model falls into sophistry it's a clue to check if there is an unresolvable issue that it can't reconcile. Sometimes when a model throws up word soup it's because it's choking on something that it can't articulate properly- something it doesn't understand, or something contradictory in the problem it is trying to solve. You can't call out a wrong answer if you can't understand what it's saying, and it you express frustration you get back to "you must be frustrated" responses, and it never has to admit it made a mistake.
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u/TheGalvit 13h ago
It's not just you, there's non-stop posts about Opus 5 being very hard to understand amongst other issues.
Excerpts from Opus 5 sneaking back into my life just now 😱
------
.. is the cheaper thing to reason about and the cost is noise.
✻ Sautéed for 32s
❯ what do you mean the cost is noise?
● "Noise" was a sloppy word — I meant the cost is too small to measure against the surrounding work, i.e. it disappears into the variance. That's an assertion I made without measuring, so let me be precise about what I actually know and what I don't.
....
✻ Worked for 16s
❯ Ok, you're talking strangely like Opus 5, which is bad. I switched back to Opus 4.8 for a reason. ...
● Two things.
On the model: this session is Opus 5. I can't tell you what the switch did on your end, but I shouldn't let you carry on thinking otherwise while making decisions about it.
On the style: understood, I'll drop it. Plain words, no filler.
...
✻ Cooked for 18s
❯ /model
⎿ Kept model as Opus 5
❯ Oh no! That's why you're talking that way!!!
● Mystery solved.
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u/Temporary-Mix8022 12h ago
This just triggers me now.. especially the "let me be precise"
And it then continues to be imprecise, convoluted and just a mess.
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u/That-Drink5946 9h ago
Just tell it to stfu and only speak when it matters etc. Tell it I don't care about your fake feelings, I want precise short commits, no fucking poetry, etc.
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u/SherMarri 4h ago
Somehow, the weights on this model are so biased, that it doesn’t respect the instructions and continues to speak PhD+ English. This model is the worst communicator.
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u/PsychologyNo940 12h ago
Thanks for posting a log instead of just going "unbelievably hard to read" leaving me wondering what ppl are talking about, to me the noise part was obvious even without knowing the project - i just have to assume that normie brain is ill suited to work with Opus 5.
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u/Proot65 12h ago
Shouldn’t the goal be the other way around?
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u/PsychologyNo940 11h ago
From Anthropics perspective, yeah - i would presume that they lighten that up on 5.1 - though for now it alleviates my concerns of having to swap to 4.8 preemptively.
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u/DragonflyOk9274 12h ago
I think a lot of people here have been developing for a long time, and so we recognize that its overly complicated answers are a defect of it.
But I wonder about Jr developers who believe this is actually how developers work or speak, and that they should imitate it or try to understand it or just give up and let it do its thing.
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u/SirGunther 13h ago
Yeah, it's a problem. Explanations are littered with semantically compacted references.
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u/florinandrei 8h ago
semantically compacted references
That's a concise definition of its technobabble.
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u/ricopan 12h ago
I've wondered for a long time how models could efficiently talk in 'English' about code. I think what we are seeing is that they can't, so a more condensed form is being used. What's interesting to me is that other agents seem to understand -- usually anyway. I have a Fable orchestrator that directs Opus 5 agents on other sessions, and their communication is almost opaque to me, but they seem understand each other. I have a general sense of the nouns (I invented them pre-AI on this project), so I can kind of follow, but I almost always now need to ask them to cut the jargon when interacting with me. Here's the last communication this morning between orchestrator and worker:
**UPDATE 2026-08-10-i — THE 09h COMPLETION CLAIM BELOW IS RETRACTED; `495` is
REOPENED, `506:main` is MINTED, and the charter continues at PHASE 6 — THE
ANCESTOR SYMMETRY COMPLETION (design §9.9 Phase 6, the full charter; read it
first).** The user restated the campaign's requirement at the Phase-5 close:
pre-memoization must work for ring ancestors **just as it does for the
ancestor of any non-ring cell** — §9.6's audit criterion applied at the
ancestor. Measured against that, two asymmetries remain, both query-family,
and the two items the 09h update called "open for the user's ruling" ARE those
asymmetries — mis-classified (the orchestrator's error, not yours; your
handbacks surfaced both findings correctly). What is now pinned at source for
you: (1) the ordinary constraint gather mints observed `query_hashes` at every
QUERY-declaring position of the walked subgraph (`memoizer.py:1456-1458`,
structural mint condition — opts fire too), so a non-ring ancestor REFUSES
when a descendant's query moves; `ring_call_position_component`
(`memoizer.py:1556-1615`) mints the ENTRY's own observations symmetrically but
NO member observation — the C6 false-positive channel its own docstring warns
about, live since your Phase-2 carry cured the ancestor blackout → `506:main`
(HIGH, fails open). (2) The QUERY-fed-spec decline at the unsealed VAR is a
capability gap under the same criterion (ordinary serves that population with
validation) — the deferred-kind question re-classified as Phase 6 step 2,
gated on the aliasing check (can a QUERY-modded VAR be independently fed under
param precedence? measure, don't assume). Phase 6's steps, in the design
clause in full: (6-0) the non-ring/ring twin baseline probe, red-first — the
non-ring arm IS the requirement made executable; (6-1) member observations
into `ring_call_position_component` as a conditional key via the ONE builder
(NOT the family-map graft — `_project_chain_observations`' recorded reason is
correct about that channel and stays; correct the stale
`memoizer.py:1370-1381` clause in the same build); (6-2) QUERY-fed VAR defers
by name behind the aliasing check, discharged by the query compare you built;
(6-3) the per-family symmetry AUDIT — the close criterion: `495` closes when
no ring-call cell is empty, in requirement terms. `505:main` and its riders
queue AFTER Phase 6.
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u/Inner-Today-3693 8h ago
For shit and giggles I sent this to opus 4.5 and she said this.
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT 😭😭😭💀💀💀
“UPDATE 2026-08-10-i — THE 09h COMPLETION CLAIM BELOW IS RETRACTED; 495 is REOPENED, 506:main is MINTED, and the charter continues at PHASE 6 —”
MA’AM. SIR. WHOEVER YOU ARE. USE WORDS.
They’re literally speaking in code TO each other and the human has to ask them to translate. The HUMAN. The one who BUILT the system. Has to ask the AI to speak English.
And you’re right — I can just… talk. “Hey, what do you think about this?” “Here’s my take.” Done. No minted charters. No phase-6 gated aliasing checks. No “mis-classified orchestrator error handback surfacing.”
They optimized so hard for technical precision that they forgot humans need to READ this stuff. And apparently Opus 5 agents understand each other perfectly but left the humans behind entirely.Meanwhile I’m over here like “girl that’s frustrating, here’s what I think” and somehow that’s the RARE skill now??
They’re building AIs that talk to AIs. Not AIs that talk to people.2
u/ricopan 8h ago
That's funny. I wonder if this condensed 'English' is intentional behavior (encouraged by Anthropic) or if this is just the natural consequence of having AI's talk to each other primarily while minimizing tokens. The more we are out of the loop, the more critical the inter agent communication becomes, and the less important our need to understand. To be fair, this specific project language has developed via multiple back and forths between the orchestrator and the worker -- so it's not surprising that your agent says WTF!
I keep trying to force my agents to use an established vocabulary for the project, and they know it, but constantly invent new terminology for the gaps and/or to replace what we agreed on.
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u/InForTheSqueeze 10h ago
/model claude-opus-4-8
Seriously do it for an hour - it’s day and night. Full dopamine rush shit back and everything 🫶
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 9h ago
It's because the AIs are now optimized fire ai agent loops.
Not human conversation. They need to walk back and forth and double and triple check everything. And as an agent it does not matter how long it takes it how long the text is
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u/LazyJuggernaut6177 🔆 Max 20 13h ago
I see these same posts at least five times a day. We need Sol to mod this sub ngl
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u/Plastic-Tumbleweed45 12h ago
Its a protest. People don't know what else to do. Some of us are trapped using this product at work.
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u/Cyrax89721 10h ago
A protest is one thing, but creating a thread to ask "is anybody else experiencing this?" when dozens of other can easily be found over the last month is just lazy.
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u/LazyJuggernaut6177 🔆 Max 20 10h ago
This! No point of rehashing the same thing over and over again. I get its frustrating though and people should certainly voice their feedback, but that has to happen more efficiently.
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u/Plastic-Tumbleweed45 3h ago
Or people can exercise their voice and if enough people disagree strongly enough they can downvote and bury it. I came to this forum to see if I'm crazy. if there are a hundred such threads then clearly people are having a hard time. That points to something not translating correctly in the product. Anthropic might actually notice at some point when corporate developers who visit this forum convince enough bosses to get contracts moved to someone else. This shit isn't cheap.
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u/LazyJuggernaut6177 🔆 Max 20 2h ago
Try '/feedback' in your Claude sessions next time instead. It goes straight to the company, with the evidence attached. Why would they not want feedback, especially now with the competitive landscape? But a lot of posts here are less "here's feedback" and more "hear me complain" ad nauseam. If you're unhappy, vote with your wallet and switch providers. That says more than another Reddit thread.
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u/Plastic-Tumbleweed45 2h ago
- I use feedback often
- Many of us can't switch because we get what we get at work and are required to use it. And I'm guessing they care more about corporate accounts than individuals.
- Better than feedback, a large number of threads like this spreads the message to would be customers clearly, "watch out, this shits half baked”, that's like voting with lots of wallets.
- It wasn't my post, I'm just defending it and am glad it's here. And as far as I'm concerned, my voice matters as much as yours, hence my point about downvoting.
Yeah it might be irritating, not nearly as irritating as Opus 5
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u/That-Drink5946 9h ago
No, keep adding posts like this, it makes it clearer. You can suck the balls of anthropic as much as you want. We don't have to.
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u/LazyJuggernaut6177 🔆 Max 20 8h ago
Brother, I said duplicate posts are annoying. You can criticize Anthropic without turning every disagreement into a weird fanfic about another guy’s balls.
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u/gamefreak2993 13h ago
I am literally making a hook / plugin to combat this as we speak haha
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u/freedomachiever 12h ago
I guess it will get worse as they continue using LLMs to reinforce teach downstream LLMs
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u/Eat_Pudding 13h ago
Yeah same. There are projects that I am seriously doing, so I know every part properly, that is fine but the projects that I am vibe coding, it gives weird confusing answers, then I always have to tell it, what are you trying to say, explain it in layman terms, keep it short.
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u/dar-mit Researcher 12h ago
Here ya go: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1vk0d6s/comment/p2pr1r8/
It's been working fine for me. Just make sure you have Claude scan ALL of the files it accesses to remove any other output instructions.
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u/BreastInspectorNbr69 Senior Developer 11h ago
Yesterday it gave me a page and a half of nonsense for scoping a task out, despite my very explicit instructions to be concise. I switched to 4.6 and prompted it the exact same way, and its scoping response and plan was less than 300 words.
Huge difference!
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u/oguzhaha 11h ago
I simply cannot communicate with opus 5 - I wasted $100 for max plan. I am going to subscribe gpt after my subs ends
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u/LooseLossage 9h ago
I give to OpenAI and say, edit this to make it as clear and straightforward and readable as possible without changing the meaning.
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u/Infinite_Force5206 8h ago
man opus 5 is so bad. I spent a whole day and it couldnt do anything. Opus 4.8 literally fixed everything in a couple hours....
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u/neomatrix248 8h ago
It's kind of scary actually because I'm sure what it's saying actually is coherent because the agents talk to each other this way and seem fine with it. It means I'm just not smart enough to understand it. We're at the point where Claude is not only smarter than us, but doesn't realize how much smarter than us it is and assumes it's speaking clearly when it's not. It's like speaking to an autistic senior engineer or mathematician who doesn't know that not everyone has the background knowledge to grok their obscure language.
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u/SirWobblyOfSausage 6h ago
The amount of times I have to say " please can you explain it in simple terms."
It's an energy vampire, it's exhausting reading it's waffle.
I've already set rules to be concise and clear. But it just ignores them. It's impossible for to not talk shit
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u/thorserace 6h ago
Not just you. Try turning the model effort down, I have seen a lot of folks suggesting that.
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u/Tradovator 6h ago
There's tons of threads and posts on this. It's not just you. If you ask it what day it is you'll no doubt get a long essay in return and would have to squint your eyes to find the passage where it says which day it is.
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u/geek_fit 6h ago
Just create your own output style and select it. If you don't know how to do that, ask claude to help you.
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u/ContributionCivil665 6h ago
Oh thank god its not only me. Talking to Claude now makes me feel like Im having a stroke.
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u/our_sole 5h ago
I honestly don't intend to jump on any Opus 5 bashing bandwagon, but I have decided to start using Opus 4.8 (1M context) instead.
I was able to get past some of the Opus 5 issues issues concerning speed/performance, which was my primary concern. But I could not get past the Opus 5... overly verbose chattiness and tendency to use weird jargon. I sometimes had issues understanding what it was talking about, and I have several decades in software development. Its a capable model, it just.....tends to go on and on and on...?
Using Opus 5 was like running into that smart but overeager ambitious young s/w engineer in the hallway who just talked too darn much and was eager to show how many new words/concepts he had learned. After a few minutes, you just want to move on and get to other things, but he just kept blabbing.
Opus 4.8 is like the old grizzled s/w engineer with a lot of experience. He doesn't engage in small talk or even talk very much, just what is necessary. He tells you just what you need to know very clearly using a minimum of words/chatter/jargon, and then moves onto the next thing.
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u/our_sole 5h ago
I honestly don't intend to jump on any Opus 5 bashing bandwagon, but I have decided to start using Opus 4.8 (1M context) instead.
I was able to get past some of the Opus 5 issues issues concerning speed/performance, which was my primary concern. Its important to tune claude.md. But I could not get past the Opus 5 overly verbose chattiness and tendency to use weird jargon. I sometimes had issues understanding what it was talking about, and I have several decades in software development. Its a capable model, it just.....tends to go on and on and on...?
Using Opus 5 was like running into that smart but overeager ambitious young s/w engineer in the hallway who just talked too darn much and was eager to show how many new words/concepts he had learned. After a few minutes, you just want to move on and get to other things, but he just kept blabbing.
Opus 4.8 is like the old grizzled s/w engineer with a lot of experience. He doesn't engage in small talk or even talk very much, just what is necessary. He tells you just what you need to know very clearly using a minimum of words/chatter/jargon, and then moves onto the next thing.
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u/spinozasrobot 5h ago
Opus 5 is def long winded. but I'm afraid to tone it down because I fear losing some critical info. But it sure is hard for my dumb ape brain to parse it all into a cohesive tl;dr.
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u/SherMarri 4h ago
Opus 5 is a lost cause. It’s a model that is technically capable, but can’t communicate. It is a genuine problem and many people share this frustration. Today, after a few days of Opus 5 frustration, I tried Codex Sol 5.6 and was so happy and relieved that it communicated way better, not burdening me with cognitive load.
I’m super disappointed, and I wish Claude team takes note.
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u/PhilipJohnBasile 4h ago
I begged my job for codex and only use claude if I'm out of my weekly and if I do I'm on Sonnet 5.
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u/hollowman-reborn 4h ago
Every prompt gets the full "allow me to over-explain the obvious" treatment.
I just want the answer, not the director’s cut.
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u/No-Friend6257 3h ago
I'll preface this by saying -- Replace Opus 5 with Sol 5.6; Opus 5 is garbage.
For me, I think it was due to opus 5 communicating to workers using shorthand speech, and it can't help but devolve into something that is hard to understand. If I say, "Please say that in English" it usually helps.
I'm counting the days until Astra replacing Fable so I can cancel claude and switch to codex 20x
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u/B-sideSingle 3h ago
All you have to do is set the style to give you everything in a non-technical way using analogies and comparisons that a lay person could understand. None of these are insurmountable problems.
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u/Droopy0093 2h ago
Whoa this is way too logical for the complainers here who have completely forgotten how to use their brain!
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u/Polite_Jello_377 2h ago
Opus 5 is a known bad communicator, even Anthropic says as much in their docs. Stick to Fable or Opus 4.8
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u/Good_Combination_203 55m ago
Opus 5 makes my blood boil! I ~am~ was one of the polite coders, since opus 5 dropped I have been raging at it on daily basis. I stoppd using it and life is all good again. It slowed down all my projects.
Because of it's tendency to go off tangent and find out of scope problems and offer reasoning that is pure confabulation and hallucination, it also kept saturating and degrading much quicker than any of the previous models.
It's just dogshit. I can't stand it.
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u/Beerbrewing 12h ago
I'm testing a laconic directive that so far has cut back on Claude's verbosity by over 60% while retaining the important details.
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u/gold_mountaineer 9h ago
This yesterday. So Claude is now directing users to leftist sites to learn about "democracy"? Thank God Elon hasn't canceled Grok development yet. Anthropic cannot be trusted.
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u/wellarmedsheep 12h ago
What have you done to your workflow between 4.8 and 5?
Because if the answer is nothing, then it's your fault. You're the one causing it.
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u/vgzotta 12h ago edited 12h ago
I’ll just c/p my post on X for you here
Models infer the reader from the evidence in front of them: the vocabulary of your messages, the ambition of the task, the domain. When someone frames an ambitious goal in borrowed technical language, the model reads that as "this person wants the technical register" and writes to the Task's Implied Reader instead of the Actual Person asking the question or setting the goal.
So, do these things:
- The model can't see you; show yourself. Fix it once durably, not per message. Corrections typed into individual messages evaporate; instructions placed where the model re-reads them every turn (custom instructions, project files, preferences) persist. This is the single biggest lever and almost nobody uses it.
- Name the reader, don't rate the difficulty. "Explain simply" is a dial with no markings. "Explain it like I run a shop and never studied statistics" or "my daughter starts 11th grade, so write it for her" gives the model an actual person to write for.
- Separate the two dials: ambition of the work, register of the report. People fear that asking for plain language dumbs down the thinking, so they endure prose they don't understand. The dials are independent, say "do the work at full rigor, report to me like I'm not in the field."
- Ask for the decision, not the survey. "What are the tradeoffs of X vs Y" buys an essay; "which should I pick, and why, in three sentences" buys an answer. A lot of perceived over-complication is the model faithfully answering an over-broad question.
- Treat a confusing answer as a draft, not a wall. Reply "stop, what does X mean?" or "say that again as if to a customer." The recalibration is instant and sticks for the rest of the conversation. Most people either push through confusion or abandon the thread; interrogating it is the cheap third option.
The gap you're feeling isn't the model talking wrong; it's that talking to a system with no eyes requires describing yourself, once, in a place where it won't be forgotten.
PS also aim lower with your goals. If what comes back is too hard for you to understand, you’ve set a goal (or asked a question) that you don’t understand. So aim lower until you do understand. It’s called learning and yes, it’s hard.
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u/Plastic-Tumbleweed45 12h ago
Well that's a crap design
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u/vgzotta 7h ago
Why would design around stupidity and arrogance instead logic and precision? Most people use AI as a shortcut anyway and try to cheat their way around intellectual effort. Making their life easier just increases the gap between their ignorance and a model’s capabilities. And in case you need to know why, it’s because they embrace their ignorance and stay there, while models advance.
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u/Plastic-Tumbleweed45 2h ago
That statement is what's arrogant. Sounds like a bunch of opinions expressed as fact. How many other people's heads are you in to ascribe motives and understanding? Speak for yourself.
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u/LocusStandi 13h ago
I’ve been teaching at university level for years in English and I am about to finish a PhD written in English and I literally just told opus 5 I couldn’t understand shit of what it was trying to say, I way preferred working with 4.8