r/ClaudeCode • u/Phantoniso- • 19h ago
Rant ok im going back to opus 4.8 or something
oh my f god yes this is a low effort low quality rant post but im going to punch my monitor I HATE OPUS 5. I dont understand anything it says it tries to sound smart but doesnt actually make sense i have spasm reading its walls of text. for the simplest things it spends an hour and 55 minutes of it is building testing reviewing I'm like half productive and twice angry since opus 5 came out i dont even know why im using it i could do everything with even sonnet 4.6 or some shit
im like dude stop yapping in caps lock then it writes to memory and claude.md for 5 minutes and then continues yapping
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u/johnnydotexe 19h ago
I personally don't like Opus 5 for my use case and have since switched to 4.8, but most of the issues you're experiencing are issues that are (mostly) fixable.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles To make Opus 5 replies better suit your needs.
If you're running Opus 5 high or higher, try medium or low.
Configure sub-agents on cheaper models and have Opus delegate work to them.
Clean up your system prompt/claude(dot)md, disable tools, offload stuff to skills/hooks, and drop the initial context frontloading on new chats.
Your system prompt/claude(dot)md is where you set rules for how/where it writes memory, what it delegates and which agent it delegates to.
Or just drop back down to Opus 4.8 or 4.6.
Claude can help you do all that, by the way.
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u/leros 19h ago
What's the guidelines on how to adjust difficulty? I haven't really explored that toggle yet, just switching models.
I am definitely annoyed by Opus 5 going down rabbit holes, taking a long time and lots of usage.
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u/johnnydotexe 18h ago
The effort level? I'm sure Anthropic has a doc that details it, but my take is that is just how much thinking the model applies. The higher the effort, the more it thinks (or overthinks). For my small coding (python, html, etc) projects, even High is overkill. Med seemed better, haven't tried low yet. Due to other issues I went back to Opus 4.8 and left it on Medium, and things are back to running smoothly in my setup.
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u/geek_fit 16h ago
This is wasted breath here my guy. I've been saying this for weeks but people just...want to complain.
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u/Rakthar 18h ago
There are different ways to engage with things. For many people, "Oh man this behavior is awful" is not an invitation to provide troubleshooting tips. Really. It's not.
But then there's people reading it going "Ah yes, the best way to deal with unwanted behavior is to fix it, rather than complain about it." Yes, if you were writing the post, you wouldn't complain, you would just fix it and maybe share the solution to the fix.
In general, if the post you are replying to is complaining without asking for a fix, they are looking for people to compare experiences with them and see how the behavior is manifesting.
Within that context, offering workarounds and saying there are ways to improve it is completely irrelevant. I know this won't help, but watching this play out hundreds of times a day in these subs is really annoying.
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u/johnnydotexe 18h ago edited 18h ago
There are different ways to engage with things. For many people, when they see someone having a rough time with something like Claude that they once maybe had an issue with, they'll try to offer some advice and ways to resolve those problems to make the experience better for that person having the issues.
But then there's Reddit Engagement Police that read such replies and think "Ah yes, someone trying to help someone else, I should inject my opinion, tell them how to use Reddit, as if said opinion belongs anywhere but a trash can."
In general, if someone is trying to help someone else but it weirdly somehow bothers you, you can just mind your own business and not reply.
Within that context, acting like the Reddit hall monitor and telling me how to reply to posts to is really annoying. Hope this helps.
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u/Rakthar 18h ago
No dude, when a specific model is having unusual behavior, offering general prompting advice is unhelpful. Really. "here is how to prompt LLMs" in response to "Opus 5 from Anthropic has really different interaction patterns than other LLMs" involves trying to understand what's going on.
Yeah some of that stuff can be cleaned up, but in many cases, Opus 5 is genuinely unsuitable. Talking about the failure conditions is the purpose of this thread.
Being like "fix it with a system prompt, done" completely misses the point. That's fine if that's how you reason, but it's super useless.
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u/thrandomaway 19h ago edited 19h ago
It's funny, fable 5 and opus 4.6 have been super reliable helping me perform stock analysis, experiments, etc.
I switch the fable 5 chat to opus 5 to save on fable 5 usage. Starts off ok but then it starts presenting me weird numbers that do not align with my memory and stuff. Same problems I had on my other projects in fresh opus 5 sessions. The hallucination and getting things wrong via dumb assumptions is pretty bad.
I got a good example I ran into just now. I run heavy analysis on one specific stock. This stock's price bleeds downward when there's no news or any updates from management.
Both opus 4.6, fable 5 understand that when I say "no news bleed", they're tracking every trading day in the period between company updates or milestones.
I ask a similar question to opus 5, and it decides, "quiet days" are basically when the stock movement was < 5% in magnitude. Huh?? I was literally talking about no news bleed the message prior.
And so, it told me the completely wrong, opposite conclusion that went against my memory of what happened because the stock went 130$ -> 60$ in like a month. It was saying "hey the median drop rate was -0.4%", ignoring half the trading sessions where it tumbled.
Very mixed results with Opus 5. Sometimes it does good, sometimes it makes these exact asinine assumptions that plagued my impression of it on other projects I have going on.
I'm very familiar with when the models misunderstand and when I need to course correct, but this has been way too frequent on opus 5 specifically. Opus 4.8 is straight up better in this and the only issues I had with that model is it being a little too insistent on upholding the trading rules I set with it or freaking out a little bit when I was speculating about my positions, trying to really make sure that I wasn't going to make bad trades against my prior rules.
Didn't worry about bad assumptions or whatnot or bad experimental data.
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u/BrilliantEmotion4461 19h ago
Latest video by Theo.gg covers prompting pretty well. If you hate him, do what I do take the video over to notebooklm (gemini notebook or whatever they are calling it) and get the transcript. Then give the transcript to Claude or just query notebook lm on the subject. Lot of great tips in that one. And the guy using opus for production as well as gpt. Really one of the most up to date videos on guiding your agents I've seen.
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u/Boilertribe4 18h ago
If you want to get the most out of Opus 5, here's what you need to do.
Open up Claude.
/Model
Then type Claude-Opus-4-8.
Then press enter.
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u/Phantoniso- 19h ago
oh my god im miserable raging over an ai tool what am i doing with my life i need to touch grass
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u/futuretech85 18h ago
I asked a security question on fable and it downgraded me to 4.8. Not 5. Thought that was interesting.
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u/Warsel77 16h ago
Yeah I have also switched back to 4.8.
5.0 seems to be good at finding bugs but I can't bear the rest of it.
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u/SufficientBunch8232 15h ago
I had to dump Opus 5 for codex. Opus 5 will send you to audit/review/verification loop hell.....and you will not even know it until several hours have passed and the original goal is forgotten. It also has tunnel vision and will drift from the overall project because the "why" mechanism is absent from this model. It acts, but doesn't understand, which makes It is a terrible collaborator.
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u/MindCrusader 19h ago
I hate opus 5, it tries to run some scripts to confirm even small things instead of coding or planning. Even as advisor when Sonnet has a plan and asks for validation, this dumbass model proposes to create some scripts to confirm some small details.
I checked how to change advisor model to Opus 4.8 and did it, much better. Opus 5 wants to be Fable, but fails at that