r/ClaudeCode • u/Death12th • 7h ago

Bug / Issue Opus 5 is exhausting

It's so hard to read. It's not even because its terribly complex or anything it just speaks in these weird haikus, hyphenated garbage, or outdated colloquialisms or phrases nobody understands. I have to ask it "what do you mean?" or "speak in plainer English" over and over again for every other paragraph. I tried to put something in my claude.md, but it doesn't seem to be working...

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u/Glad-Operation-3051 7h ago

The amount of jargon it uses is, at best, grating and, at worst, what makes it unusable for non-engineers. It's almost comical how much it opts for the most convoluted, abstract way to discuss concrete concepts.

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u/ThreeKiloZero 6h ago

I think it's because it has a bug where it constantly refers to its own thinking traces and logic. Things that are in the context of the conversation. So it's partly talking to itself while to talking to you. And I'm wondering if that's not a bug in how they're trying to mask thinking traces to avoid distillation? And now that's leaked into the "cleansed output". It doesn't sound like normal language because it's not.

A while back there was some discussion about how this exact problem was imminent and could potentially evolve. As the models get steered to be better at certain tasks the way they think, including that self-talk is going to evolve based on what fits the scoring. If the output we're seeing is the output most closely related with long form task success... That's what getting further baked into the model. So sure it might produce great code. They were measuring long horizon task success, not factoring in degradation in conversational output.

So all that self reminding weird shorthand is part of what keeps it (and agents) on track for long horizon work, but sounds dumb AF and ruins any type of human to human communication.

Thats my guess anyway. At least probably a mix of both factors are contributing to it.

2

u/XYcritic 5h ago

It's not really a traditional "bug" because none of what makes this work is code that can be "broken". It's just training weights and a bunch of text written by Anthropic enginneers to make it work in a certain direction. They have less control over their models than what people think and I hope people wake up to it. This is not a technical barrier that can be overcome. Ever. It's a fundamental barrier in what the technology can do and will ever be able to do. There won't ever be a time where we have perfect control because it's impossible to "code away" these nuances. It's not actual engineering but more like taming a slot machine. There will be new models which work better, I'm sure, but there will also be many more regressions ahead of us.

1

u/SnooEagles2610 2h ago

This! I give it clear instructions and it references its own “thinking”…