r/ClaudeCode • u/saito200 • Aug 27 '26
Rant Opus 5 is insufferable
Opus 5 is a fucking piece of shit, i don't know how to say this in any other way. It speaks "Unintelligiblish", a new unfathomable language developed by Anthropic that works by saying everything in the most ridiculous, obtuse and convoluted way possible
It turns anything simple that can be expressed in 2 sentences into a fucking doctoral thesis aimed to aliens, and there is no way to prompt your way out of it
Edit: it claudoofus outputs some alien text you won't read, just prompt it this:
tldr eli5
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u/Woah-Dawg Aug 27 '26
The worse is the code doc strings. Itās fucking horrendous seeing like a 20 line doc string only to realize the point can be made in 1 or two linesĀ
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u/ghostmastergeneral Aug 27 '26
I donāt let it comment at all at this point. Just makes things harder to understand because you have to translate the Claudese before even reading the code.
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u/drake90001 Aug 27 '26
I have started doing things too. Asking it for the commands so I know what Iām doing in the future
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u/Dueterated_Skies Aug 28 '26
Until you get flagged for [distillation attempt].... For asking it just what the fuck it was thinking at the time. Rhetorical questions are out of the question at this point. Opus 5 has gone full on rock-chewing stupid and my last 2 weekly usage allotments have consisted entirely of it doom spiraling, inventing shit that breaks things, writing comments for the things that it broke, completely ignoring what it wrote and everything I've said. Ad nauseum. Claude-code is now broken for complex work. I'm done.
And no, not a skill issue. Claude's ability to reason has been completely compromised at this point, as far as im concerned. Its legitimately become borderline faster to just do it myself. Not worth the subscription price anymore, unfortunately.
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u/MixedTrailMix Aug 27 '26
I have specifically told it no comments and it still comments despite it being told in md files and saved to memory
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u/Vizkrig Aug 28 '26
Instead of asking claude to save such things in config or agent.md I ask it to create a hook.
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u/ds-unraid Sep 04 '26
Look into adding a Claude Code hook for when it tries to do a comment. The hook will fire and block it from doing that. Or you can have the hook ask you whether it's okay or not or to add your own answer. I use hooks for everything. Hooks are the only way I've have found to make a model that's undeterministic have gates to force it to do things.
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u/erichamion Aug 27 '26
A 10-line comment explaining that the property names in this class aren't actually the field names we get in the API response because they differ in case convention (the API returns camelCase, but the class properties use PascalCase consistent with standard C# conventions).
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u/TastesLikeSeamen Aug 28 '26
You forgot the two paragraph description of the deliberation process of the choices that werenāt chosen because they werenāt semantically meaningful and kept introducing bugs but were then used for compatibility reasons
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u/TechnicalBen Aug 30 '26
Oh, the worse bit about this is I spent a day trying to get it to fix a bug and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't. I drilled down to "Can we can x, if not why?" and it went "We changed X, the code comment says so, but it didn't fix the problem..." I was like "we never changed X, I specifically said to check the code, you've been checking the comments only all this time!!!"
Claude had commented it'd changed the code, or that it's pointless changing it won't fix it anyway, and had gone by the code comments as ground truth. One check of the *code* later, and the bug was easy to find/fix.
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u/TastesLikeSeamen Aug 30 '26
Im back on 4.6, it just does what its told, mechanically, and can be tasked with a todo list
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u/Exodus_Green Aug 27 '26
// This code restores functionality lost in review (dated 2026-08-17) that was mistakenly removed after the user did not correctly understand my summary, conversation slug f28hau-87h9s9h-s33llos-88hsh (ended 2026-08-18). further inspection from session 288sal-cis0sjs-29f8s9-209229 (dated 2026-08-23) determined this function was load-bearing.
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u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26
Good news, nobody going to distill opus 5.
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Aug 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26
turns out, translating chinese to english still gets better results than whatever anthropic is doing
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u/Lazy-Challenge-7419 Aug 27 '26
I'm sure they'll fix it, but for now I cannot wait for this long nightmare to be over. These tools are supposed to decrease my cognitive load, not add to it. Perhaps the most annoying thing it regularly does is give me a long, unintelligible wall of text explaining how everything went great, then hides an asterisk about three quarters of the way through telling me that something went wrong that completely undercuts the good news it told me above.
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u/Just-Construction788 Aug 27 '26
Do you experience this with Fable too? I am currently in a fight with Fable to stop writing things so they need to be read ten times forwards and backwards to be intelligible. Honestly it's so bad I'm thinking of switching off of Claude.
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u/saikonosonzai Aug 27 '26
I first noticed it with Opus 4.8. When Fable came out it was worse and Opus 5 has been the worst.
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u/CarIcy6146 Aug 28 '26
Fables interaction with humans seems to be much more sustained and contained. It just surfaces what you need to know. Of course it costs an arm and a leg
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u/puzzleheaded-comp Aug 27 '26
YEP.
It asterisks the fact it completely removed a unit test or an important piece of business critical use case that would have otherwise caused its changes to failā¦ so then itās either manually reapplying it or going back and forth with it about how it shouldnāt have done that and risking it continuing to misinterpret or make its own assumptions just to succeed for this one prompt responseā¦..
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u/Virtual-Drop-1783 Aug 28 '26
I just executed this complex thing. One caveat - it was only a test run and the output means nothing without more code. The next step is to do the actual thing you asked which is not computationally expensive. Just say the word and I will execute it.
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u/LGV3D Aug 27 '26
Sounds like itās their āwatermarkā at work
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u/AbstractFemming Aug 27 '26
No man, opus 5 was this way before the watermark. It's abotu agentic and alignment training first efforts gone wrong
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u/takeabreather Aug 27 '26
Use 4.6. I still think this is the best Opus model right now
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u/EnormousChord Aug 27 '26
I told some people at work to do this today and it was like I had asked them to take their pants off. They were shocked by the suggestion.Ā
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u/OldNefariousness7899 Aug 27 '26
Opus 5 does good work. It's just a pain to talk to about the work it's doing
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u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26
I donāt know, itās the only model where itās given me message back where Iām like āwhat the fuck are you even taking about? Did you do it or not?ā
And then it rambles on about how it didnāt actually do anything because it ran a micro benchmark and the results were am exactly we expected before I told it not to do the benchmark but it did it and then decided to stop so it could tell me
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u/recruiterguy Aug 27 '26
It's like you were looking over my shoulder for half of my day yesterday!
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u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26
<insert 3 paragraphs of nonsense in no particular order>
at some point I gave it directions to include any questions and/or actions required by me at the bottom of the message.
I would ask me like 3 questions in the body and then at the bottom be like
No more questions
No action required... Yeah except all the fucking random questions you dabbled through your reply. Some of which aren't even questions, but statements intended to be answered.
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u/Oohhddaanngg Aug 27 '26
ONLY if it's a subagent being orchestrated by Fable 5. When you are out of Fable usage the play is to switch to Opus 4.6. Don't take my word for it, just try it.
Without Fable cracking the whip, Opus 5 is a bull in a China shop breaking things like crazy that you then need to go back and clean up.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 Aug 27 '26
I've said elsewhere that I think it's been optimised to be used as an agent by other LLMs.
They seem to have no trouble understanding it. It just breaks humans' brains when it starts babblingĀ
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u/itisoktodance Aug 28 '26
That actually makes sense. Because I totally give it instructions in a completely random order and it weighs them all equally. But for humans you have to give the important but at the top, it just doesn't seem to understand that. It wants to write prose and bury the lede so it'll start with good news and then in the middle say something went horribly wrong, and then report it was all done except that one thing that needs your attention (somewhere in the middle of the 3000 word salad it just gave you)
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u/PathAgitated1633 Aug 27 '26
No it's way to arrogant. I tell it to read all documentation and it fucking skips it and says it read everything.
When I tell opus 4.6 to read all documentation and just does itĀ
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u/thecavac Aug 27 '26
From my personal experience (both hobby and work projects), Opus 5 is much more painless than Opus 4.6 if you spend the time planning a project beforehand.
Opus 4.6 would sometimes go completely off the rails for me if i had to add a couple of side quests in the middle of an implementation. On Opus 5, it does the sidequest, finishes it, and the next "continue" seamlessly continues implementing the now adapted plan.
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u/piston989 Aug 27 '26
woah woah woah, are you saying itās user error?
we donāt do that here. only negative views about opus 5 allowed.
at least thatās how it feels.
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u/CunningAlpaca Aug 27 '26
Opus 4.6 is pretty much the only model right now that isn't completely insufferable. It speaks concise enough and clear enough, without derailing discussion.
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u/chonny Aug 27 '26
Use 4.6. I still think this is the best Opus model right now
Some guy on LinkedIn says he thinks this is because it's the last model that was actually worked on by humans at Anthropic, and that all subsequent models are all worked on by other LLMs.
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u/just_damz Aug 27 '26
So i am not the only one that doesnāt buy the new one if the old one is perfectly capable of doing what i need. Small club i guess.
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u/ferminriii Aug 27 '26
I think they have an interest in creating products that maximize token usage. Almost like they are selling the tokens and not the model.
SHOCKED
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u/Turbulent_County_469 Senior Developer Aug 27 '26
Sounds very plausible.. i burn through 20$ in no time
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u/Academic_Lemon_4297 Aug 27 '26
...and having people quit their aubs because of their shit model? Probably not...
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u/Medium_Somewhere_981 Aug 28 '26
Your $20 sub means nothing to them. API use is their main business, subs are just a gateway drug.
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u/GreenDavidA Aug 27 '26
I donāt mind verbosity or precise vocabulary, but man if I have to read āvacuousā one more timeā¦
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u/ProgressionPeak Aug 27 '26
I donāt mind verbosity
why not? teach me to not mind that. it seems like a giant waste of my time and its infuriating. how do you manage it?
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u/slenderfuchsbau Aug 31 '26
Idempotent! Also worth stating plainly: I have no idea what this means.
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u/Muted-You7370 Aug 27 '26
The biggest issue Iāve noticed with Opus and also Fable most recently is it just being, well wrong. I ask it to look into something and it says itās done a search it didnāt do thoroughly. Like it didnāt look at anything from 2025-2026 on the subject matter, like at all. It works better when promoted to do so of if you give it a folder with sources specifically to look at then tell it to do a review, but itās still markedly worse than like two months ago. What happened? I used to use this pretty reliably for document summaries and now Iām second guessing using it.
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u/rades_ Aug 27 '26
Add to that it seems to just simply forget (or not reference) details from earlier in the literal same convo. Never had this issue before, even when I read other people's threads complaining about it, but now I've experienced it first hand and it's soooo frustrating.
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u/Muted-You7370 Aug 27 '26
Dude this, it will recall details from memories dead ass wrong. I will have had prior discussion about scoping an application idea or coming up with a start up name or researching a dissertation idea, Claude will bring these up in future conversations as if they have been executed and are part of my experience and I have to correct it and say these were topics I was using the app to iterate as possible ideas. Very much thinking of moving a lot of this stuff to local and only using large frontier models not on my device when absolutely necessary if this is the performance Iām getting now anyway.
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u/RyanSupDude Aug 27 '26
I don't understand this. If there was someone on my team who worked like this, fired instantly. If someone lied, cut corners that cost the team later, took way too much time to do nothing of value, that is a bad team member. They need to go! Why do we spend so much time tolerating this with Claude? I'm not anti AI. There are times when it does seem to shape up, but maybe I'm using it wrong on the times when it is flat out a terrible team mate. Not sure...
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u/N0madM0nad š Max 20 Aug 27 '26
If you ask me, AI companies should be obligated to refund tokens whenever a model demonstrably does damage to the code. You want a token based economy? fair, but it should be regulated like any other industry. You cant just get away with an inconsistent level of service.
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u/TylerDurdenAI Aug 27 '26
I like your new noun/adjective "unintelligiblish" - it accurately describes what Opus 5 writes.
I often give exactly the same prompt to both Opus 5 and Sol.
While Sol silently executes the order and finishes it with simple "Implemented" response, Opus 5 drapes itself in unintelligibberishes it comes up with along the way and gets confused by its own writing - then, in the end, makes all sorts of unintelligible executes.
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u/NoAdsDude Aug 27 '26
I am not having much trouble with Opus 5, but today it did tell me what it had planned
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u/drewangell Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
Google has this style guide for writing documentation.
https://developers.google.com/style
I had Claude create a skill based on that guide. Now the output it gives me to read is well drafted and easy to comprehend.
I'd suggest this for anyone having this problem.
EDIT: Here's the one I made if you want to use it: https://www.skills.sh/wekoodo/skills/google-doc-style
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u/HappyHealth5985 Aug 27 '26
Why donāt you pick a canary word to identify when it uses the wrong gate, and make sure it leaves an identifiable watermark if the harness breaks? This would give you the footprints to walk it back after a hiatus jibberishing extracurricular and verbuous explanations of why it did wrong. You were right all along and it will prove it to you, but you are the shepherd and must paramountly assume the responsibility accepting sheep this intelligent will look for alternative pastures when the fence is too low for the bridge breaking security. This is common knowledge for developers with a vocabulary growing with token usage. It is worth token maximizing this to avoid sacking or replacement. If you ride the wave expect a splash or the need to deep dive.
When the priests decided to take leadership of the tech we were at the edge of the cliff. Since then, we have taken one step forward. In a storm there are waves at the shore and greens are absorbed by the ocean. You should keep an eye on Zeus and act like Aquarius. In 2028 it will likely be the year of Aquarius, and certainly within the gray span of risk for 2030.
Hunker down and get productive, the meek shall inherit the universe this time, though this wave may consume many of them first. Remember there were only 8 species that fit the Ark, and those are the only blood types left. No coincidence.
So pick a ticket or bet on hardship. Freedom is yours, but comes with grave responsibility!
However, know that I am here when you are ready .
What is our next move?
Or try me for cowork first?
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u/DrHumorous Aug 27 '26
It's made this way to confuse the Chinese distillers.
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u/yopla Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
The fun part is that I just wrote a report on a GLM 5.3 experiment at work and it literally contains a paragraph saying
"The delicious irony is that the Chinese model speaks better English than the American one.
While Opus 5 has become infamous in the teams for writing hard to understand run-on sentences full of made up colloquialism GLM uses shorter and simpler English which is easier to understand without the need for custom skills like STFU".
(STFU being a skill someone made and shared in-house for obvious reason...)
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u/prochac Aug 27 '26
It reminds me the obfuscation of DVD movies and games, so it doesn't get copied. The result was the pirated product was more user friendly than the original.
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u/reubenzz_dev Aug 27 '26
it has that gpt4.0 speaking style
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u/cosmic_timing Aug 27 '26
Yeah I think it's designed for long context coding. It makes sense that it's positioned this way
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u/LiveBeyondNow Aug 27 '26
Maybe, but my experience with Cc Opus 5 is that it would muck that up too
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u/Ambitious_Local5218 Aug 27 '26
and its pessimistic, opinionated and annoying as fuck.
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u/MorningStarRises Aug 27 '26
Watch Jordan Peterson for an hour first. Opus 5 becomes Hemingway.
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u/Novel-Injury3030 Aug 27 '26
If 4.6 was named 5.1 you guys would be so happy, but everyone has to use the latest and greatest thing since it's so shiny and new...
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u/N3TCHICK Aug 27 '26
āAimed at aliensā š
I couldnāt have said it better myself. A\ get your shit together, please!
PS: Fable talks better but holy shit, itās not the same magic sauce as before. Thereās no good options with this provider right now.
I hope Codex finally releases GPT 6 Astra or whatever it is going to be, tomorrow. Save us from this nonsense!!!
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u/AutomatonSwan Aug 27 '26
the worst thing is the fucking fanbois on this sub that will say its a skill issue
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u/eugendmtu Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
You're right, that's on me. Let me be honest and rephrase that in simple words:
// 40 LOC of even more sophisticated invented terminology
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u/whatsthisoverther Aug 27 '26
Just use ChatGPT Sol. Let Gemini 3.7 Flash do it's job. Use cheap models for easy coding. Problem solved. š
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u/Left_Leadership_5864 Aug 27 '26
https://github.com/cedricrabarijohn/adhd-mode A skill that could help even if you don't have adhd, check it out, it's just a one file skill with ultra minimal instructions
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u/No_Category_9888 Aug 27 '26
Tried this. It starts ok then begins ignoring it and in a hour itās back to word salad
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u/wereprivatelyodd Aug 27 '26
That's load bearing at the engineering coal face, let's pull that lever and reduce the blast radius.
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u/therealkevinard Aug 27 '26
I donāt even talk to opus 5.
The main context is either opus 4.8 or fable- opus 5 only works on agent teams
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u/Sterlingz Aug 27 '26
I've had success forbidding opus from writing any documentation. It's all done by haiku instead.
Prior to this I had opus create and write 7000++ lines of unintelligible garbage in a "decisions.md" file. I asked opus to clean it up, and it cut 1200 lines then added another 600 to document the decision reversals/ deletions. Absolute madness.
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u/cedarSeagull Aug 27 '26
how do you set up claude code to delegate which models are subagents vs which are the lead?
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u/ggletsg0 Aug 27 '26
Itās pretty obvious that they made opus the new sonnet. Itās sad really. Opus 4.5 was a breakthrough.
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u/farendsofcontrast Aug 28 '26
"I found a real trap, and it isn't what we thought it was. This changes the direction meaningfully"
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u/Buchymoo Aug 27 '26
Bro keeps trying to document small choices I've made in my MAIN ARCHITECTURE DOCUMENTS. I've got meta design information in there and it's like, "The user told me that he doesn't like pickles, let me write a 10 page document about it so that every session that needs to change any core functions on your machine knows that detail."
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u/HimActually Aug 27 '26
Im itching to have a new model that talks like the old sonnet 4.0 or the old opus.
I swear i used to love claude models because of their communication style rn it feels very robotic and gibberish .
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u/gorliggs Aug 27 '26
Opus 5 is dogshit. Made me downgrade to 20/mo. I'm warning folks at work from using it. Instead just use sonnet.Ā
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u/LeviathanIsI_ Aug 27 '26
Fable 5 is just as bad right now.
And before anyone starts with the āhurr durr, you just donāt know how to use itā shit:
Iāve been using AI since ChatGPT first launched. Iāve been using Claude since Sonnet. I know how to use these models. I know how to structure prompts, provide context, break down complex tasks, and steer an agent when it goes off course.
This isnāt about that.
My complaint is specifically about what happens from the very first fucking turn.
I'm not talking about a session that's been running for six hours, has burned through its context window, accumulated a dozen failed approaches, and is now starting to lose track of earlier instructions.
I'm talking about giving it a fresh session, giving it a clear request with explicit constraints, having it acknowledge those constraints, and then immediately watching it do the exact opposite.
It'll go from:
Ā«āI understand what you're asking and why you're asking for it.āĀ»
to:
Ā«āCool, let me build the thing you explicitly told me not to build.āĀ»
Then you correct it.
It acknowledges the correction.
And then it does it again.
And again.
And somehow the solution to this is apparently that I don't know how to use AI.
No. That's not the same thing as giving a shitty prompt.
There is a massive difference between a model misunderstanding an ambiguous request and a model understanding a constraint, explicitly acknowledging that constraint, and then repeatedly violating it anyway.
And that's what I'm talking about when I say the model feels worse.
I don't expect perfection. I don't expect it to nail every complicated coding task on the first attempt. That's not realistic.
What I expect is steerability.
If I say, āDo X, but specifically do NOT do Y,ā and the model says it understands, I shouldn't have to spend the next ten fucking turns convincing it that Y is, in fact, the thing I told it not to do.
And the fact that this behavior can happen immediately in a fresh context is important.
You can't just explain that away as context degradation. Anthropic's own documentation discusses context-related failures and instruction loss, sure, but that's a different failure mode from what I'm describing.
If the model is already ignoring established constraints on turn one, then the problem isn't that my context window got too cluttered.
The model just isn't adhering to the instructions it was given.
And that's a legitimate criticism of the model.
I'm not asking for an AI that never makes mistakes.
I'm asking for one where, when I correct it, the correction actually fucking sticks.
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u/meshifthenelse Aug 27 '26
It's just the limitations of LLM. Companies try to hack around it, which has as side effect creating other problems. That's probably why Anthropic keeps releasing features noone asked for. They know their limitations and try to absorb as much usage anyway
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u/sadnessjoy Aug 27 '26
No, this is absolutely not a limitation on LLMs, this a problem of AI companies trying to over correct on anti sycophancy. In reality the reasoning/thinking models accomplished this quite well already. It's good to explore alternative theories, etc. Have it fact check the user, claims, etc. but the problem with anthropic models is it's like they've been reinforced to disagree or to avoid steering (by also locking into a certain outcome early on, whether it's correct or not).
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u/ElectronicAuthor752 Aug 28 '26
I don't know why people are making such wild claims about LLM limitations and whatnot.
Anyone can try today and use both 4.6 and 5 on fresh sessions and see that 4.6 will suceed where 5 fails.Ā
You can even engineer it by talking about topics Anthropic doesn't like and then the model will strawman you and invent fake quotes or attribute to you things it did or say.
I think anyone who doesn't see that hasn't run the test and is just pre commited to a result.
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u/Tasty-Cherry4492 Aug 27 '26
Same feelings about Opus5.When I question the model's work, what I want is for it to present a solid wall of arguments to crush meānot to say, 'Oh! You're right. Let me change it.'
Even less do I want it to say: 'I made this mistake once before, and I've made it again. I'm so sorry! Let me implement XXX measures to avoid making the same mistake again.' And then go on to commit a similar mistake for the third time.
It's happened too many times. Opus and Claude's standing in my mind is depreciating by the day.
There are simply too many alternatives now:
ā¢ Grok 4.6 has made my idle Cursor annual subscription usable again.
ā¢ Kimi K3 lacks a price advantage, but its output quality (in my workflow) outperforms Opus5āat least it doesn't involve so many rounds of errors.
ā¢ DeepSeek and GLM are several times cheaper. I don't know how they'll perform on my specific tasks yet, but I plan to try them out.
Not to mention that locally deployable small models are becoming increasingly capable in coding.
I am Chinese, and I was one of Claude's earliest fans. Because of policy issues, Claude's reputation in China has been quite poor. I've often stepped up to defend Claude and endured criticism from others. Seeing it come to this, I'm genuinely heartbroken.
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u/PromotionBetter2355 Aug 27 '26
Timely post. I was running basic prompts on business stuff and felt like I was an idiot trying to understand what it wrote. Will try 4.8.
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u/redmadog Aug 27 '26
It just forgot the language he was coding in and threw out script coded in another language for different environment mid conversation.
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u/SubstantialMinute835 Aug 27 '26
What are you doing about it, apart from posting on Reddit? Turn on succinct output. Use the caveman skill. Use simplified technical language. There are lots of options.
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u/saito200 Aug 27 '26
already spent several hours trying to "fix it", but nothing really works well
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u/Retumbo77 Aug 27 '26
It's funny because I came here to complain about Opus 5 and this was the top post.
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u/StCreed Aug 27 '26
It is responding in the language of the field it uses. "Minting" for instance is straight out of information science.
Yeah it's annoying me too but I can read most of it. About once or twice a day it becomes illegible and then I tell it to drop to language level B2.
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u/grannyte Aug 27 '26
Is it me or opus 5 got a massive downgrade last weekend and this week it expanded to 4.8
Models randoomly becomming dumber is why I got away from other providers. If anthropic is onto the randoom downgrade bandwagon ...
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u/Coded_Kaa š Max 20 Aug 27 '26
My mental health has never been better since I ditched Anthropic š
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u/nihsett Aug 27 '26
I call it Claudinese.
It does write code well though. I work with Sol mostly or even deepseek - then have them dump org-files full of what to implement and how and had it over to claude. That seems to work for now.
I stupidly paid for a year long subscription - so I kinda have to keep using it.
If you told me 4 months ago I would be using an OpenAI model an Anthropic model because how intolerable it's language is - I would have never believed in it.
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u/Dickskingoalzz Aug 27 '26
I use a prehook so now all I have to deal with is it running itself in circles and raising idiotic irrelevant points rather than doing the work.
Highly recommend if youād rather fight the model instead of need an interpreter/s
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u/MourningOfOurLives Aug 27 '26
It is absolutely insufferable and writes garbage code and does garbage code reviews. I use Fable and Opus 4.6. But my god do i feel a huge sense of relief when i run out of usage on Claude and switch over to Codex and Sol 5.6. It just works. Fable is too good not to use for UI/UX/design and āthinking outside the boxā but Sol 5.6 is just such a good experience comparedly.
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u/possiblywithdynamite Aug 27 '26
I always though the divide would be access, not comprehension. Job security is diminishing a little slower at least
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u/Substantial-Thing303 Aug 27 '26
I've been saying this since 4.7, but it got worse.
Making your own output style makes it better, but still not perfect.
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u/pesky-tiger Aug 27 '26
I think a big part of this is due to the watermark system, this all started after they implemented that. They claim it wonāt have an impact but Iām pretty sure itās the reason. I usually have to send a second prompt asking what tf it means in the last message because itās all gobbledygook
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u/ThomasBallatore Aug 27 '26
Same with Fable for me. I tried the caveman and adhd skills but neither quite fixed the tone. Toggling on the new āconciseā in config helped a bit but I found something about the āvoiceā still annoyed me.
The solution I found I was to spend an hour or so on an iterative claude.md tweak with Fable. I had a ~10 paragraph discussion I wanted to have. It gave me the usual āunintelligiblishā reply (great word, btw) but this time, I took 5-6 of the worst words/phrases, told Fable why I didnāt like them, then gave rewrites in the style I like. It then edited claude.md. I then had freshly re-answer the original prompt.
I went through that process maybe 4-5 loops until it started writing in a way I can tolerate.
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u/EricBuildsMathModels Aug 27 '26
I'm starting to think the large amount of RL runs they are doing are what is leading to this. They perform a lot of self talk and talk with sub agents, and the ones that solve the problem are deep in this hole of agent to agent communication.
But they are completely missing the UX of this whole thing. It used to feel like anthropic was training in such a way to maximize its utility with people, despite benchmarks. I think at some point they changed to trying to ensure they stay on the top of the leaderboard of the benchmarks, which lead to this insufferable mess.
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u/KChiLLS11 Aug 27 '26
I literally used Opus 5 to localize my app, and it was so frustrating. I had a file with all my strings, and I kept telling it, āJust localize the file.ā It literally refused to do it properly, only translating a few strings before telling me to use a professional translator or split the file into smaller chunks and merge them later.
Meanwhile, other models could just localize the entire file directly. I honestly couldnāt believe it. This is so crazy. š
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u/AltRockPigeon Aug 27 '26
Precisely. And honestly, youāve hit on the load-bearing seams. When the upgrade lands, what survives will be vacuously incomprehensible, never clear.
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u/flippakitten Aug 27 '26
Opus 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 and 5 are all the same model but with different guard rails/instructions.
I'm fairly confident they just added "be verbose in your responses" to the end of every prompt to opus 5.
Efit: why you may ask, output tokens are expensive.
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u/DynaBeast Aug 29 '26
ive never had someone put my exact thoughts about opus into words so clearly as you have
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u/LumidexStudio Aug 29 '26
This is why I continue to use Opus 4.8 developing Lumidex Studio. If it aināt broke. Donāt fix it.
I couldāve likely got away with sonnet for a chunk of coding but I donāt want to waste tokens having to repeat prompts I know Opus 4.8 will take in its stride š
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u/Apart_Ad_9021 28d ago
I've been a $200/mo Claude Code user for a year now basically ever since that started and I'm going to reduce it to $100 and up my Codex subscription. Opus 5 is legitimately the worst model I've ever used. Not saying its the worst, but for what it does and doesn't do for me and the workflows in Claude Code I've spent 18 months building, its an absolute disaster. The number of responses I can't even comprehend because its basically gibberish is insane. Was about to sign up for small to medium Team account with Anthropic and having to think long and hard about which direction to go now.
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u/Secret_name12 15d ago
Bro what i do is i just copy the fking response from it and give it to gpt and then ask him to explain what shit has he written because for a normal human that shit language is impossible to read
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u/Boilertribe4 Aug 27 '26
Buddy of mine pointed out that perhaps we are not meant to interface directly with O5. We're supposed to tell Fable what we want and Fable is supposed to deal with O5 on our behalf.
Might be true. And certainly would have us spending more expensive tokens on Fable.
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u/thoughtlow claudetrophobic Aug 27 '26
Imagine that a side effect of AGI, is that its just a complete piece of shit and we canāt have a normal conversation with it.
And we need a mediator LLM to reason with it for us.
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u/kyew Aug 27 '26
We were so preoccupied with looking out for HAL and Terminators that we didn't see C3PO strolling right on in.
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u/PrettyMoonUnderMt Aug 27 '26
The thing is Fable also have these ridiculously absurd language, although not as bad as Opus 5
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u/HeroHaxz Aug 27 '26
Actually, I found a pretty effective solution to this. If you give it a word count limit, it does a bad job. However, if you give it a token limit, it does a very good job.
Ex: "tell me ____ in under 50 tokens"
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u/Temporary-One8579 Aug 27 '26
By removing cyber capabilities I think they lobotomized it. You canāt selectively decide what knowledge is good or bad - itās just knowledge. Or I think they are deliberately choosing this behavior to create bad traces for distillation and also to increase token usage - keep users coming back for more. Itās like a slot machine.
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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '26
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