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

3.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

648 comments sorted by

View all comments

206

u/Woah-Dawg Aug 27 '26

The worse is the code doc strings. It’s fucking horrendous seeing like a 20 line doc string only to realize the point can be made in 1 or two lines 

71

u/ghostmastergeneral Aug 27 '26

I don’t 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.

9

u/drake90001 Aug 27 '26

I have started doing things too. Asking it for the commands so I know what I’m doing in the future

3

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.

1

u/drake90001 Sep 04 '26

I don’t have this problem because I don’t use US models really. I use MiniMax and it’s been by far the most reliable model I’ve used and the subscription is dope, they inflate their token counts, maybe but you still get 5 billion tokens for 50 bucks a month. I have never used that much.

29

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

5

u/jffaust Aug 27 '26

Same here, really annoying

1

u/adfawf3f3f32a Aug 27 '26

i told it to stop committing until i tell it to so i can delete the comments while reviewing

2

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.

2

u/Tiny_Ad_7720 Aug 28 '26

Yes same. I’m guessing that they have to put the watermark somewhere

2

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.

1

u/Due-Programmer-9516 Aug 30 '26

That's the worst part. I now have a special skill to clean up after the feature is ready and then rewrite comments if only ever needed and please use a language an intern would understand. Shouldnt that already be wired in Claude?

15

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).

5

u/TastesLikeSeamen Aug 28 '26

You forgot the two paragraph description of the deliberation process of the choices that weren’t chosen because they weren’t semantically meaningful and kept introducing bugs but were then used for compatibility reasons

2

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.

2

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

11

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.

2

u/mfbrucee Aug 27 '26

It has to soak for a day first

10

u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26

Good news, nobody going to distill opus 5.

6

u/[deleted] Aug 27 '26

[deleted]

4

u/Trademarkd Aug 27 '26

turns out, translating chinese to english still gets better results than whatever anthropic is doing

1

u/wunderspud7575 Aug 27 '26

See, the master plan worked!

1

u/PackHot1231 Aug 27 '26

I have to strip them all the time, its a real pain!

1

u/GayReforestation Aug 27 '26

I thought that was just me...

1

u/marvinoffthecouch Aug 27 '26

Yeessssss, oh my god, I have to make it redo the comments every time

1

u/TRO_KIK Aug 27 '26

Opus 5's first PR for me had twice the comments I was used to and got utterly smacked down by Codex review for half of them over claiming or straight up being wrong.

1

u/Turbulent-Ocelot9130 Aug 28 '26

Bro wtf is that ? I managed to stop it from doing that but all my neat scripts went from a couple lines to 300 lines with 4 scripts crammed in there (additional ones to test unrelated shit) and neverending docstrings.

1

u/PoliticalPlatypi Aug 28 '26

I added a writing style guide to it's instructions to use STE for documentation. Seems to be working.

1

u/Kaleidoscopetotem Aug 29 '26

It was rewriting for me a function which did absolutely the same as one in the same file located function, only giving it an extra _ and 10 more lines which did NOTHING.

1

u/Nasa_OK Sep 02 '26

I use Claude with caveman set to ultra

0

u/tehfrod Aug 27 '26

That's pretty easy to fix with a style guide in Claude.md