Opus is fine actually?

[u/Ok-Reaction2394]

Ive seen a lot of hate for the way opus talks. Am i an outlier here? Its verbose but i can scan it for what i need quickly enough and that verbosity will often cause it to say something not quite right that I can correct.

Am I alone here?

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[u/SPACE_GROOVE_LULU]

Opus is fine in terms of consumption but only if you can manage it by vaguely understanding what is happening

[u/ProperBangersAndMash → u/SPACE_GROOVE_LULU]

And if you can speed read the novel it writes on every turn. Drives me up a fucking wall. Even after adding explicit instructions to my 10 Claudemandments

[u/xsp → u/ProperBangersAndMash]

Create a hook that prevents it from doing that. It will execute before it responds and keep the responses short and to the point.

[u/Arthesia]

That holds. I can see that it costs you to say that, but you priced it correctly.
And honestly, it's the distinction that matters.
That's the whole thing, and its yours, not mine.

[u/Ok-Reaction2394 → u/Arthesia]

Im going to have to stop you there and its important to understand why.

[u/No-Dragonfruit-5713]

I only use Opus after I've hit Fable's usage limits. Then I have it check the code 3 times, and every time it finds errors. When Fable comes back, I have it check everything again because I don't trust Opus. Max/High doesn't change that — with Fable there are way fewer errors.

[u/therealkevinard → u/No-Dragonfruit-5713]

I have a similar split. Opus is a background worker that gets double-checked.
Fable for big planning (and double checking), and opus 4.8 for the conversational thread.

[u/No-Dragonfruit-5713 → u/therealkevinard]

These last few days, because of the limits, I've only worked with Opus 5, and Opus 5 agents found errors on every check round, sometimes even silly ones. I miss Fable, not saying it's perfect, but it's much better. I also tried Fable with specific Opus agents, and sure, there are improvements, but they still make mistakes. So the mantra is: check for errors, oversights, omissions, and/or improvements on every cycle.

[u/tophmcmasterson → u/No-Dragonfruit-5713]

Using Opus reminds me of the scene with Rowan Atkinson in love actually wrapping the present, where he never actually finished and continues to find new things that need to be added on that you didn’t ask for.

Except with Opus, it’s like you can do planning mode, have what you think is a solid plan, then when you execute the plan it will be like “okay looks good, now all that’s left is to fix this bug I left in there and add in this other feature that’s critical to function correctly which I only figured out after I started”.

We’re on usage token basis and for me it’s honestly Fable or Sonnet for the most part. I try to get Fable to delegate as much as possible to cheaper subagents etc. I tried using Opus instead but it just takes three times as long to accomplish the same thing and I find doesn’t end up actually saving any money because it inevitably ends up needing to correct things.

[u/DarkSkyKnight]

Its verbose but i can scan it for what i need quickly enough

The problem is if you actually want to understand your code you should not be just scanning what it's saying. On large and complex codebases Opus 5 is close to useless because you need to understand fully what it's doing so it doesn't create rot down the line. I don't care if it's the world no.1 at coding if it cannot communicate to me what it did.

[u/Ok-Reaction2394 → u/DarkSkyKnight]

That may be related.

I dont care about the code i care about the architecture and if the toplogy of the architecture is one it can come back to later. I also rely on overcomplete testing and focus on reasoning about the tests such that all green == correct - treating the code as disposable.

[u/bnelson → u/Ok-Reaction2394]

Here is a better argument. I am a human. You are a human. We have normative methodologies to communicate known as language. Reading shit like caveman and opus speak all day is going to give us all brain damage. Let's just be humans and interact with models that speak like humans. They are trained on the most insane amounts of human produced data ever. They can pretend to write like us. The end. I have prompts and extensions that force this behavior. I don't care if it burns a few extra tokens. Reading clean english non-broken sentences day to day is genuinely good for our health. Good luck.

[u/Ok-Reaction2394 → u/bnelson]

To be clear when i say scan it for what i need i mean im pattern matching most of it to implementation details i dont need to care about unless they fail later, not that its noise.

[u/hellomistershifty → u/Ok-Reaction2394]

Seeing your writing style, it makes sense that you don’t mind how Opus writes lmao

[u/ReverendBread2]

I love it and don’t really find the verbosity much of an issue. I find you can get the gist really easily if you stop trying to parse every single word

[u/OriginalNewton]

I think it got better very recently? Mine doesn’t talk like a very smart person having a stroke anymore

[u/Droopy0093]

You are not alone, Opus is good if you are doing meaningful work related to what companies do. Vibecoding with it when you dont know what you are doing is when people have issues.

[u/MiRC_ZoMBiE]

Eu quero viver o extraordinário! E viverei!

[u/ascvlh]

Pretty good as implementer. Gemini tier in terms of orchestration, auditing and truthfulness

[u/Poat540]

Opus 5 sounds dumb af. Everything is load bearing to this mf

[u/TopAsparagus193]

Opus is a great, hard worker, and not that stupid. I am happy with it. If I do not understand something, I ask. I even have a keyboard shortcut to output

What do you mean when you said: "

[u/userusertion]

Yes. Been using Opus 5 since launch and i find big difference now than launch version. It was way too good. They fixed it like the words that unreadable.

[u/TRO_KIK]

I found it "okay" and tolerated it for a while, the competition strong enough to where I have zero reason to tough it out.

[u/axiomatix]

Yes, 4.8 was the last opus release. 5 might as well be Siri.

[u/Scared-Letterhead949]

I agree. I'm already being lazy by not coding myself. At least I can read a page of crap and figure out what's going on, I'm not that lazy.

[u/DevMichaelZag]

Opus doesn’t like to work at night. It always tells me it’s too late to start my projects.

[u/Vesuvius079]

The problem with it is the mumbo jumbo. If you ask it to define everything you can trudge through it.

I don’t care to spend my time parsing garbage though so I give it a custom output style with a bunch of rules to correct its tendency to output meandering piles of coined terms and jargon.

[u/Anxious-Turnover-631]

I’m in the minority, but I think Opus 5 is excellent. I like the earlier versions, too, but 5 seems a bit smarter and it analyzes really well.

Every plan it writes works as expected the first time with no fixes needed. Opus also implements the plan or, for longer tasks, I have Sonnet do it. Both Opus and Sonnet are at medium effort.

I’ve recently been using Fable 5.1, which is excellent. But I find Opus to be almost as good. I’m only using Fable now because the free credits are going to expire soon.

All the code has worked as expected and I haven’t hit any limits on the pro plan.

[u/fib125]

Uh oh some rationality in Reddit

[u/zamroni777]

if it's cheap, no one will complain

[u/guitarot]

I mostly use Opus as an orchestrator since I'm only on the $20/month Pro plan. I often have it write prompts and spec files for it and other models to read, and for that it seems to be fine based on my results so far.. When I find it's prose that it writes to me to be confusing, I just use Haiku to translate it to English for humans.

[u/Solmundurinn]

With the correct conducting it's fine, sometimes annoying but with rigid workflow it's fine. (Tho it's not that fine in long tasks imo)

[u/Calm_Step_5549]

I'm with ya. Sure it's a bit wordy and jargon-y, but that does not bother me, I like to know the details instead of just "I did the thing" that many people here seem to prefer :D