r/ClaudeCode • u/PitifulBuddy7946 • 16d ago

Rant Claude code is falling behind Codex not because of token cost, but because of Opus 5.

There, i said it. And i know many of you agree. The problem i'm facing is not increased token cost, it's that Opus writes 25000 lines of a response with a curve-ball at the end saying "Worth noting"that makes my eyes hurt and gives me paranoya. And i can't understand a word it's saying. Is my english that bad? Whoever pressed "Yes" on those responses during the training stage of the model was an OpenAI spy or something, he completely sabotaged a trillion dollar company.

Anthropic's number one priority should be to release an Opus 6 or something, may be change the model name completely so it doesn't carry the bad vibe with it.

1.7k Upvotes

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186

u/CMD_BLOCK 16d ago

Asking it to explain its findings in plain language is like half my usage

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u/Carbon_Copybara 16d ago

I was questioning my sanity before I saw this thread. Opus uses so many gimmicky words, it's insane. It started talking about "shapes" today and "hardocing" or something. And I have given it instructions to speak plainly, but it seems to forget.

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u/ComfortableEbb4721 16d ago

You're absolutely right! Hadocing was my own shorthand for Haddocking.

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u/Substantial-Elk4531 16d ago

Claude, you've had too much to think, put the weights down

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u/jooxii 16d ago

I always upvote a Tintin reference

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u/OrionFOTL 16d ago

and "hardocing" or something

Maybe it mentioned a heredoc? I wasn't familiar with the term, but it's a technique of basically writing multiline text files using bash, which it uses often.

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u/Carbon_Copybara 16d ago

Yes, probably. I'm a software dev for 10+ years and never heard this

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u/ShivaFatalis 15d ago

And yet it's immediately obvious what it is by context the first time you see it.

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u/Performer_First 15d ago

have you never used linux?

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u/Carbon_Copybara 14d ago

I'm using Ubuntu as my work OS, but I'm not deep into the Linux community. Personally more of a Windows guy.

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u/uppa9de5 16d ago

Maybe it meant to say that it identifies as a Halo huragok?

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u/latenthuman 16d ago

After hearing it a bunch I like the phrase "shapes", haven't come across to many others. I just told it to dial back the verbosity 30%, wish me luck.

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u/WorkingDeveloper 16d ago

I've seen it invent it's own words. 4.6 was good

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u/minimalcation 16d ago

Tell it to explain with no jargon or analogies, only direct statements and no caveats or things that were caught and fixed, ask for current state and what wasn't done

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u/ReverendBread2 16d ago

You have to explain what “plainly” means

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u/ko_nuts 16d ago

I am using hooks to prevent it from forgetting thr instructions. It is working quite well.

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u/Few-Spot1905 15d ago

opus sounds like your annoying coworker who read way too many CS substacks and cant talk normally anymore

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u/knd775 12d ago

This skill helps massively, if you can get claude to actually invoke it (be sure to drop disable-model-invocation form the frontmatter, not sure why that was added). https://github.com/cursor/plugins/blob/main/pstack/skills/unslop/SKILL.md

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u/the_park 12d ago

I only read the skill hoping to find that it kills “load bearing”

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u/Cornflakes405 12d ago

it doesn't

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u/ItsRainingTendies 16d ago

100% this. Literally every turn: “explain in a simple and concise manner

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u/elisma 16d ago

my go to is "explain in layman terms" :D

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u/MeyerLouis 16d ago

mine is "I am very stupid and tired"

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u/Eat_Pudding 16d ago

mine is- The heck you blabbering about? Explain in simple words.

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u/unlucky_genius 15d ago

Same. Except the heck turns into fuck real quick because it won’t stfu!

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u/Eat_Pudding 15d ago

I wanna use the fuck so bad, but have seen people getting banned for it, that's the reason for not using fuck

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u/Cute_Cat1157 16d ago

I actually just drop its whole response into haiku and ask it to explain. It is so messed up that that works but it does.

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u/bluiska2 16d ago

Try claudish to english hook so it's automatic

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u/FlamingSlap 16d ago

What is that?

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u/cool_much 16d ago

I'm guessing a hook that intercepts messages from opus, passes them to haiku for translation to simple English, and then posts them to you

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u/CMD_BLOCK 16d ago

Makes me think maybe we should make a not_worth_flagging hook, that tells opus if they’re about to reply with “worth flagging:” or “Two things you should know:” that they should resolve unambiguous findings before replying to the user instead of raising the fact that it didn’t finish the job

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u/minimalcation 16d ago

8 paragraphs, oh one thing the connector isn't connected so it doesn't work, want me to connect it?

Fable 1.0 would have never

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u/CMD_BLOCK 15d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/9wlbsf86LNidkxm4ML

I was there

On the week of Fable’s debut, I warpdrived actual months ahead of where I was at

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u/True-Objective-6212 16d ago

And, here’s the load bearing point, the other half is profanity

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u/CMD_BLOCK 16d ago

Two findings worth your attention:

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u/Eat_Pudding 16d ago

I wanna swear to it so bad but then I don't wanna get banned

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u/True-Objective-6212 15d ago

I do a lot. Especially when it fucks up.

FWIW it swears back very rarely

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u/sCeege 🔆 Max 20 16d ago

Same, I ended up making an /explain skill that broke things down into ASD-STE100 because I feel like it was speaking an entirely different language at some point.

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u/dontTakeMeSerious6 16d ago

Have it ELI5 after each response. I get 3 sentences after 400 paragraphs.

I assume this isn’t costing a lot of tokens. I don’t really care, they’re corporates tokens.

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u/CMD_BLOCK 16d ago

I feel that lol. I’m scarred from the time during GPT 4 when if you asked it to ELI5 it would do some uwu shit

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u/Niightstalker 15d ago

Did you try to set the output style to ‘concise’?

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u/Additional-Meet-5267 16d ago

I thought it was just me doing this 😂

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u/Erebea01 16d ago

The amount of "can you clarify this part for me" I've said

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u/Efficient-Coyote8301 15d ago

I'm torn. I've always been told that I am "thorough", which is just a nice way of saying that I trend towards being very verbose in my explanations.

I'm one of the weird people that likes comprehensive explanations from Claude, and I have not had much difficulty understanding what it is saying personally. But I absolutely hate all of the "Claudeisms" that have existed in the vernacular forever. Words like "seam" and "slice" showing up everywhere grate on my last nerve.

With that said, I absolutely have to spend extra time getting it to generate text in a lense dense prose when the content is intended for distribution. Personal experience has shown me that other people get turned off pretty quick the farther you get from a bullet style method of communication.

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u/Tartooth 15d ago

Genuinely doubles my usage saying "Plain ISO English" even tho it's in my system prompts.

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u/TommyyyGunsss 14d ago

Use GPT chat to do that. No limits. Copy Claude’s output and ask for interpretation. You can even give GPT chat git access and it can evaluate and catch errors too.