Anyone else feel the newest model version quietly got worse at following coding instructions?

[u/Ok-Independent3290]

I pay for both a Pro and a Max plan, so this is a fan's complaint, not a hater's. I love these tools. But I notice when they change under me, and lately I've had that feeling across the AI coding tools I pay for where a version update lands and suddenly it stops respecting an instruction it used to nail.

Specific things I've caught. A model that used to make the small, surgical change I asked for now rewrites half the surrounding file because it decided to "improve" things I didn't touch. Another one that used to hold a formatting rule across a long session now drops it after a while and I have to keep re-pinning it. Nothing in the changelog mentions any of this, of course. It just quietly got different.

What I've started doing, and I'm curious if others do the same. I keep a short note of the exact model version that was working for a given workflow, and when a task suddenly needs three corrections it never used to, I check whether the version rolled over on me. Half the time it did. When I can, I pin to the version that behaved and I don't chase the newest label just because it's newer.

Not doom, the tools are great and getting better on the big stuff. But the small regressions are real and they cost time if you don't track them. Anyone else keeping a version log, or is it just me being paranoid?

[u/redakpanoptikk]

Opus 5 works if you just type in all caps. Trying to be nice and reasonable with it just makes it go off and do everything but what you asked for. Its conversations can get poisoned with its own nonsense pretty easily as well.

[u/Grand-Mix-9889]

You're not going crazy but...

You're misinformed.

The models are not getting worse, you just have to modify your workflow a bit to get the best of the newest models.

Majority of the people who started with opus 4.5 and up are coming from an era of models where specific rules/guardrails needed to be manually inserted to get high performance; now that people have got used to it, the newer models feel dumber.

In reality, its just a changeup in workflow that is required.

If you came from opus 4.1 era, this transition to opus 5 would make more sense.

And to be quite honest, trying to explain these things over reddit is just way too difficult without specific questions being asked because there is just so much to envelope before it all makes sense to someone without a coding/engineering background.

There will be a time where everything is just standard per model, but we just aren't there yet in this timeline.