Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight. Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end. It is definitely more capable, and yes, I've found it can make unwarranted decisions, but actually I've found Fable worse for that, particularly if it's off in a subagent somewhere out of sight. And comments are out of control. I have a subsystem in my hobby app that I wrote over a couple of weekends with Opus + Fable. After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated. A review of the code showed it was approaching 3:1 comments to code ratio. I spent a day's worth of tokens (5x) rephrasing and eliminating comments.

I’ve also caught it cheating a two times now. I’ve asked it to write a benchmark suite. It found a bunch of my adhoc logs in a scratch directory and wrote code that used those instead of running the actual benchmarks! When I pointed out the 5 hour benchmark seemed to run in 5 seconds it literally said, and I quote, “I cheated”. That was the easier one, second time I was making a source of truth data set and was parsing complex items into data structures. Instead of parsing the data I asked, it pulled data out of related network logs, as apparently that felt easier, and inserted that data into my database rather than the specified source. Again, I caught it and fixed it, but while the benchmark was easy to catch this one was really subtle, the data ended up being slightly off and I caught it. I don’t trust it, going to switch to another provider most likely.

It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point. It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. [1] https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd [2] https://omp.sh

I've gone back to 4.8. 5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions. I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do is pure marketing bs - Fable in my view has also been not much better than 4.6 or 4.8 after a few days, disregarding the insane amounts of astroturfing and marketing everywhere. Theres thousands of threads of twitter, reddit and the internet at large but silence here. Weird but not weird as crypto bs was also insufferably rampant here for a while. Personally i think we've hit the top of the subsidisation phase and prices will probably 10-15x soon as foreshadowed with both API price policy changes from all the big providers, and now the 1100% deepseek API price changes from yesterday, this could domino into a market implosion and an AI winter, because expecting growth from the bizarre bubble carousel investments with little ROI atm is just not viable. A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.

I must wonder whether it's their watermarking initiative[1] forcing certain logit choices to produce watermarked text that ultimately causing the model to behave in a dumb manner. [1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16266773-how-claude-m...