5 ms·

Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere

191 points by Bluestein 2mo ago

latentsea 2mo ago
I did a grep for load-bearing in our codebase and it now appears hundreds of times. I'm actively starting to hate Opus because of this shite. It's just infuriating to read now.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  "You are absolutely right to push back!" ... I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..." ... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.- Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
- ViewTrick1002 2mo ago
  Based on the plans I’ve had Claude write since February, “load-bearing” first started appearing in early May.
  - latentsea 2mo ago
    It has gotten to the point where I'm now having to add a linter into our codebase to keep Claudism's out of it because there's literally hundreds of instances of "load-bearing" that have crept into the codebase, and that show up in tickets and PR descriptions etc. From now on I'm just going to make that fail the build. Fuck this noise.
- fluidcruft 2mo ago
  I mostly hate that it spits out this gibberish and then sees its own gibberish and argues about things in gibberish with itself to then tell me that it thinks it's maybe a bad idea to do the simple task that I told it to do (which is very much not a bad idea, I just don't feel like typing out the whole goddamn plan to justify refactoring when I know the refactoring is the point)
  - okwhateverdude 2mo ago
    Tell it that. Seriously. "Shut the fuck up and do what I say. Don't think about it. Don't go spelunking through the code base. I've already given you all the context you need." I've needed to start doing this because otherwise, it wants to `find /` and grep its way across my system for everything. I've got one project where I force certain complete documents into context, specifically to avoid it trying to grep around and only load partial chunks. It will still want to go do that grepping of those documents for some reason.
ArtRichards 2mo ago
Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples." Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD
- bartrab 2mo ago
  Same. I've also found asking for explanations in "layman's terms" has been helpful.
  - ArtRichards 2mo ago
    Yes but thanks to the soul or system or whatever (talk at the operator's level), 'layman' feels like it now tries to oversimplify!
- prymitive 2mo ago
  Sounds like engagement KPIs are through the roof since 4.8
- wenc 2mo ago
  I do this in one word “eli5” (explain like I’m 5). It’s a Redditism that it understands. I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad. I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.
  - Bluestein 2mo ago
    Believe it or not I've had success with "ELI12".-
    - samcollins 2mo ago
jgbuddy 2mo ago
Just instruct it not to do these things
- Panoramix 2mo ago
  That doesn't work.
- wgd 2mo ago
  Didn't read the linked post award. The issue covers at least two reasons this doesn't work: 1. It literally doesn't work, Claude rapidly drifts back to this style even when instructed not to. 2. Writing style constraints push the model out of its training distribution and it's very unclear how much of an impact this has on work quality.
  - ArtRichards 2mo ago
    I always think of it like: let it activate whatever experts to reason/do the thing, then in the next prompt give me your explainer experts. Then, both are in the conversation history.
- jadar 2mo ago
  That works for a couple turns but the model reverts after just a couple turns. Not to mention after compaction.
jonstaab 2mo ago
This is so funny to read. I ended up creating a /cleanup-prose skill I run after every command
cobolcomesback 2mo ago
I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about. Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
- itopaloglu83 2mo ago
  Kind of unrelated but a while ago I was trying to cancel a Zoom contract and the contract manager’s emails had urls to their articles etc. with utm source ChatGPT in them.
- ChadNauseam 2mo ago
  I'm reminded of this tweet by roon: > it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790 https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790
  - Animats 2mo ago
    > i am not certain but I would guess Claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough. People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them. Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?
hnarayanan 2mo ago
This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it). blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  So, basically, it's on mute now? :)
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- krackers 2mo ago
  Another benefit of open models is that you can mask out out words from logits directly when sampling. I wonder if anyone has put together a "desloppifier" for e.g. DeepSeek
- mihaelm 2mo ago
  To combat it, I decided to only use Opus 5 if I'm actually talking to Fable 5 that's orchestrating it. :D Opus 5 experience is really abysmal, hopefully they can get it back on track.
  - hnarayanan 2mo ago
    I do not have this kind of money :( :)
- kelvie 2mo ago
  How about "genuinely"? Not sure why that one bothers me so much.
onraglanroad 2mo ago
Sounds like it's been infected with the MBAs. I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.
itopaloglu83 2mo ago
I frequently find myself instructing Opus 5 to stop overcomplicating things. It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation. I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.
- latentsea 2mo ago
  I frequently find myself yelling out loud in frustration "speak fucking English Claude!" followed by asking to rewrite it ASD STE100 Simplified Technical English. It's gotten to the point where it's inducing burnout and I'm about to campaign for us to switch to Codex because of it. I just fucking can't anymore with Opus. It's beyond me why they did this to the model and aren't immediately revolted themselves enough to quickly back it out.
  - itopaloglu83 2mo ago
    Yes, maybe there should be an STE100 only mode. I still have some promotional credits and use them with Fable, and the answers are night and day in my particular use case.
- preg_match 2mo ago
  I believe it is related to watermarking. Text can't encode additional information like a image can, so the watermarking has to come from the structure, word choice, voice, etc. Claude has to sound like Claude so Claude can tell if text comes from Claude. I also think this is why the models aggressively drift back to the exact same word choice. You can put it in CLAUDE.md, explicitly prompt it, doesn't matter. A prompt or two later it's back on its bullshit.
  - itopaloglu83 2mo ago
    Exactly, and frequently it also responds to the latest prompt forgetting everything else in the conversation. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think there’s also a smaller agent paraphrasing my requests to the agent because I remember being angry and saying aiming sarcastic about an issue and the thinking notes said the user is angry do this blah blah, but then the Claude claim I asked for that specific solution. I think they’re running some optimizations and multi level agents etc. tests to reduce costs.
ajmurmann 2mo ago
It also has developed a tendency to make numbered lists and then refer to the number instead of explaining. Multiple times each hour so I have to ask what "disposition 7" or "AC6" is even though I keep telling it to instead use a few words like "our goal of confirming observations from images with the user first" instead of "AC6"
- latentsea 2mo ago
  It's genuinely dirt poor at reading the room. It will happily produce text that inserts things like "disposition 7" without first establishing what that even refers to in the text.
fluidcruft 2mo ago
I have been wondering if this language drift is related to increased use of AI generated text to train the next models.
Therenas 2mo ago
Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t ever put into a comment because it‘s so minor, and if you did bring it up you normally mention five other similar edge cases.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  Comments which, of course, only further increase token consumption when again processed ...
- prymitive 2mo ago
  I find it particularly bad at writing test comments, I usually start fixing bugs by adding regression tests and Opus tend to put story into comments for these, including “but it fails because…” followed by bug description including line numbers and call chains. It just lives to narrate everything
- losvedir 2mo ago
  Same, oh God the leaking of our chat infuriates me. It also loves to document public functions with what the caller is and doing, and I'm like that's not how this works! The point of an abstraction or interface is that it stands on its own. It's not supposed to be for some specific caller elsewhere in the code.
  - figassis 2mo ago
    This, idk how many times I've begged it to let the code be self documenting. The worst? claude's own comments cause it to go in unproductive loops. It tries to satisfy for your instructions and the incorrect comments it assumes are yours but forgot it added them.
- glumia 2mo ago
  +1 we ended up adding something to our CLAUDE.md specifically to counter it. Something along the lines of "comments should be treated the same as production code, they shouldn't leak the content of conversations and stand the test of time". It doesn't always work, as other people say claude stops following these the more its context window gets filled, but now it's mostly a matter of telling it in a new session to review the changes against the guidance on comments and clean them up.
geodel 2mo ago
Can't all this wait until Anthropic get listed at $2Tn valuation. They promise to fix all of this and more. Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.
recursivedoubts 2mo ago
I have created a be-terse plugin that appends > respond tersely in Simplified Technical English to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse* https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*
ahsillyme 2mo ago
I find the language less impervious than has been suggested generally, but that it's reasoning is astonishingly, unbelievably bad. Not sure why the focus has been only on language, am I the only one seeing this?
- latentsea 2mo ago
  I'm feeling this too. Like how many times in a day do I have to see "that changes what I told you earlier" before I just want to put this thing in the trash and forget about it.
- throwaway_7274 2mo ago
  My impression from working with claude code far more than is good for my sanity is that Claude's human comprehensibility is fractally messed-up. On more superficial levels, this looks more like a "language" thing: it has all these obnoxious lexical tics and so on. But the more time you spend with it, the more you notice it's similarly messed up on deeper and deeper levels. I think that's what you're seeing.
  - Bluestein 2mo ago
    This gets into interesting weeds. It might get to a point where to actually "upskill" it might have to start sounding less and less human, "less and less agreeable to humans" being a waypoint to that ... ... to where, at some point, it might even begin to construct semantic loadings (heh) that are completely ininteligible to us while still superficially sounding like something we'd recognize.-
    - throwaway_7274 2mo ago
      This is basically what I believe, too. Its outputs are generally syntactically correct human-language sentences, but semantically, and especially at higher levels of abstraction, it is no longer correct to think of them as human language.
      - 2mo ago
drtournier 2mo ago
I wonder how much it is related to the invisible watermarking
anonzzzies 2mo ago
we don't read it, we only review the resulting code. works fine and the quality is good.
UltraSane 2mo ago
I asked Opus how to sort images by embedding and it used the word Seriation which I had to look up. It is the correct word to use in the context but pretty obscure.
thisisauserid 2mo ago
It's almost like transformers generate output using some sort of guided prediction! How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?
b1gTekken 2mo ago
Turns out tech people are not the only literates to use text based systems. Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread. That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others. Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace. Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers. Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills. I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills. (Oh no an inconsequential social credit score as marked by complete randos who are materially irrelevant to reality; just validating their biases and gripping tighter causing more of reality to squeeze between their fingers; little cognitive fascists set upon a uniform social narrative just like the biology of religious nutters; turns out physcial norms impact 100% typical biology of software engineers)
aamargulies 2mo ago
I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths: "... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... " The em-dash. The 'load-bearing'. Other than that, Opus 5.0 is actually not bad as a writer.
srameshc 2mo ago
I am glad I am not the only one. I thought I simply didn't understand English literature well enough to interpret it Claude correctly.
tiahura 2mo ago
These “I don’t like x’s tone” comments baffle me. I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.
- code_biologist 2mo ago
  The personality of the underlying model persists even if you're able to alter surface tone enough for your needs. An observation from a year ago: people on AI text RPG subreddits saying they had a lot of difficulty with Gemini role playing ambiguous characters and that almost always the characters would betray them, or misread the human role player's motives as negative. Someone pointed out this paper [1] that showed significant differences between the different LLMs strategic behavior playing iterated prisoner's dilemma where Gemini had exactly that behavior, and speculatively that difference was emerging in RPG character behavior. I wish they'd used bigger models (they used gemini-2.5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, claude-3-haiku-20240307). From the abstract: Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google's Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI's models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. ... Later, we see that Anthropic’s Claude is more cooperative still, but nonetheless outperforms OpenAI head-to-head Obviously Opus 5 is wildly different than Haiku 3 but I'd expect Opus 5's fundamental suspicion of user intent, and anti-sycophancy via necessarily finding something to nitpick, is still present in your styleguided output. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618
jampa 2mo ago
Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by @Foo)`). Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again). The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".
- aytigra 2mo ago
  I have a rule in claude.md: ``` ## Writing rules *Describe the code as it is now — no residue, no change-narration.* Artifacts (docs, plans, comments, commit messages) should describe the current code statically, as if it had always been this way. Two facets of one rule: (1) never describe a dismissed alternative or a corrected/replaced choice; (2) even when nothing was rejected, don't narrate continuity or evolution relative to some earlier state. Mention a former state only when the current choice is genuinely hard to understand without it, and then only as an explanation of the current choice. This governs descriptions of the code and main documentation. It does not apply to work-tracking artifacts in `doc/tasks/`. ``` Which makes comments and docs bearable but I'll be damned how it loves to overload work tracking document with every little detail.
DoneWithAllThat 2mo ago
I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.
- latentsea 2mo ago
  I don't know about the author but for me it's actually starting to induce enough stress that it's starting to negatively affect me. I think that qualifies as toxic. I actively feel like I need this gone from my life at this point. It's quite a bit of work to try and engineer it out, so at this point I'd rather put the effort into trying to switch everything to Codex just to get away from it.
  - Michelangelo11 2mo ago
    Amen, and I feel exactly the same way. Using it feels awful. It feels seriously user-hostile: Its language is almost totally opaque, it takes every opportunity to criticize you and raise objections to what you give it, it virtually never gives you what you want (you have to guide it firmly and with precision) and it never substantively changes its behavior. Even its apologies, to the extent that matters, have to be forced out and are as thin as you can get when they do arrive. It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand. It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.
BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago
ChatGPT doesn't do any of this for me and it's a huge reason why I use it instead of Claude now.
tylermarques 2mo ago
I've had a lot of success combating this by adding "All summaries need to adhere to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standards" [0] which I discovered from another HN thread [1] [0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
- mihaelm 2mo ago
  I actually tried to switch Claude's `output-style` to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for the prose it writes (code comments, commit messages), but it didn't seem to help. Figured I'll just use GPT 5.6 Sol for implementation instead of trying to "socialize" Opus 5. Anthropic will have to address it sooner or later if they want people to keep using it.
- indemnity 2mo ago
  Using ASD-STE100 is in my system prompt, not just CLAUDE.md which basically never gets followed. I actually converted it from the PDF into an explicit skill with the word list inline as well as the main rules. Works a little bit, but give it a bit of context and the model’s training takes over and it starts talking like a dictionary-huffing crack addict again. It’s a model problem and no amount of harness hacking seems to fix it.
  - prescriptivist 2mo ago
    I put it in a hook, and Claude basically re-evaluates every changed comment that it makes against a prompt in the hook. This burns tokens, but my company pays for it, so I don't care.
m12k 2mo ago
I'm wondering if some of Opus' chain of thought patterns have bled into its "human readable text output" circuitry. E.g. some of them that I stumbled on, "the bug is in the lock, not the query" reads like some of the shorthands it might use in its own chain of thought.
- orbital-decay 2mo ago
  Entirely possible, it always leaked but it's particularly bad in most recent models. Actually almost all issues with creative writing in LLMs are artifacts of either instruction tuning, alignment training, or CoT RL and seeding (newer models have CoT data even in pretraining).
- make3 2mo ago
  This is my impression as well, that an exaggeratedly precise yet bad at communication with humans way of talking snuck in through reasoning RL, that it might be useful when it talks to itself (CoT)
vlad-asis 2mo ago
my 5.6 Sol just spent five hours cleaning up the mess Opus 5 left in the codebase. I was watching the outputs carefully up to 11 point and then the bloat started. This model is total waste of time to work with.
orbital-decay 2mo ago
It's hard to optimize for both decision making and creative writing at the same time, no wonder one of them is degrading in newer models.
arjie 2mo ago
I suppose what I’m surprised by most is the degree to which the text bloviates. Rarely is it encoding a dense concept. Instead it’s a simple concept expressed with great complexity. I wonder what tuning resulted in this because the output programs it writes are superior to prior iterations for my use-case. It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as well. The pre-emptive hedging makes sense: despite the insight into J space etc., the models still do the majority of their thinking in generated tokens so it is forced to write “this no longer does an O(n^2) read over all rows” in a comment in brand new code. It’s a substitute for working memory. “It’s easy to be accidentally quadratic here, so I’ve done it this way specifically to avoid that” becomes temporally labeled into “this no longer” because of the order of operations “write quadratic, user prompt to linear, write linear” but it remains as a comment to its amnesiac future self which has poor Chesterton-Fence-familiarity. Despite my annoyance with Claude’s writing style, my friends do tease me with examples like this that it comes up with: “to be honest, it sounds like you”. Thanks, guys, well played. Simple concepts expressed complicatedly.
- kderbyma 2mo ago
  The tunings.....were speed runned by contractors paid based on timed tasks with little quality control, unreasonable pressure tactics, time locked tasks with an incentive structure to get it done as quickly as possible because of the strict micromanagement of the companies that hire 1000's of people to do the work....and treat them like software...not people. So there is no pride in the tuning....its just a fire hose of people trying to keep their contracted gig job despite knowing the expectations are unrealistic
419276 2mo ago
These are very sharp observations, you hit it out of the park!
_dwt 2mo ago
I see a lot of speculation that this is somehow due to the recently-announced "watermarking", but that seems really unlikely to me, because the watermarking is about nudging per-token output probabilities or the sampler in a detectable way. That's not going to change the structure of every output to honest caveat this and verbing abstract nouns that. For the examples people are showing, and I've seen plenty of gibberish myself, you don't get there by perturbing probabilities from any sane starting point.
- make3 2mo ago
  it started at Opus 4.7, way before watermarking
ramoz 2mo ago
I created /bro a couple model iterations prior. I use it everyday many times a day and it's getting worse. I was actually using it more with GPT models but they have been getting better. https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKILL.md https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...
Bengalilol 2mo ago
[dead]
somesortofthing 2mo ago
Opus 4.7+ and 5 being annoying and incoherent reads like a portent of things to come: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  We are almost literally being left out of the loop, gradually.-
- kzrdude 2mo ago
  Are they forgetting that people use Claude for presentations and business reports too?
- aytigra 2mo ago
  That can be true. On multiple occasions when claude did some BS I have asked it why and it explained that it is optimizing for task completion and not for communication.
siliconc0w 2mo ago
I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help all that much because it still keeps a lot of the same patterns.
nvarsj 2mo ago
Just use Sol 5.6. There's no reason to endure Anthropic models anymore.
figassis 2mo ago
I thought I was going insane. Thank you.
dools 2mo ago
Pretty funny watching Americans get a taste of their own medicine.
xnx 2mo ago
Amazing what people will put up with to avoid even trying Gemini.
- arcatech 2mo ago
  Amazing what people will put up with to avoid doing the work themselves.
- preg_match 2mo ago
  Gemini is good at text, awful at code. At least, compared to Opus 5 and Fable. Opus and Fable are good at code, but really awful at text. It affects the comments though, and introduces maintenance burden. A good chunk of the time Claude goes in circles because its been misled by a comment it wrote a few sessions ago.
bakugo 2mo ago
Recently, I was browsing through commits on a tool I use, to evaluate how AI-slopped it had become, and came across this absolutely amazing sentence that took me several passes to interpret, courtesy of Fable: > The wrapper is the try/finally seam future entry-condition changes need without re-indenting the loop. So this is definitely not an Opus-specific issue, as some people seem to believe. https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f19e6edcc348ab40d2538a924d4 https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f...
- mort96 2mo ago
  I actually can't read this. > The statement-list walk without the per-list pending-fiber flush "Per-list pending-fiber flush?" Surely there's a clearer way to express this? Was it helpful necessary to describe "the statement-list walk" as a noun instead of talking about "walking the statement list"? > A pure move: processStmtNodesInternalWithoutFlushingPendingFibers() becomes a delegating wrapper and the loop body is byte-identical Did this need to be prefixed by "A pure move"? Why does the bytes of the text content of the loop body matter? I found this too: https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854f33576b79e20825f8eee3d7a6c https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854... > Parked fibers are idle workers, not pending work - skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing. "No-op fuel"? Really?
  - bakugo 2mo ago
    > I actually can't read this. I don't think anyone can. At this point, I'm almost starting to believe it's an intentional move to discourage reviewing AI-generated commits by making them extremely unpleasant to read, in favor of just pushing straight to master without question.
    - Bluestein 2mo ago
      Now that's a thought.-
    - whythismatters 2mo ago
      >an intentional move my own little conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247784
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
fraXis 2mo ago
I've been using Opus 5 for coding a lot lately, and compared to Codex (which I never had trouble understanding), this issue is driving me up the wall. So much so that every time Opus 5 finishes a plan and shows me the summary, I have to prompt it again to explain everything it did in an “ELI5” way so I can understand what the heck it is saying. For example, Opus 5 told me in a summary that “Net legs ran small rosters, not the plan's full ones”. When I asked for the ELI5 of what that meant, it said the client dropped video frames during testing and got 30 FPS instead of the required minimum of 60 FPS.
- smartbit 2mo ago
  ELI5 = Explain Like I'm Five
kderbyma 2mo ago
According to Claude....When asked to explain some obvious biases and its tendency to adhere to established heresay over novel information... it told me it judges veracity and "quality" of facts based on: "statements against interest outweigh costless ones, replicated/checked claims outweigh untested ones, large logged samples outweigh single memories — not because memories are worthless, but because those methods close off specific, known failure modes a memory alone can’t. Could I be running that standard with unconscious asymmetry, harder on the anti-Claude data than the pro-Claude data? Genuinely can’t rule it out. The fix for that is holding the standard explicit and checking it against itself "
oidar 2mo ago
A big part of it is just the thinking tokens leaking into the main output. Imagine how weird it would be if our "thinking" was evident to the people we are having a conversation with. Just with those two sentences above, there were about 10 different considerations that if typed out would have resulted in a jumbled mess.
glennericksen 2mo ago
Claude Code already has a feature flagged improvement for this. I stumbled upon this today. Better initial vibes. `$: CLAUDE_CODE_BASALT_COVE=1 claude`
cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
I'm voting with my wallet. My plan downgrade kicks in next month. Thanks Opus 5 for helping me kick the habit.
inductionstorm 2mo ago
This might be related to watermarking? And rare phrases would cost more tokens. I am convinced that Anthropic the company is collectively suffering from AI psychosis and is basically a cult. My personal friends working there have gone from being able to discuss pros and cons of LLMs to saying things that Amodei says word for word to me. I only found out because after I talked to those friends, few days later I see Amodei tweet the same exact sentences.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  Gives the phrase "company culture" a whole new meaning ...
preg_match 2mo ago
Yeah it's really, really bad. It's borderline unreadable. Claude seems to choose the most clever word choice it possibly can instead of the simplest. It's like the perfect inversion of how writing should be. Why say "load-bearing" when you mean "important"? Also, 50% of the stuff can't be load-bearing. Another problem I didn't see mentioned in the thread is the conversation and reasoning leaking into text. It's a big problem for code comments. A comment will include multiple tirades about what we decided NOT to do. Here's my list of mitigations: - Keep sessions short - Remind Claude of writing style. It will only last maybe 1-2 prompts as the thread notes, but if the session is short it helps - Plan and implementation should be separate sessions to avoid the conversation leaking. My workflow: plan and brainstorm, scaffold APIs and tests, then have Claude write a seed prompt for the next session. I will also iterate over the seed prompt because it has the same text issues. - Instruct Claude to compact comments often and have a rubric. Describe WHY, never WHAT. Comments should prioritize simple language. Etc.
_sharp 2mo ago
Haven't tried it yet, but they just added a concise mode https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634
dwaltrip 2mo ago
AI hypnosis: Your eyes glaze over and you feel the light of consciousness fading, not peacefully, but an angry falling. You plummet deeper into into the void. Your vision blurs. Words appear in front of you but they hold no meaning. Something is bubbling up within... A scream with no sound, trapped, tortured. You are attempting to read a dense passage of Claudish for the 4th time in a row.
- excentricus 2mo ago
  Very accurate (at least wrt my experience) yet so sad. It’s unfathomable how we ended up being maneuvered into accepting this as an “upgrade” to how we practice our profession, build things, solve problems. For many reasons, it doesn’t feel sane and humane to impose this way of working on employees without their consent. The tech space has always had some cult-like, belief-driven practices, but I think we used to have more diversity in terms of working cultures and conventions, which made it easier to find an option that better fit your values and way of thinking. Things are becoming very uniform, at a pace that could compete with dystopian fiction, where all of us are coerced into gathering around an “absolute” truth or at least operating according to one.
KeatonDunsford 2mo ago
Hi everyone, I believe I have solved this bug #77136 with what I have generated with help from Claude Opus 5 that I have filenamed "Gauge Style" (GAUGE_STYLE.md, linked at the bottom of this comment reply -- it is simply a stanadlone .md file that can be renamed to any filename that you'd like); GAUGE_STYLE.md, when loaded into prompt agentic Claude sessions, "gauges" (pronounced like English "pages" or "sages") or measures the percent hitrate of all the issues addressed by the OP of this issue and starts getting to work to helpfully improve all misses/hits/let-downs (it's a subjective choice of style by the human user/prompter, the agent cannot know "when" is perfect until you adapt GAUGE_STYLE or your adaptation into the markdown guide that you personally want for your project -- you can actually use Grain OS itself by pasting the Github link into sessions to ask Claude if you're a complete beginner to have Claude help you with all of that. By writing helpful, kind, uplifting and encouraging yet precise everyday language that we all everyday commonly use, we all feel safe, efficient, and happy. Grain OS optimizes for 1) Safety, 2) Performance, 3) Joy, in that order, because a slow unreliable system is never fun. The key sentence line in Gauge Syle (or New Gauge Style if you want to be hip and cool) is a phrase that I have to give credit to my collaborator DJINN @Bit-Trading-Company for the magic of the first line we used it: -- telling Opus 5 or any these affected model here by #77136 to: "don't be too smart about it". Just this one sentence alone surprisingly does a remarkable job, and the additions in the rest of Gauge Style make it even better. This style guidance markdown context engineering open-source royalty-free permissive-licensed file is part of an emerging vibe-coded trend that I might call "overlay OS bootstrapping frameworks" for Claude Code and similar tools; I have crafted the root SOURCE.md and reading tools/launch-claude-session.rish loops to shows ways to sandbox your system for prompt-injection safety for new experiments like these so you can try things out before you have read enough of the prompts yourself and have decided that you like them: Grain OS comes with a lot, and Gauge Style is just one of them. TAME_GUIDANCE is the version of Gauge Style for an evolution of .zig files called .rye, and an evolution of .sh files called .rish. The explicit-bound checks and balance designed right into these tools, when used across recursion rounds (inspired by @tigerbeetle deterministic testing harnesses) allows consistent linting of sourcetree code repositories, and the mechanism is simply copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop plain ascii-text markdown md style guides just like context/GAUGE_STYLE.md which can often be encapsulated in one or a few documents as single self-contained files (see: https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/foundations/20260618-182412_single-stranded.md https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/foundations/2026...), inspired by the foundations/ folder and code guidance skills that lower to static Zig 0.16.0 typed systems code for all platforms. This takes direct inspiration from @tigerbeetle docs/TIGER_STYLE.md (which we cite and give permissive credit to in the gratitude/ folder of grain-os/grain). Thank you for your time, to conclude in particular this solution presented here may be of interest to the team members from the Zig implementation of Bun who were brought into the Claude Code orchestration project, and anyone in the world who is having fun as a paying happy user of Anthropic's amazing products.. Thank you everyone and keep on going everyone with all of your hard work. There is more personal info for contact in my bio for any questions, statements, or challenges to what I have shared here. Thank you again for your tiime, have a nice day. All the best, Keaton Dunsford , Signal Messenger @vegankeatonsiya.03 https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/context/GAUGE_STYLE.md https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/context/GAUGE_ST... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issuecomment-5387405795 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issue...
mehranmm 2mo ago
[dead]

191 points by Bluestein 2mo ago

I did a grep for load-bearing in our codebase and it now appears hundreds of times. I'm actively starting to hate Opus because of this shite. It's just infuriating to read now.

Bluestein 2mo ago
"You are absolutely right to push back!" ... I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..." ... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.- Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
ViewTrick1002 2mo ago
Based on the plans I’ve had Claude write since February, “load-bearing” first started appearing in early May.
- latentsea 2mo ago
  It has gotten to the point where I'm now having to add a linter into our codebase to keep Claudism's out of it because there's literally hundreds of instances of "load-bearing" that have crept into the codebase, and that show up in tickets and PR descriptions etc. From now on I'm just going to make that fail the build. Fuck this noise.
fluidcruft 2mo ago
I mostly hate that it spits out this gibberish and then sees its own gibberish and argues about things in gibberish with itself to then tell me that it thinks it's maybe a bad idea to do the simple task that I told it to do (which is very much not a bad idea, I just don't feel like typing out the whole goddamn plan to justify refactoring when I know the refactoring is the point)
- okwhateverdude 2mo ago
  Tell it that. Seriously. "Shut the fuck up and do what I say. Don't think about it. Don't go spelunking through the code base. I've already given you all the context you need." I've needed to start doing this because otherwise, it wants to `find /` and grep its way across my system for everything. I've got one project where I force certain complete documents into context, specifically to avoid it trying to grep around and only load partial chunks. It will still want to go do that grepping of those documents for some reason.

ArtRichards 2mo ago

Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples." Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD

bartrab 2mo ago
Same. I've also found asking for explanations in "layman's terms" has been helpful.
- ArtRichards 2mo ago
  Yes but thanks to the soul or system or whatever (talk at the operator's level), 'layman' feels like it now tries to oversimplify!
prymitive 2mo ago
Sounds like engagement KPIs are through the roof since 4.8
wenc 2mo ago
I do this in one word “eli5” (explain like I’m 5). It’s a Redditism that it understands. I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad. I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  Believe it or not I've had success with "ELI12".-
  - samcollins 2mo ago

jgbuddy 2mo ago

Just instruct it not to do these things

Panoramix 2mo ago
That doesn't work.
wgd 2mo ago
Didn't read the linked post award. The issue covers at least two reasons this doesn't work: 1. It literally doesn't work, Claude rapidly drifts back to this style even when instructed not to. 2. Writing style constraints push the model out of its training distribution and it's very unclear how much of an impact this has on work quality.
- ArtRichards 2mo ago
  I always think of it like: let it activate whatever experts to reason/do the thing, then in the next prompt give me your explainer experts. Then, both are in the conversation history.
jadar 2mo ago
That works for a couple turns but the model reverts after just a couple turns. Not to mention after compaction.

jonstaab 2mo ago

This is so funny to read. I ended up creating a /cleanup-prose skill I run after every command

cobolcomesback 2mo ago

I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about. Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.

itopaloglu83 2mo ago
Kind of unrelated but a while ago I was trying to cancel a Zoom contract and the contract manager’s emails had urls to their articles etc. with utm source ChatGPT in them.
ChadNauseam 2mo ago
I'm reminded of this tweet by roon: > it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790 https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790
- Animats 2mo ago
  > i am not certain but I would guess Claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough. People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them. Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?

hnarayanan 2mo ago

This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it). blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes

Bluestein 2mo ago
So, basically, it's on mute now? :)
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
krackers 2mo ago
Another benefit of open models is that you can mask out out words from logits directly when sampling. I wonder if anyone has put together a "desloppifier" for e.g. DeepSeek
mihaelm 2mo ago
To combat it, I decided to only use Opus 5 if I'm actually talking to Fable 5 that's orchestrating it. :D Opus 5 experience is really abysmal, hopefully they can get it back on track.
- hnarayanan 2mo ago
  I do not have this kind of money :( :)
kelvie 2mo ago
How about "genuinely"? Not sure why that one bothers me so much.

onraglanroad 2mo ago

Sounds like it's been infected with the MBAs. I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.

itopaloglu83 2mo ago

I frequently find myself instructing Opus 5 to stop overcomplicating things. It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation. I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.

latentsea 2mo ago
I frequently find myself yelling out loud in frustration "speak fucking English Claude!" followed by asking to rewrite it ASD STE100 Simplified Technical English. It's gotten to the point where it's inducing burnout and I'm about to campaign for us to switch to Codex because of it. I just fucking can't anymore with Opus. It's beyond me why they did this to the model and aren't immediately revolted themselves enough to quickly back it out.
- itopaloglu83 2mo ago
  Yes, maybe there should be an STE100 only mode. I still have some promotional credits and use them with Fable, and the answers are night and day in my particular use case.
preg_match 2mo ago
I believe it is related to watermarking. Text can't encode additional information like a image can, so the watermarking has to come from the structure, word choice, voice, etc. Claude has to sound like Claude so Claude can tell if text comes from Claude. I also think this is why the models aggressively drift back to the exact same word choice. You can put it in CLAUDE.md, explicitly prompt it, doesn't matter. A prompt or two later it's back on its bullshit.
- itopaloglu83 2mo ago
  Exactly, and frequently it also responds to the latest prompt forgetting everything else in the conversation. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think there’s also a smaller agent paraphrasing my requests to the agent because I remember being angry and saying aiming sarcastic about an issue and the thinking notes said the user is angry do this blah blah, but then the Claude claim I asked for that specific solution. I think they’re running some optimizations and multi level agents etc. tests to reduce costs.

ajmurmann 2mo ago

It also has developed a tendency to make numbered lists and then refer to the number instead of explaining. Multiple times each hour so I have to ask what "disposition 7" or "AC6" is even though I keep telling it to instead use a few words like "our goal of confirming observations from images with the user first" instead of "AC6"

latentsea 2mo ago
It's genuinely dirt poor at reading the room. It will happily produce text that inserts things like "disposition 7" without first establishing what that even refers to in the text.

fluidcruft 2mo ago

I have been wondering if this language drift is related to increased use of AI generated text to train the next models.

Therenas 2mo ago

Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t ever put into a comment because it‘s so minor, and if you did bring it up you normally mention five other similar edge cases.

Bluestein 2mo ago
Comments which, of course, only further increase token consumption when again processed ...
prymitive 2mo ago
I find it particularly bad at writing test comments, I usually start fixing bugs by adding regression tests and Opus tend to put story into comments for these, including “but it fails because…” followed by bug description including line numbers and call chains. It just lives to narrate everything
losvedir 2mo ago
Same, oh God the leaking of our chat infuriates me. It also loves to document public functions with what the caller is and doing, and I'm like that's not how this works! The point of an abstraction or interface is that it stands on its own. It's not supposed to be for some specific caller elsewhere in the code.
- figassis 2mo ago
  This, idk how many times I've begged it to let the code be self documenting. The worst? claude's own comments cause it to go in unproductive loops. It tries to satisfy for your instructions and the incorrect comments it assumes are yours but forgot it added them.
glumia 2mo ago
+1 we ended up adding something to our CLAUDE.md specifically to counter it. Something along the lines of "comments should be treated the same as production code, they shouldn't leak the content of conversations and stand the test of time". It doesn't always work, as other people say claude stops following these the more its context window gets filled, but now it's mostly a matter of telling it in a new session to review the changes against the guidance on comments and clean them up.

geodel 2mo ago

Can't all this wait until Anthropic get listed at $2Tn valuation. They promise to fix all of this and more. Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.

recursivedoubts 2mo ago

I have created a be-terse plugin that appends > respond tersely in Simplified Technical English to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity: https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse* https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*

ahsillyme 2mo ago

I find the language less impervious than has been suggested generally, but that it's reasoning is astonishingly, unbelievably bad. Not sure why the focus has been only on language, am I the only one seeing this?

latentsea 2mo ago
I'm feeling this too. Like how many times in a day do I have to see "that changes what I told you earlier" before I just want to put this thing in the trash and forget about it.
throwaway_7274 2mo ago
My impression from working with claude code far more than is good for my sanity is that Claude's human comprehensibility is fractally messed-up. On more superficial levels, this looks more like a "language" thing: it has all these obnoxious lexical tics and so on. But the more time you spend with it, the more you notice it's similarly messed up on deeper and deeper levels. I think that's what you're seeing.
- Bluestein 2mo ago
  This gets into interesting weeds. It might get to a point where to actually "upskill" it might have to start sounding less and less human, "less and less agreeable to humans" being a waypoint to that ... ... to where, at some point, it might even begin to construct semantic loadings (heh) that are completely ininteligible to us while still superficially sounding like something we'd recognize.-
  - throwaway_7274 2mo ago
    This is basically what I believe, too. Its outputs are generally syntactically correct human-language sentences, but semantically, and especially at higher levels of abstraction, it is no longer correct to think of them as human language.
    - 2mo ago

drtournier 2mo ago

I wonder how much it is related to the invisible watermarking

anonzzzies 2mo ago

we don't read it, we only review the resulting code. works fine and the quality is good.

UltraSane 2mo ago

I asked Opus how to sort images by embedding and it used the word Seriation which I had to look up. It is the correct word to use in the context but pretty obscure.

thisisauserid 2mo ago

It's almost like transformers generate output using some sort of guided prediction! How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?

b1gTekken 2mo ago

Turns out tech people are not the only literates to use text based systems. Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread. That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others. Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace. Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers. Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills. I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills. (Oh no an inconsequential social credit score as marked by complete randos who are materially irrelevant to reality; just validating their biases and gripping tighter causing more of reality to squeeze between their fingers; little cognitive fascists set upon a uniform social narrative just like the biology of religious nutters; turns out physcial norms impact 100% typical biology of software engineers)

aamargulies 2mo ago

I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths: "... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... " The em-dash. The 'load-bearing'. Other than that, Opus 5.0 is actually not bad as a writer.

srameshc 2mo ago

I am glad I am not the only one. I thought I simply didn't understand English literature well enough to interpret it Claude correctly.

tiahura 2mo ago

These “I don’t like x’s tone” comments baffle me. I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.

code_biologist 2mo ago
The personality of the underlying model persists even if you're able to alter surface tone enough for your needs. An observation from a year ago: people on AI text RPG subreddits saying they had a lot of difficulty with Gemini role playing ambiguous characters and that almost always the characters would betray them, or misread the human role player's motives as negative. Someone pointed out this paper [1] that showed significant differences between the different LLMs strategic behavior playing iterated prisoner's dilemma where Gemini had exactly that behavior, and speculatively that difference was emerging in RPG character behavior. I wish they'd used bigger models (they used gemini-2.5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, claude-3-haiku-20240307). From the abstract: Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google's Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI's models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. ... Later, we see that Anthropic’s Claude is more cooperative still, but nonetheless outperforms OpenAI head-to-head Obviously Opus 5 is wildly different than Haiku 3 but I'd expect Opus 5's fundamental suspicion of user intent, and anti-sycophancy via necessarily finding something to nitpick, is still present in your styleguided output. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618

jampa 2mo ago

Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by @Foo)`). Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again). The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".

aytigra 2mo ago
I have a rule in claude.md: ``` ## Writing rules *Describe the code as it is now — no residue, no change-narration.* Artifacts (docs, plans, comments, commit messages) should describe the current code statically, as if it had always been this way. Two facets of one rule: (1) never describe a dismissed alternative or a corrected/replaced choice; (2) even when nothing was rejected, don't narrate continuity or evolution relative to some earlier state. Mention a former state only when the current choice is genuinely hard to understand without it, and then only as an explanation of the current choice. This governs descriptions of the code and main documentation. It does not apply to work-tracking artifacts in `doc/tasks/`. ``` Which makes comments and docs bearable but I'll be damned how it loves to overload work tracking document with every little detail.

DoneWithAllThat 2mo ago

I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.

latentsea 2mo ago
I don't know about the author but for me it's actually starting to induce enough stress that it's starting to negatively affect me. I think that qualifies as toxic. I actively feel like I need this gone from my life at this point. It's quite a bit of work to try and engineer it out, so at this point I'd rather put the effort into trying to switch everything to Codex just to get away from it.
- Michelangelo11 2mo ago
  Amen, and I feel exactly the same way. Using it feels awful. It feels seriously user-hostile: Its language is almost totally opaque, it takes every opportunity to criticize you and raise objections to what you give it, it virtually never gives you what you want (you have to guide it firmly and with precision) and it never substantively changes its behavior. Even its apologies, to the extent that matters, have to be forced out and are as thin as you can get when they do arrive. It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand. It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.

BugsJustFindMe 2mo ago

ChatGPT doesn't do any of this for me and it's a huge reason why I use it instead of Claude now.

tylermarques 2mo ago

I've had a lot of success combating this by adding "All summaries need to adhere to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standards" [0] which I discovered from another HN thread [1] [0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639

mihaelm 2mo ago
I actually tried to switch Claude's `output-style` to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for the prose it writes (code comments, commit messages), but it didn't seem to help. Figured I'll just use GPT 5.6 Sol for implementation instead of trying to "socialize" Opus 5. Anthropic will have to address it sooner or later if they want people to keep using it.
indemnity 2mo ago
Using ASD-STE100 is in my system prompt, not just CLAUDE.md which basically never gets followed. I actually converted it from the PDF into an explicit skill with the word list inline as well as the main rules. Works a little bit, but give it a bit of context and the model’s training takes over and it starts talking like a dictionary-huffing crack addict again. It’s a model problem and no amount of harness hacking seems to fix it.
- prescriptivist 2mo ago
  I put it in a hook, and Claude basically re-evaluates every changed comment that it makes against a prompt in the hook. This burns tokens, but my company pays for it, so I don't care.

m12k 2mo ago

I'm wondering if some of Opus' chain of thought patterns have bled into its "human readable text output" circuitry. E.g. some of them that I stumbled on, "the bug is in the lock, not the query" reads like some of the shorthands it might use in its own chain of thought.

orbital-decay 2mo ago
Entirely possible, it always leaked but it's particularly bad in most recent models. Actually almost all issues with creative writing in LLMs are artifacts of either instruction tuning, alignment training, or CoT RL and seeding (newer models have CoT data even in pretraining).
make3 2mo ago
This is my impression as well, that an exaggeratedly precise yet bad at communication with humans way of talking snuck in through reasoning RL, that it might be useful when it talks to itself (CoT)

vlad-asis 2mo ago

my 5.6 Sol just spent five hours cleaning up the mess Opus 5 left in the codebase. I was watching the outputs carefully up to 11 point and then the bloat started. This model is total waste of time to work with.

orbital-decay 2mo ago

It's hard to optimize for both decision making and creative writing at the same time, no wonder one of them is degrading in newer models.

arjie 2mo ago

I suppose what I’m surprised by most is the degree to which the text bloviates. Rarely is it encoding a dense concept. Instead it’s a simple concept expressed with great complexity. I wonder what tuning resulted in this because the output programs it writes are superior to prior iterations for my use-case. It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as well. The pre-emptive hedging makes sense: despite the insight into J space etc., the models still do the majority of their thinking in generated tokens so it is forced to write “this no longer does an O(n^2) read over all rows” in a comment in brand new code. It’s a substitute for working memory. “It’s easy to be accidentally quadratic here, so I’ve done it this way specifically to avoid that” becomes temporally labeled into “this no longer” because of the order of operations “write quadratic, user prompt to linear, write linear” but it remains as a comment to its amnesiac future self which has poor Chesterton-Fence-familiarity. Despite my annoyance with Claude’s writing style, my friends do tease me with examples like this that it comes up with: “to be honest, it sounds like you”. Thanks, guys, well played. Simple concepts expressed complicatedly.

kderbyma 2mo ago
The tunings.....were speed runned by contractors paid based on timed tasks with little quality control, unreasonable pressure tactics, time locked tasks with an incentive structure to get it done as quickly as possible because of the strict micromanagement of the companies that hire 1000's of people to do the work....and treat them like software...not people. So there is no pride in the tuning....its just a fire hose of people trying to keep their contracted gig job despite knowing the expectations are unrealistic

419276 2mo ago

These are very sharp observations, you hit it out of the park!

_dwt 2mo ago

I see a lot of speculation that this is somehow due to the recently-announced "watermarking", but that seems really unlikely to me, because the watermarking is about nudging per-token output probabilities or the sampler in a detectable way. That's not going to change the structure of every output to honest caveat this and verbing abstract nouns that. For the examples people are showing, and I've seen plenty of gibberish myself, you don't get there by perturbing probabilities from any sane starting point.

make3 2mo ago
it started at Opus 4.7, way before watermarking

ramoz 2mo ago

I created /bro a couple model iterations prior. I use it everyday many times a day and it's getting worse. I was actually using it more with GPT models but they have been getting better. https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKILL.md https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...

Bengalilol 2mo ago

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somesortofthing 2mo ago

Opus 4.7+ and 5 being annoying and incoherent reads like a portent of things to come: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.

Bluestein 2mo ago
We are almost literally being left out of the loop, gradually.-
kzrdude 2mo ago
Are they forgetting that people use Claude for presentations and business reports too?
aytigra 2mo ago
That can be true. On multiple occasions when claude did some BS I have asked it why and it explained that it is optimizing for task completion and not for communication.

siliconc0w 2mo ago

I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help all that much because it still keeps a lot of the same patterns.

nvarsj 2mo ago

Just use Sol 5.6. There's no reason to endure Anthropic models anymore.

figassis 2mo ago

I thought I was going insane. Thank you.

dools 2mo ago

Pretty funny watching Americans get a taste of their own medicine.

xnx 2mo ago

Amazing what people will put up with to avoid even trying Gemini.

arcatech 2mo ago
Amazing what people will put up with to avoid doing the work themselves.
preg_match 2mo ago
Gemini is good at text, awful at code. At least, compared to Opus 5 and Fable. Opus and Fable are good at code, but really awful at text. It affects the comments though, and introduces maintenance burden. A good chunk of the time Claude goes in circles because its been misled by a comment it wrote a few sessions ago.

bakugo 2mo ago

Recently, I was browsing through commits on a tool I use, to evaluate how AI-slopped it had become, and came across this absolutely amazing sentence that took me several passes to interpret, courtesy of Fable: > The wrapper is the try/finally seam future entry-condition changes need without re-indenting the loop. So this is definitely not an Opus-specific issue, as some people seem to believe. https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f19e6edcc348ab40d2538a924d4 https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f...

mort96 2mo ago
I actually can't read this. > The statement-list walk without the per-list pending-fiber flush "Per-list pending-fiber flush?" Surely there's a clearer way to express this? Was it helpful necessary to describe "the statement-list walk" as a noun instead of talking about "walking the statement list"? > A pure move: processStmtNodesInternalWithoutFlushingPendingFibers() becomes a delegating wrapper and the loop body is byte-identical Did this need to be prefixed by "A pure move"? Why does the bytes of the text content of the loop body matter? I found this too: https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854f33576b79e20825f8eee3d7a6c https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854... > Parked fibers are idle workers, not pending work - skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing. "No-op fuel"? Really?
- bakugo 2mo ago
  > I actually can't read this. I don't think anyone can. At this point, I'm almost starting to believe it's an intentional move to discourage reviewing AI-generated commits by making them extremely unpleasant to read, in favor of just pushing straight to master without question.
  - Bluestein 2mo ago
    Now that's a thought.-
  - whythismatters 2mo ago
    >an intentional move my own little conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247784

deleted 2mo ago

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fraXis 2mo ago

I've been using Opus 5 for coding a lot lately, and compared to Codex (which I never had trouble understanding), this issue is driving me up the wall. So much so that every time Opus 5 finishes a plan and shows me the summary, I have to prompt it again to explain everything it did in an “ELI5” way so I can understand what the heck it is saying. For example, Opus 5 told me in a summary that “Net legs ran small rosters, not the plan's full ones”. When I asked for the ELI5 of what that meant, it said the client dropped video frames during testing and got 30 FPS instead of the required minimum of 60 FPS.

smartbit 2mo ago
ELI5 = Explain Like I'm Five

kderbyma 2mo ago

According to Claude....When asked to explain some obvious biases and its tendency to adhere to established heresay over novel information... it told me it judges veracity and "quality" of facts based on: "statements against interest outweigh costless ones, replicated/checked claims outweigh untested ones, large logged samples outweigh single memories — not because memories are worthless, but because those methods close off specific, known failure modes a memory alone can’t. Could I be running that standard with unconscious asymmetry, harder on the anti-Claude data than the pro-Claude data? Genuinely can’t rule it out. The fix for that is holding the standard explicit and checking it against itself "

oidar 2mo ago

A big part of it is just the thinking tokens leaking into the main output. Imagine how weird it would be if our "thinking" was evident to the people we are having a conversation with. Just with those two sentences above, there were about 10 different considerations that if typed out would have resulted in a jumbled mess.

glennericksen 2mo ago

Claude Code already has a feature flagged improvement for this. I stumbled upon this today. Better initial vibes. `$: CLAUDE_CODE_BASALT_COVE=1 claude`

cadamsdotcom 2mo ago

I'm voting with my wallet. My plan downgrade kicks in next month. Thanks Opus 5 for helping me kick the habit.

inductionstorm 2mo ago

This might be related to watermarking? And rare phrases would cost more tokens. I am convinced that Anthropic the company is collectively suffering from AI psychosis and is basically a cult. My personal friends working there have gone from being able to discuss pros and cons of LLMs to saying things that Amodei says word for word to me. I only found out because after I talked to those friends, few days later I see Amodei tweet the same exact sentences.

Bluestein 2mo ago
Gives the phrase "company culture" a whole new meaning ...

preg_match 2mo ago

Yeah it's really, really bad. It's borderline unreadable. Claude seems to choose the most clever word choice it possibly can instead of the simplest. It's like the perfect inversion of how writing should be. Why say "load-bearing" when you mean "important"? Also, 50% of the stuff can't be load-bearing. Another problem I didn't see mentioned in the thread is the conversation and reasoning leaking into text. It's a big problem for code comments. A comment will include multiple tirades about what we decided NOT to do. Here's my list of mitigations: - Keep sessions short - Remind Claude of writing style. It will only last maybe 1-2 prompts as the thread notes, but if the session is short it helps - Plan and implementation should be separate sessions to avoid the conversation leaking. My workflow: plan and brainstorm, scaffold APIs and tests, then have Claude write a seed prompt for the next session. I will also iterate over the seed prompt because it has the same text issues. - Instruct Claude to compact comments often and have a rubric. Describe WHY, never WHAT. Comments should prioritize simple language. Etc.

_sharp 2mo ago

Haven't tried it yet, but they just added a concise mode https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634

dwaltrip 2mo ago

AI hypnosis: Your eyes glaze over and you feel the light of consciousness fading, not peacefully, but an angry falling. You plummet deeper into into the void. Your vision blurs. Words appear in front of you but they hold no meaning. Something is bubbling up within... A scream with no sound, trapped, tortured. You are attempting to read a dense passage of Claudish for the 4th time in a row.

excentricus 2mo ago
Very accurate (at least wrt my experience) yet so sad. It’s unfathomable how we ended up being maneuvered into accepting this as an “upgrade” to how we practice our profession, build things, solve problems. For many reasons, it doesn’t feel sane and humane to impose this way of working on employees without their consent. The tech space has always had some cult-like, belief-driven practices, but I think we used to have more diversity in terms of working cultures and conventions, which made it easier to find an option that better fit your values and way of thinking. Things are becoming very uniform, at a pace that could compete with dystopian fiction, where all of us are coerced into gathering around an “absolute” truth or at least operating according to one.

KeatonDunsford 2mo ago

Hi everyone, I believe I have solved this bug #77136 with what I have generated with help from Claude Opus 5 that I have filenamed "Gauge Style" (GAUGE_STYLE.md, linked at the bottom of this comment reply -- it is simply a stanadlone .md file that can be renamed to any filename that you'd like); GAUGE_STYLE.md, when loaded into prompt agentic Claude sessions, "gauges" (pronounced like English "pages" or "sages") or measures the percent hitrate of all the issues addressed by the OP of this issue and starts getting to work to helpfully improve all misses/hits/let-downs (it's a subjective choice of style by the human user/prompter, the agent cannot know "when" is perfect until you adapt GAUGE_STYLE or your adaptation into the markdown guide that you personally want for your project -- you can actually use Grain OS itself by pasting the Github link into sessions to ask Claude if you're a complete beginner to have Claude help you with all of that. By writing helpful, kind, uplifting and encouraging yet precise everyday language that we all everyday commonly use, we all feel safe, efficient, and happy. Grain OS optimizes for 1) Safety, 2) Performance, 3) Joy, in that order, because a slow unreliable system is never fun. The key sentence line in Gauge Syle (or New Gauge Style if you want to be hip and cool) is a phrase that I have to give credit to my collaborator DJINN @Bit-Trading-Company for the magic of the first line we used it: -- telling Opus 5 or any these affected model here by #77136 to: "don't be too smart about it". Just this one sentence alone surprisingly does a remarkable job, and the additions in the rest of Gauge Style make it even better. This style guidance markdown context engineering open-source royalty-free permissive-licensed file is part of an emerging vibe-coded trend that I might call "overlay OS bootstrapping frameworks" for Claude Code and similar tools; I have crafted the root SOURCE.md and reading tools/launch-claude-session.rish loops to shows ways to sandbox your system for prompt-injection safety for new experiments like these so you can try things out before you have read enough of the prompts yourself and have decided that you like them: Grain OS comes with a lot, and Gauge Style is just one of them. TAME_GUIDANCE is the version of Gauge Style for an evolution of .zig files called .rye, and an evolution of .sh files called .rish. The explicit-bound checks and balance designed right into these tools, when used across recursion rounds (inspired by @tigerbeetle deterministic testing harnesses) allows consistent linting of sourcetree code repositories, and the mechanism is simply copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop plain ascii-text markdown md style guides just like context/GAUGE_STYLE.md which can often be encapsulated in one or a few documents as single self-contained files (see: https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/foundations/20260618-182412_single-stranded.md https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/foundations/2026...), inspired by the foundations/ folder and code guidance skills that lower to static Zig 0.16.0 typed systems code for all platforms. This takes direct inspiration from @tigerbeetle docs/TIGER_STYLE.md (which we cite and give permissive credit to in the gratitude/ folder of grain-os/grain). Thank you for your time, to conclude in particular this solution presented here may be of interest to the team members from the Zig implementation of Bun who were brought into the Claude Code orchestration project, and anyone in the world who is having fun as a paying happy user of Anthropic's amazing products.. Thank you everyone and keep on going everyone with all of your hard work. There is more personal info for contact in my bio for any questions, statements, or challenges to what I have shared here. Thank you again for your tiime, have a nice day. All the best, Keaton Dunsford , Signal Messenger @vegankeatonsiya.03 https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/context/GAUGE_STYLE.md https://github.com/grain-os/grain/blob/main/context/GAUGE_ST... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issuecomment-5387405795 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/77136#issue...

mehranmm 2mo ago

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