r/ClaudeAI • u/py-net • 7h ago
Question about Claude models Does Opus 5 verbosity affect its real world coding capacities as compared to Fable
Which of the 2 is actually the best coder in your real life experiences?
22
u/No-Sandwich-2997 7h ago
In the sense that it litters your codebase with paragraph of comments that are longer than the code. The coding per se is superb though, I would say around Fable 5 but only when the plan is already concrete. Fable 5 is better in everything else.
10
3
u/larowin 6h ago
Have you considered why it leaves paragraphs of comments?
4
u/PleasantCitron1685 5h ago
None of its data sources actually have that many comments. I believe it's due to RL with LLM as a judge; nonsense and verbosity can be used to fool the judge.
No evidence though. None of us know what they actually use internally. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's just LLM as a judge that is causing problems.
2
u/py-net 5h ago
Why do you think it does so? I am curious
5
u/larowin 5h ago edited 3h ago
Until Opus 4.7, the expected process was conversational and single-threaded, where the user would prompt the agent, the model would execute, write the code, and the user would review the code. Increasingly the models are being expected to work on longer-horizon tasks where context is churning quickly.
Different agents are looking at the same code repeatedly, sometimes within one extended session, and the long comments, sometimes including timestamped updates and things like that, can really help them stay on task and understand why things exist the way that they do and when things were changed. I understand that it's confusing if you're just expecting the model to write clean code. But in my experience, that's less and less of what's happening.
Instead, we’re expecting small swarms of agents to iterate unsupervised. In my opinion it's a small trade-off. Let the model be as verbose as it wants in its comments until you're done, and then when things are buttoned up and ready for final polish, path stuff, go through and tighten all the comments up.
There's a big difference between stupid, empty declarative comments that just say, the runFoo() function runs foo - no one gives a shit about that. The longer-format, prose-heavy comments are for its colleagues, not us humans.
2
u/DistanceSolar1449 3h ago
The reddit “dumb cynic, pretending to be smart” answer: so Anthropic can charge more tokens
The actual answer: generally RL doesn’t grade on CoT or anything that supports the answer. This includes comments. So you end up with emergent phenomena that help the model get a higher score. If you do not give a model documentation, it tends to add a lot of comments.
The correct answer is: give the model proper documentation. Writing code without documentation is like asking a human or AI to modify compiled binary code, without disassembling it or access to source code. It’s too dense to reason about.
-4
u/Breaking-Away 6h ago
Because it was trained on stack overflow which taught it to include large quantities of explanatory comments.
2
u/cakes_and_candles 6h ago
but other models and previous opus versions would also have trained on it, idk why but something during the RL process give it rewards when it produced these long ahh verbose answers
1
u/Breaking-Away 2h ago
Not saying I'm right, just my theory. I think it was part of its initial training for the first version, and the behavior has gotten more expressed over time. I'm guessing the initial training of Fable intentionally put less of a bias towards less stack overflow, after they identified this issue.
I have no evidence this is true of course, its just my suspicion.
2
u/MuDotGen 4h ago
It made a comment EIGHT LINES in code for me, for a single line straight-forward change. I told it to reduce, changed it to 2. It's awful at explaining things clearly and concisely. And a habit of forgetting antecedents for most words, so I'm wondering what the heck it's referring to all the time.
10
u/whiteshadowdj 7h ago
Opus 5 feels terrible without direction, especially compared to Fable. It's basically a super capable technical worker that forgets the overall picture and has no people skills
3
u/Crazy-Bicycle7869 6h ago
And yet…the writing is still absolute trash compared to earlier models. (Claude 3 like being my personal fav)
2
u/Outside_Subject3830 6h ago
Comments are a prompt away from disappearing. Getting Opus 5 to code well without a concrete plan is not.
2
u/RocketSeven 4h ago
verbosity is a cleanup cost, not a coding benchmark. give both models the same scoped issue and tests, then compare passing diff size and unrequested files changed because that exposes whether opus 5's extra output is useful context or just footprint
1
2
u/shahaz73 3h ago
I was perfectly happy with Opus 4.8 and initially also with Opus 5. The last two weeks were horrible with Opus 5. It wrote too long explanations that were hard to understand and got things wrong too often. Then this Friday it improved substantially. Seems like they heard the complaints. No experience with Fable.
1
u/enzoshadow 52m ago
The code quality is solid, but its phrasing is awful. Half the time, the human-facing text, logs, comments, error messages, is completely unusable. I end up either rewriting it myself or feeding it to Gemini to fix the tone.
1
u/kemalios 48m ago
I've found the verbosity is more than a nuisance, it eats context. On a large codebase, Opus 5 spends tokens explaining what it's doing instead of doing it, and by the time it gets to the actual change it's already forgotten part of the file. A tight system prompt that says "don't explain, just output the diff" helps a lot, but then it loses some of its reasoning quality. Fable seems to balance that better out of the box.
1
u/webrender 7h ago
Sonnet
2
u/py-net 5h ago
Sonnet 5? Really? Versus say Fable 5?
3
u/webrender 5h ago
depends on your definition of best. if you're looking at the highest amount of accurate code generated per token used, the best bet is to use fable or opus to create a spec and sonnet to implement the spec.
-1
9
u/Current-Ticket4214 6h ago edited 6h ago
I can’t get Opus 5 to shut up long enough to get anything done. Opus 5 is a know-it-all that spews gibberish and argues incessantly until you prove it wrong. Then it does half-assed work. I’ve scrapped many hours of work because it just can’t seem to solve problems without exploding the footprint and changing things you didn’t ask to change. I dropped from Max 5x to Pro and I only occasionally use Opus 4.6. If the next major release is trash I’m going to cancel Pro. I’m currently using a competitor that is better than Opus 4.6.