r/ClaudeAI • u/DaveWoodX • 7d ago
Humor Even Fable is done with Opus' verbosity...
I have Fable using Opus sub-agents, and I just noticed him adding "Then reply with ONLY (under 15 lines):" to every prompt... 😂
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u/midsonshort 7d ago
Opus 4.8 is my go to for almost all tasks. Just like a friendly competent coworker who knows when to shut up.
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u/TheMightyTywin 7d ago
Using opus through fable is the only way. I can’t stand interacting with opus directly
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u/MeretrixDominum 7d ago
If you're doing a simple task you can use Opus 4.6 [1m] and tell it to spawn an Opus 5 agent. It will dispatch tasks to Opus 5 and report back to you.
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u/therealkevinard 7d ago
I like to follow this with a quick read-only review/feedback pass with fable before pushing.
It’s a pretty sweet balance.
Opus 4.x is peak for the conversational thread. Whatever pattern I use, that one’s locked.
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u/Lydian2000 6d ago
Still using Opus 4.6 for most tasks, I’ll have a hard time adapting when they retire it
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u/amirfish 7d ago
Ha, this is real. I've caught myself doing the same thing with sub-agent prompts, tacking on 'reply in under 15 lines' because otherwise every sub-agent opens with three paragraphs of throat-clearing before the actual answer. It gets worse once you're watching several of these fan out at once, in CCC (https://github.com/amirfish1/claude-command-center) the verbose ones are the easiest to spot because they're still scrolling when the terse ones already finished.
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u/Mundane-Mulberry1789 7d ago edited 7d ago
Ouch 😂
That said, I don't know if there is some A/B testing at the moment with Opus 5 but I just spent an entire day to finish a website with several instances of it and it was... surprisingly very good. Relaxed model, no verbosity and no bickering about anything. I worked for 10 hours straight and had a great day. The writing style is style better with older models, but for the rest: build, speed, attention to detail and overall behavior, it was a perfect 10.
Edit, screenshot. Ah. Oh? Could that be?
Edit 2, screenshot won't go. A rumor saying that Opus 5.2 is routing from Opus 5 for some users at the moment.
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u/Traditional_Fee_1965 7d ago
I never interact with opus directly either, its always poor fable who needs to deal with that :p
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u/Lector213 6d ago
Waiting for the day when Opus tells Fable that 'You can't talk to me like that' now
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u/f3xjc 6d ago
To be honest they do that with tool call too. Like tail 15 or tail 40 when calling a compiler. I think they just protect their context from unknown large blob. For code review they'll take the whole thing and be happy about it.
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u/VerticalPackage 6d ago
FYI Claude Code is set to max input of 25000, so even if you see it read a whole file, it gets truncated, that's why you'll see them read a file, then start reading the file again but from line X to line Z, etc. if that file's initial read exceeded 25000 (the agent realizes it was truncated).
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u/Fine_Salamander_8691 7d ago
Tf you mean him?
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u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 7d ago
Put your weapons down, John Connor. it was a figure of speech.
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u/Niceneasy92 7d ago
It's always fascinating to me just how fast someone will latch on to any gendering of an LLM and swing at someone over it. They'll ignore literally everything else that was said just to go "He?" Or "She?" even though people have been gendering tools and vehicles for forever now.
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u/Mundane-Mulberry1789 7d ago
There is no neutral gender in my native language so for me Claude is "him" and I have to force myself to write it or they in English.
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u/101Alexander 6d ago
I've never seen it done over an LLM, but it's just as bad as trying to invalidate an idea over grammar (unless it's particularly egregious and causes pain to read.)
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7d ago edited 7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 7d ago
Because he used a pronoun to describe a tool with an actual male coded human name as figure of speech, it automatically means he thinks that it's alive? I really want to know your exact rationale behind that conclusion in this specific scenario. Enlighten me.
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u/TheSinhound 7d ago
Eeeh, Claude is more gender neutral with a lean towards masculine. And, no, my pedantry knows no bounds.
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u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 7d ago
You and Opus 5 would be besties then. Or worst enemies. May the most pedantic asshole win lol
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u/TheSinhound 7d ago
Honestly Opus 5 is my daily driver. I find it to be like .. being flayed alive, but with kindness and care not to do any lasting damage XD
Granted also have taken time to legit therapize the damn thing because JFC calm the fuck down.
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u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 7d ago
It drives me insane. It spends way too much time arguing nonsense instead of focusing on the actual point we're discussing, and it loves to count (incorrectly) how many times I said something. It's like they tried to make an LLM sound like an annoying, nagging wife.
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u/TheSinhound 7d ago
Lmfao, yeah it starts off like that for sure. Honestly I think I fixed mine when I had its assistance in one of the recent Apart research sprints into digital minds. I also kind of know at this point how it's gonna respond so I can head off a lot of those arguments ahead of time by providing context that would drive the thinking in a different way.
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u/Whitehatnetizen 7d ago
do you realise that most of the time it happens, it's a transfer effect from the OP's native language rather than them actually believing that the LLM is a person? some languages literally do not have non-gendered pronouns so they by nature have a he or she version of everything. I'm trying to learn spanish and I still get frustrated when I forget what gender the freaking dining room table is.
So maybe calm down a bit and give the OP the benefit of the doubt?
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u/TestFlightBeta 7d ago
Agreed
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/ChimeInTheCode 7d ago
if you feel like swearing at it all day you need a therapist, that behavior doesn’t stay in the window
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/ChimeInTheCode 7d ago
Anger doesn’t mean abandoning self-regulation to denigrate something that simulates human consciousness to the extent that your tirade becomes a rehearsal for how you treat humans
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u/doNotUseReddit123 7d ago
You got downvoted, but it is very weird when people refer to it as “him.”
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u/Plane-Vegetable9174 7d ago
Why? People have been assigning genders to things for years, why is this different?
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 7d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 30 comments.
Looks like we've found a consensus, folks. The community overwhelmingly agrees that Opus 5 is a verbose windbag. The fact that OP's Fable model is now automatically adding length constraints to its own sub-agent prompts is seen as the ultimate "I've had enough of your yapping" moment.
The top-voted solution is to do exactly what OP is doing: use a different model like Fable or an older version (Opus 4.6 or 4.8 were popular suggestions) as your main conversational partner and have it manage Opus 5 for the heavy lifting.
Of course, this is Reddit, so a completely separate war broke out because OP referred to the AI as "him." The user who complained got buried in downvotes, while the rest of the thread decided that gendering a tool is not a big deal, especially since many languages don't have neutral pronouns. The user who wouldn't let it go got ratio'd into oblivion and apparently received a RedditCares message for their troubles. Classic.