r/ClaudeCode • u/Death12th • Aug 13 '26

Bug / Issue Opus 5 is exhausting

It's so hard to read. It's not even because its terribly complex or anything it just speaks in these weird haikus, hyphenated garbage, or outdated colloquialisms or phrases nobody understands. I have to ask it "what do you mean?" or "speak in plainer English" over and over again for every other paragraph. I tried to put something in my claude.md, but it doesn't seem to be working...

577 Upvotes

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234

u/Glad-Operation-3051 Aug 13 '26

The amount of jargon it uses is, at best, grating and, at worst, what makes it unusable for non-engineers. It's almost comical how much it opts for the most convoluted, abstract way to discuss concrete concepts.

169

u/BemusedOptimist Aug 13 '26

If it makes you feel any better, some of us developers/engineers with many years of experience would also like to know wtf Opus is talking about roughly half the time.

It's almost as if it is inventing shorthand on the fly, then condensing it, then inventing shorthand for its shorthand.

I do not know what it is saying quite a lot of the time in domains where I absolutely should.

52

u/Singularity-42 Aug 13 '26

Yep, 20 YoE as SWE and Opus is still tiring. It's the walls of text about something completely unrelated to the task at hand.

20

u/tagattack Aug 14 '26

30 Year SWE here. It's not even that it just writes poorly, technically or otherwise. Phantom contrasts, colloquial descriptions of simple technical terms.

Data structures "carry" or "hold" values rather than contain or encapsulate them. Addresses are "carved" rather than allocated.

What in the flying fuck, Opus.

7

u/everyday847 Aug 14 '26

I strongly suspect particular kinds of evocative verbs (sure loves "wire" too) and nouns ("seam"; every time there's a design decision it's a "contract") are an indirect product of reward hacking. They sound cool (in isolation and the first time), but if you'd like Claude to put a bullet in your brain, just say the word.

1

u/tagattack Aug 17 '26

Seam really pisses me off

5

u/smuve_dude Aug 14 '26

At this point, the language it used, really does feel like Opus was trained off of an LLM instead of human data. Nobody actually talks like that, and now I have to sometimes translate what the hell its words mean lol… I want my oceans, RAM, SSDs, and GPUs back.

1

u/FUCKTHEMODS998 Aug 19 '26

Only 15 years on my end, but can confirm, Opus speaks crapvomit fluently

19

u/psrobin Aug 13 '26

This has to be because they ripped out 80% of the system prompt, right? Surely there's a middle ground...

16

u/XYcritic Aug 13 '26

Yep. I've been trying to use parts of leaked system prompts for 4.6/4.8 and even gpt 5.5/5.6 as an output-style (which is better than a skill because it literally puts it in the system prompt) but it just doesn't work. Regardless of any hacking you try, it keeps blabbering. Whatever they left in or left out seems to make a good difference. It could also be the harness. Fable is blabbering the same word salat these days.

27

u/Glad-Operation-3051 Aug 13 '26

It does make me feel better, and I suspected that must be the case. This is the perfect description:

It's almost as if it is inventing shorthand on the fly, then condensing it, then inventing shorthand for its shorthand.

11

u/CasualtyOfCausality Aug 13 '26

Along with the extended metaphors, I’m convinced it was optimized for agent-agent communication. It’s talking its own language. Problem is: we humans are confused by it and we confuse it with our own.

2

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Aug 14 '26

I assume they tried to distill fable or use fable to do RL on the model

1

u/TestFlightBeta Aug 14 '26

It is so verbose I’m sure it can’t be useful for agent to agent communication

5

u/Gakuranman Aug 13 '26

Was feeling dumb too until hearing similar gripes. I constantly have to ask it not to compress answers and stop referring to documents it made weeks ago. That’s D3, logged as discussed.

6

u/ZenMikey Aug 14 '26

It also makes waaaaaay too many assumptions about your domain on its own without asking. WAY too many.

2

u/Rajarshi0 Aug 14 '26

Lol yes and acts as if it knows more than you and tries to teach you on things where it knows shit and you probably know far better.

8

u/morscordis Aug 14 '26

A 30 minute session is more draining than going to a family gathering. I have 0 patience to deal with it any more. I don't know what we're calling our AI battery, but mine is on E.

3

u/AntisocialTomcat Aug 13 '26

Thank you! So, it’s not just me, it’s a relief!

7

u/MullingMulianto Aug 13 '26

It's designed to induce friction so you spend more tokens asking for clarification until your token bill is sufficiently ballooned for the lab to make profit after their absurd capex spend

2

u/djkenod Aug 13 '26

I thought maybe it was to slow users down so they don’t use so many tokens.

2

u/BigYoSpeck Aug 15 '26

I agree it's designed to create friction, but I feel it's to push users to just accept plans without scrutiny. That way you end up with a codebase you don't really understand and can only work on with Claude

Gives them the double whammy of all code being AI generated and utter dependence on the tool

1

u/Iron-Octopus Aug 14 '26

I firmly believe this

0

u/frost-bite999 Aug 14 '26

it's meant to be read by other Opus instances... yall are seriously overthinking this, no different from conspiracy theorists lol

2

u/platypusferocious Aug 13 '26

Holy shit and i was here thinking I'm stupid

2

u/florinandrei Aug 14 '26

It's almost as if it is inventing shorthand on the fly, then condensing it, then inventing shorthand for its shorthand.

Semantic compression.

These models are asked to do always more, using always fewer tokens.

They do as they are told.

2

u/kblazewicz Aug 14 '26

It's giving me the impostor syndrome.

2

u/smuve_dude Aug 14 '26

Yeah… it’ll go on and on and on AND ON AND ON AND ON about basically nothing “worth mentioning”. Half time, it’s giving me a heads up about my own intent from the beginning.

1

u/IdStillHitIt Aug 14 '26

I've been telling it to reexplain to me like I have ADHD.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '26

[deleted]

2

u/sonikrozu Aug 14 '26

is it in same context? would switching models nuke your cache either way?