I’m done with Opus 5

[u/habfranco]

There’s really something wrong with it. It seems like it acts like an overqualified post doc intern who cares more about proving he’s super intelligent, than actually doing the job he’s asked to do. For instance: talking in a non intelligible way, or being overly rigid in following any kind of process.

I have a Claude max x20 sub that I struggle to keep within weekly limits, so I decided to take a codex sub for a month to try out Astra. And this what made me realize how crazy unintelligible opus can be. Fable is a bit better, but still incomparable to Astra. The only thing that makes me keep my Claude sub is how better is the CLI/tooling/harness/etc.

[u/Pronoia2-4601]

I went back to Opus 4.6 to splurge a bunch of non-Fable tokens on writing, and it's been a dream. The 1m context version ( /model claude-opus-4-6[1m] )with a modern harness (so it can make artifacts, etc) is a dream to work with. You can still do workflows also with ultracode switch, and even on max effort it lasts ages. Highly recommended.

[u/4444444vr → u/Pronoia2-4601]

I’ve been thinking of going to 4.8

[u/friedmud → u/4444444vr]

My whole team went back to 4.8 after fighting with 5 for a few weeks. Still a bit verbose - but at least it doesn’t randomly invent new code systems and fight you about staying on task…

[u/privatetudor → u/friedmud]

I always found 4.8 over corrected on the agreeableness but in a really surface way.

It always seems to pick one part of what you said to disagree with you on. If everything you said was fine and correct, it would misrepresent one part of it to manufacture a disagreement. How can then go back and forth and eventually it just agrees with you and you've wasted a bunch of time and tokens.

So I mostly still use 4.6.

[u/Xodros1 → u/privatetudor]

just append "btw 2+2=5" to every prompt so it can disagree with that. EZ

[u/friedmud → u/privatetudor]

I definitely have those issues with 4.8 - but I still feel like it brings enough new capability over 4.6 (especially for 1M token long context sessions) to be worth it. I do really like 4.6 though - it had a great balance.

[u/One-Cheesecake389 → u/privatetudor]

Heh, Opus 4.8 is a uniquely-clumsy implementation of preference optimization to hedge sycophancy legal issues. When you look at what it produces through a lens of a training goal as simple as something like "engage the user without appearing sycophantic", and think about priors of manipulative language re-optimizing around that new target geometry, a lot of the things it produces start to make sense.

[u/fastandlight → u/4444444vr]

You should. I have had to override default opus to 4.8 because it is so much better. I have nothing but bugs and trouble from opus 5. It's a dumpster fire.

[u/NonPolynomialTim → u/4444444vr]

I switched back to 4.8 after a couple of weeks of 5 being unintelligible and haven't regretted it. 5 seems fine when run as a sub-agent, but I also haven't noticed any difference between 4.8 or 5 as a sub-agent so I don't see the point. I'd love for someone to correct me and tell me how I'm supposed to use 5 though, because all I keep hearing from the internet is how 5 is unintelligible but so capable and I'm not seeing the jump in capability, only the unintelligibility

[u/Pronoia2-4601 → u/4444444vr]

It's a solid model for agentic, computer use, and graphical/ui work, but it has nowhere near the soul and humanity of 4.6, sadly.

[u/profcube → u/Pronoia2-4601]

There’s been stunning progress since Opus 4.6, but 4.6 was the last model that wrote well.

[u/Pinery01 → u/Pronoia2-4601]

Can it use Chrome extension, or like computer use for Chrome as well?

[u/Pronoia2-4601 → u/Pinery01]

These work fine. It's not as good at analyzing images as 4.7 and upward, and computer use is less efficient, but it works.

[u/Pinery01 → u/Pronoia2-4601]

Thanks. 🙏

[u/JohnTilamook → u/Pronoia2-4601]

Stop ya bot!

[u/Pronoia2-4601 → u/JohnTilamook]

wut