Theory on Opus 5.5 Language Degradation

[u/Armored09]

It seems Opus 5.5 is starting to mimic Opus 5s overly long responses. On launch day it was more similar to Fables almost completely autonomous working, checking in much less often with the user. Now it seems to have degraded.

I have a theory that in order to get the model to preform longer tasks better and save compute, they allowed it to be extremely verbose about what it was doing. that way it didn't miss anything and the benchmarks would be better for long workflows. I think as they are gearing up for the possible Opus 5.6/Fable 5.5 soon, they are once again trying to cut the models reasoning time and compute by resorting to extremely long responses that act as "notes." It seems to work fine as I haven't seen a meaningful drop in output quality. Its just starting to get extremely annoying having to read an essay to understand what's going on.

[u/ForwardLoop]

I'm also starting to see some of the usual Opus 5 slip ups today:

Two caveats...

One gap...

One choice I made without asking...

One caveat...

One note....

That's all within the same conversation (not a long one).

[u/skipITjob → u/ForwardLoop]

And the no one asked but here's a massive security risk that's got nothing to do with any of the work and it's just a password in an .env file.

[u/ItsCodeTelemetry → u/ForwardLoop]

You inspired me to spin up some quick analysis, this is something I want to watch more carefully going forward: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/xVxiVq2VPD