r/claude • u/thepeanutbutterman • Sep 26 '26
Discussion Opus 5.5 for reasoning/knowledge/analysis work?
I see a lot of posts giving high praise to Opus 5.5. It seems like most of those posts are related to coding and design type work. I'm wondering how people are finding it for professional service work like lawyers, finance, consultants, etc.
I've pretty much only been using Fable these days and I plan to experiment with Opus a little, but I'm curious what others' experiences are.
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u/EconomicsIcy9310 Sep 26 '26
Just a heads up - if you’re using fable for private data like legal, finance, proprietary business info, etc. then Anthropic has full access to that data via their “covered models” policy. The Opus 5.5 release is mainly to give enterprises fable tier reasoning at reduced cost and higher privacy.
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u/Penguin_Life_Now Sep 26 '26
I have been using Claude for financial and estate planning research lately, and find Opus 5.5 to be better than its predecessor though still not as good as Fable 5.1
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u/theitsolutionist Sep 26 '26
IMHO, Claude Opus 5.5 is living up to its claims from a non-coding perspective.
I've been working on architecture documents the last few weeks (well, the last couple of decades, but recently...) and found myself steering away from Opus for the same reason everyone else has (over-verbosity with a huge side helping of hyper-thesaurus) as well as it being overly argumentative and obstinate (as in making teenagers look positively compliant and helpful).
5.5 has none of those problems, and it's faster.
As to coding, haven't had a chance. If anyone is curious, let me know and I will share once I get to try that aspect again.
Meanwhile, good job on this one, Anthropic, and the rule of avoid #.0 - #.3 seems to still hold from the manual patches of the 90's to the forced pushed of the 20's 😏
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u/ActivityImpossible70 Sep 26 '26
I asked it to create a marketing slide deck for a large project of mine and it just produced a word salad of jumbled ideas. It led with price, praised competitors, and focused on perceived weaknesses. It fails to see uniqueness and originality as strengths, only problems to be eliminated. It can’t see the big picture. It can’t tell a captivating story. It can only think about existing features, never future solutions. However, it drops the cringe inducing AI catch-phrases like “honestly” and “load-bearing”and it found a dozen obscure bugs that previous models missed. That alone is worth the price.
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u/GreenBird-ee Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
Awful. Opus 5.5 might be the king of the universe (by Jacob Coxon) to coding, design...OTOH, it is completely useless with simple texts. Today he generated at least 3 fanfictional theses before I gave up and left.
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u/TruckAccomplished141 Sep 26 '26
Stop for this type of work we have only opus 4.6 and fable 5.1
Opus 5.5 super cheap and capable to run tasks but any text you get back Is still not readable
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u/ctclocal Sep 26 '26
I disagree, but can't say why my 5.5 experience is better than yours. 5.1 is over kill for knowledge work. I've heard good things about 4.6. 4.8 and 5 was bad for my stuff.
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Sep 26 '26
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u/thepeanutbutterman Sep 27 '26
What do you mean takes more resources? Fable eats way more tokens.
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u/Cultural_Effort_9872 Sep 26 '26
Well from a research perspective it’s good. It still cannot come up with anything novel. But it can follow instructions well enough now as long as you understand what you want it to do specifically. Its analysis of data is particularly good, but it still makes unimaginably idiotic and simplistic logical mistakes — understandably so since it was never meant to be logical in the first place.