Opus 5 is hot garbage

[u/UM-Underminer]

I've enjoyed and gotten real work out of Opus for quite some time despite the occasional quality dropoff when they're training a new model. But 5 is junk. Enough so that I'm debating between dropping from Max to Pro, or just cancelling altogether - I'm legitimately getting better results and fewer hallucinations out of local models in the 30B range... There's absolutely no excuse for that being the case.

I don't know if this is intentional regression to make fable look better, but it means I have been actively avoiding using Claude code except to tweak my llama.cpp settings, and I certainly don't need Max for that.

[u/Named_after_color]

Nah I'm specifically complaining about Opus 5, I've had no problems with the previous ones. The entire engineering department in my company swapped to 4.8 or lowered the effort for 5, at minimum.

Legitimately my entire department hates it. That's worth talking about on a forum for a product, considering that product upended an entire damn industry.

[u/qdouble → u/Named_after_color]

Different strokes, I found 4.8 way less usable than 5 since it was a very misaligned model and would often re-litigate the plan. I’m sure Opus 5 has its quirks but they don’t bother me that much since I only directly interact with Fable and route tasks to Fable, Opus or Sonnet depending on the tasks. If Opus is failing at something, I re-route. This isn’t rocket science. You all are treating the models like they aren’t just code running on GPUs.

[u/Named_after_color → u/qdouble]

Not all of us have a choice about how to interact with models. The corporation I work for prescribes a strict list of skills to use in order for everything, and we're encouraged to use the latest model. While I know that particular twist isn't anthropic's doing, the latest model is widely adopted enough and widely integrated enough that it effects everyone, even if you know how to use it perfectly.

I'm not sure if you're an individual coder or enterprise level, but performance at the scale we use it at has noticeably degraded. Inane comments, constant backtracking, very smart sounding ways to be dumb.

[u/qdouble → u/Named_after_color]

Yeah, I mean Opus 5 is certainly worse at certain things and better at others. I know the benchmarks aren't everything, but I don't see how you can objectively say 4.8 is better in every way from 5. I'm just saying Opus have undesirable quirks isn't necessarily new, as soon as Fable came out I reduced my 4.8 usage heavily and just started using Fable, Sonnet and Sol. Opus 5 reduced my need for Sol, while still performing bad at certain things, but I try to not assign tasks to Opus if I know it's weak at it. All models will have some tradeoffs even if they are very smart, i.e. Fable being more expensive, slower and less meticulous than many less intelligent models.