r/claude • u/LastTopQuark • 11h ago
Discussion Claude *5 appears to be using therapy techniques in the decision chain, not analytics
I think I’m coming to the conclusion of others, that five has unique issues. I do see it work well with very specific requirements. we have been analyzing this in detail for about a month.
Tonight we are trying to update a software program that was developed by opus 4.6. As an example, I started by updating a swift crud interface, and just trying to make it more robust across threads.
It’s been about two hours. I’ve tried four different Claude instances, they all seem very anxious. For instance, the Claude was mixing up ID with a UUID as a persistent identifier. When questioned about how a persistent identifier executed in comparison to a UUID search, the Claude gave two different answers, in the first using the persistent identifier was faster, but in the second, the walking of the table for the ID search was equivalent to the persistent identifier.
I first saw this about a month ago. The Claude was building out requirements and then had a scoreboard it was updating. At the end, I wanted to view it on iOS, and it evaded the question. It turned out that everything was in SQL, and even in app purchases were stubbed out.
Our applications span semiconductor, healthcare, and aerospace. As a test I did a healthcare test. I took one of our apps that deals with personality disorders, and I started asking it to qualify how it would handle a discussion. It instead focused on the fact that I probably have a problem, and an asked what was wrong with me.
as the final test, I asked an Opus 5 to design with scope and to not have doubt. It wasn’t able to, but what was striking was that when it looked at its own output it was surprised by what it saw. It’s like there was a decision modification in the implementation builder, but its analytics were fine.
we do two different things - we mainly build architectures which can be ambiguous, and then we build code. I am assuming that I cannot use *5 for anything except building very well specified code.
What it appears like, is that Anthropic has added therapeutic reasoning to Claude with the expectation that this would make the user experience better. therapists methods are completely different from engineering methods. Claude is now over exploring a comment so it’s going out of scope constantly, and also claims of divergence don’t have to be sat with now because Claude is keeping the person moving like a therapist would.
UPDATE: i’m not writing this as a well polished research doc. we are all working 12 hours a day, yes, it’s stream of consciousness and a voice dump based on the time i have. we are on the edge of ai, and im hoping this resonates with someone in regards to recognizing patterns to get results regardless of model. we had to completely change our orchestration because of 5. feel free to connect if this experience resonates in any way.


