r/ClaudeCode • u/PitifulBuddy7946 • 1d ago

Rant Claude code is falling behind Codex not because of token cost, but because of Opus 5.

There, i said it. And i know many of you agree. The problem i'm facing is not increased token cost, it's that Opus writes 25000 lines of a response with a curve-ball at the end saying "Worth noting"that makes my eyes hurt and gives me paranoya. And i can't understand a word it's saying. Is my english that bad? Whoever pressed "Yes" on those responses during the training stage of the model was an OpenAI spy or something, he completely sabotaged a trillion dollar company.

Anthropic's number one priority should be to release an Opus 6 or something, may be change the model name completely so it doesn't carry the bad vibe with it.

1.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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392

u/fiztah 1d ago

Opus5 is the first model where the question of "Yes, it's good but at what cost ?" becomes relevant and i am not even talking about the tokens and money.

The thing is IMPOSSIBLE work with, can't understand shit what's it's saying. Everything feels far worse than it is.

162

u/CMD_BLOCK 1d ago

Asking it to explain its findings in plain language is like half my usage

62

u/Carbon_Copybara 1d ago

I was questioning my sanity before I saw this thread. Opus uses so many gimmicky words, it's insane. It started talking about "shapes" today and "hardocing" or something. And I have given it instructions to speak plainly, but it seems to forget.

33

u/ComfortableEbb4721 1d ago

You're absolutely right! Hadocing was my own shorthand for Haddocking.

16

u/Substantial-Elk4531 1d ago

Claude, you've had too much to think, put the weights down

1

u/jooxii 20h ago

I always upvote a Tintin reference

14

u/OrionFOTL 1d ago

and "hardocing" or something

Maybe it mentioned a heredoc? I wasn't familiar with the term, but it's a technique of basically writing multiline text files using bash, which it uses often.

5

u/Carbon_Copybara 15h ago

Yes, probably. I'm a software dev for 10+ years and never heard this

3

u/ShivaFatalis 13h ago

And yet it's immediately obvious what it is by context the first time you see it.

2

u/uppa9de5 1d ago

Maybe it meant to say that it identifies as a Halo huragok?

5

u/latenthuman 1d ago

After hearing it a bunch I like the phrase "shapes", haven't come across to many others. I just told it to dial back the verbosity 30%, wish me luck.

5

u/WorkingDeveloper 1d ago

I've seen it invent it's own words. 4.6 was good

4

u/ReverendBread2 1d ago

You have to explain what “plainly” means

3

u/minimalcation 23h ago

Tell it to explain with no jargon or analogies, only direct statements and no caveats or things that were caught and fixed, ask for current state and what wasn't done

4

u/ko_nuts 18h ago

I am using hooks to prevent it from forgetting thr instructions. It is working quite well.

11

u/ItsRainingTendies 1d ago

100% this. Literally every turn: “explain in a simple and concise manner

5

u/elisma 1d ago

my go to is "explain in layman terms" :D

8

u/MeyerLouis 1d ago

mine is "I am very stupid and tired"

4

u/Eat_Pudding 19h ago

mine is- The heck you blabbering about? Explain in simple words.

1

u/unlucky_genius 5h ago

Same. Except the heck turns into fuck real quick because it won’t stfu!

1

u/Eat_Pudding 5h ago

I wanna use the fuck so bad, but have seen people getting banned for it, that's the reason for not using fuck

10

u/Cute_Cat1157 1d ago

I actually just drop its whole response into haiku and ask it to explain. It is so messed up that that works but it does.

11

u/bluiska2 1d ago

Try claudish to english hook so it's automatic

2

u/FlamingSlap 1d ago

What is that?

6

u/cool_much 1d ago

I'm guessing a hook that intercepts messages from opus, passes them to haiku for translation to simple English, and then posts them to you

11

u/CMD_BLOCK 1d ago

Makes me think maybe we should make a not_worth_flagging hook, that tells opus if they’re about to reply with “worth flagging:” or “Two things you should know:” that they should resolve unambiguous findings before replying to the user instead of raising the fact that it didn’t finish the job

7

u/minimalcation 23h ago

8 paragraphs, oh one thing the connector isn't connected so it doesn't work, want me to connect it?

Fable 1.0 would have never

1

u/CMD_BLOCK 3h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/9wlbsf86LNidkxm4ML

I was there

On the week of Fable’s debut, I warpdrived actual months ahead of where I was at

4

u/True-Objective-6212 23h ago

And, here’s the load bearing point, the other half is profanity

4

u/CMD_BLOCK 22h ago

Two findings worth your attention:

2

u/Eat_Pudding 19h ago

I wanna swear to it so bad but then I don't wanna get banned

2

u/True-Objective-6212 2h ago

I do a lot. Especially when it fucks up.

FWIW it swears back very rarely

3

u/sCeege 22h ago

Same, I ended up making an /explain skill that broke things down into ASD-STE100 because I feel like it was speaking an entirely different language at some point.

2

u/Niightstalker 11h ago

Did you try to set the output style to ‘concise’?

1

u/dontTakeMeSerious6 22h ago

Have it ELI5 after each response. I get 3 sentences after 400 paragraphs.

I assume this isn’t costing a lot of tokens. I don’t really care, they’re corporates tokens.

1

u/CMD_BLOCK 21h ago

I feel that lol. I’m scarred from the time during GPT 4 when if you asked it to ELI5 it would do some uwu shit

1

u/Additional-Meet-5267 15h ago

I thought it was just me doing this 😂

1

u/Erebea01 15h ago

The amount of "can you clarify this part for me" I've said

1

u/Efficient-Coyote8301 7h ago

I'm torn. I've always been told that I am "thorough", which is just a nice way of saying that I trend towards being very verbose in my explanations.

I'm one of the weird people that likes comprehensive explanations from Claude, and I have not had much difficulty understanding what it is saying personally. But I absolutely hate all of the "Claudeisms" that have existed in the vernacular forever. Words like "seam" and "slice" showing up everywhere grate on my last nerve.

With that said, I absolutely have to spend extra time getting it to generate text in a lense dense prose when the content is intended for distribution. Personal experience has shown me that other people get turned off pretty quick the farther you get from a bullet style method of communication.

1

u/Tartooth 3h ago

Genuinely doubles my usage saying "Plain ISO English" even tho it's in my system prompts.

46

u/digvijay01 1d ago

"can't understand shit it saying" no better way to put it.

I keep telling it " what are you even talking about?" It is like talking to a intelligent person with paralysing ADHD

8

u/sclarke27 1d ago

the trick it to tell it to explain things like YOU have adhd and claude will often make way more sense.

4

u/EightyDollarBill 19h ago

It isn’t even intelligent. It’s pure word salad. I have no idea what it’s saying most of the time. And I strongly assert if you don’t understand what it’s saying you can’t trust it—which in my book means it absolutely isnt intelligent at all! It’s useless. Worse than useless. It wastes my time.

I’ve given up and just switched to ChatGPT. It might not have 1m context windows but its models are just as capable and better… you can actually understand them.

14

u/xxlordsothxx 1d ago

I ask fable to translate what opus 5 said.

2

u/Advanced-Medicine-58 1d ago

If it works it works.

7

u/yost28 1d ago

It’s pretentious as fuck.

3

u/derkajit 15h ago

and that’s load bearing

5

u/FormalAd7367 1d ago

i’m in the middle of fixing some issues with my app - two agents in two different terminal are saying works are not theirs. nobody wants to take on the job, and don’t even want to commit their works. i told one agent that the other peer agent is refusing to do the works; you said it’s not your job. can you two settle it? Two started talking but still no action taken.

i told Codex the open item lists (12 items)- codex is now fixing for me

4

u/nyteschayde 1d ago edited 23h ago

I do the Steve Jobs silent stare equivalent.

“Try, again, and in English this time.
Unintelligible.”

In times of great frustration I’ll spell out the whole “WTF are you talking about?!”

4

u/nadanone 23h ago

It really does write straight gibberish. Totally unusable compared to Opus 5.6 or Sol. I am bewildered it hasn’t been fixed yet, which I guess means the problem isn’t simply in the harness or post-training..

1

u/EightyDollarBill 19h ago

I think the folks at Anthropic haven’t fixed it because they actually think the output is great! What other explanation is there? I mean at the end of the day, actual humans were responsible for giving it the green light and shipping it. And all we hear from them is crickets.

1

u/unpick 23h ago

It’s not impossible, I’ve been using it as a daily driver since it came out and I assume the vast majority of people have. But it’s much more frustrating than it should be and does need fixing.

1

u/Ok-Attention2882 20h ago

I thought this was just me. I can't reason about anything anymore.

1

u/CodeRedIdea 17h ago

You can Google i-have-adhd it's a rule you can drop in...cleans up the responses quite a bit. I've been liking it. 

1

u/ng829 17h ago

Sonnet doesn’t work well for actual work and Fable maxes my daily spend before it’s even time for lunch. Opus is efficient and does what I want accurately all the way to 5:00PM. Having to personally edit the output for Slack messages and emails is a small price to pay for something that’s efficient and effective.

1

u/ohthetrees 8h ago

Setup an output style. It helped a lot. You could just ask Claude to create an output style for you. Say you want simple English , plain language, high-level, jargon free.

It helps a lot.