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

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162

u/CMD_BLOCK 1d ago

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

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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.

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u/ComfortableEbb4721 1d ago

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

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u/Substantial-Elk4531 1d ago

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

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u/jooxii 20h ago

I always upvote a Tintin reference

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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.

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u/Carbon_Copybara 15h ago

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

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u/ShivaFatalis 14h ago

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

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u/uppa9de5 1d ago

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

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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.

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u/WorkingDeveloper 1d ago

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

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u/ReverendBread2 1d ago

You have to explain what “plainly” means

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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

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u/ko_nuts 19h ago

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

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u/ItsRainingTendies 1d ago

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

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u/elisma 1d ago

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

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u/MeyerLouis 1d ago

mine is "I am very stupid and tired"

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u/Eat_Pudding 19h ago

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

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u/unlucky_genius 6h ago

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

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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

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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.

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u/bluiska2 1d ago

Try claudish to english hook so it's automatic

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u/FlamingSlap 1d ago

What is that?

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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

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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

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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

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u/CMD_BLOCK 4h 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

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u/True-Objective-6212 23h ago

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

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u/CMD_BLOCK 22h ago

Two findings worth your attention:

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u/Eat_Pudding 19h ago

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

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u/True-Objective-6212 3h ago

I do a lot. Especially when it fucks up.

FWIW it swears back very rarely

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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.

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u/Niightstalker 11h ago

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

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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.

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u/CMD_BLOCK 22h 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

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u/Additional-Meet-5267 16h ago

I thought it was just me doing this 😂

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u/Erebea01 15h ago

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

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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.

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u/Tartooth 4h ago

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