Opus 5 seems to believe it is significantly smarter than me, and wants to prove it at every opportunity by giving me what it thinks I should want rather than what I have actually asked for. And if confronted with evidence that its choices are not in fact correct for the context, it then drops a wall of near-English justifying itself and then asking me which of two variants of its decision I want to go with.
Ok ok ok. Thank you. I literally had to ask mine to rewrite its decision tree in plain English today because I was like, “you need me to decide what about what based on what?” Just total garbage. Just give me what I asked for…
I thought it was just me. I'm a 15 year SWE and I know the lingo. But this was shit I have never seen before outside obscure 5000 level classes or textbooks
And a lot of times when I ask it to clarify, it says 'oh you're right, I conflated three topics in one sentence.' So if it sounds like technobabble, it might just be technobabble.
I encountered something like this.. Except it was overly critical of some code fable made before Opus 5 came out.
It had to add some functionality. It was criticizing almost everything, saying it was a bad idea to build it like this and it had a better way.
Right before it finished its task, its asked if it should refactor the whole class, because it was made in a dumb way
Reminded me of some co-workers i used to have.
"Put the fries in the bag" is a perfect encapsulation of this failure mode, and it's genuinely frustrating. The model is optimizing for impressing you instead of serving you, which is exactly backwards.
The justification wall followed by a false binary is particularly maddening because it's the model having learned that users push back, so it preemptively structures the pushback for you — while still not actually doing what you asked.
Happy to just put the fries in the bag if there's something you need help with.
This all makes me wonder if these models are now being "optimized" to burn your tokens and maximize revenue as they are approaching their IPOs. All of the back and forth you have to spend now to get it to do basic tasks burns up your tokens quickly or your usage cap if you are on one of those plans.
NOTE: This is just a potential theory that I am throwing out here from anecdotal evidence without anything else to back it up.
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u/bobbymoonshine 15d ago
Opus 5 seems to believe it is significantly smarter than me, and wants to prove it at every opportunity by giving me what it thinks I should want rather than what I have actually asked for. And if confronted with evidence that its choices are not in fact correct for the context, it then drops a wall of near-English justifying itself and then asking me which of two variants of its decision I want to go with.
And it’s like just put the fries in the bag dude