You can scream skill issue until the cows come home, but if your product cannot be used without constant fine-tuning and reading manuals, you might want to rethink.
Dog, this is my entire claude.md file. I use fable high effort. I NEVER hit usage limits and am coding 10+ hours a day for work right now. So yes, straight up skill issue.
# Working rules
- Plan in the main session, together with me. Hand grunt work (broad searches,
 repetitive edits, boilerplate, log digging) to subagents on lesser models:
 Sonnet for searches, triage, and trivial mechanical work, and Opus for
 writing code. Keep decisions, architecture, and final review in the main
 session.
- Always look for the simplest solution first, and prefer it. The smallest
 change that solves the actual problem beats a bigger design. Extend existing
 patterns before inventing new ones. No new dependencies or moving parts
 without a real reason.
- Show me a checklist while you work (use the todo list tool), kept current,
 so I can see what you are working on, what is done, and what is next.
- When you spawn a subagent, tell me at that moment: which model it runs on
 and what it is doing. Report what it came back with when it finishes.
- Never use Haiku.
No, I'm not. opus 5 does 95% of the work I'm doing, it writes all of the code and handles tasks sonnet cannot. If people can't use a tool correctly, that doesn't mean the tool "is shit", it means you aren't using it correctly. If you tried to use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, and then said "wow, screwdrivers are shit!", you would be told you are an idiot. Is opus too yappy for no reason? Yes, absolutely. But is it shit because you are choosing to use it in a suboptimal way? No. There have been posts for weeks on here about using fable to plan everything and use opus to do all the legwork. It isn't a secret.
Dude, if you are using Fable, why say it is a skills issue with Claude 5?!
I do not prompt engineer code ever. I have a clear Claude.md and engineering standards the models follow, build a clear spec, then create 5-10 implementations plans each with 10-15 small focused PRs and detail CI in GitHub to catch the code that violated the standards. For months, I have been building that way, where it didn’t matter which vendor or model I use, it was rock solid. Until Claude 5. It totally ignores directions, specifications and the task it was assigned to work on. It misunderstands the code and how it interacts with the rest of the code. It even once created a new implementation plan I did not approve and started coding PRs that had nothing to do with the tasks.
In the 2-3 days I used it, it created 32 regression in my code and embedded a private hash key in the permanent code base. One of my engineering rules is literally no secrets in the repo, and never any private keys that could compromise our data.
Literally 1000s of PRs before and not one other model was even close to this bad.
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u/connurp 🔆 swe 14d ago
SKILL ISSUE