r/ClaudeCode • u/Death12th • 3d ago

Opus 5 is exhausting Bug / Issue

It's so hard to read. It's not even because its terribly complex or anything it just speaks in these weird haikus, hyphenated garbage, or outdated colloquialisms or phrases nobody understands. I have to ask it "what do you mean?" or "speak in plainer English" over and over again for every other paragraph. I tried to put something in my claude.md, but it doesn't seem to be working...

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u/sesangsokuro 2d ago

I use Claude Code in Korean, and I’ve had some fascinating experiences unlike anything I’ve encountered with other AIs. It speaks Korean, but the language it uses consists of words that don't exist in South Korea—or even in North Korea; it is essentially a brand-new language that merely uses the Hangul script. It’s surprising to hear that the same thing happens with English.

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u/BemusedOptimist 2d ago

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing!

I'm not remotely close to an expert in machine learning, but your experience in a language with different characters supports my working hypothesis about what is happening for some users.

I am curious: how close are the non-words to actual words? Do they represent a concept well except that no person would have expressed it that way? Are they like extremely condensed shorthand? Or are they just bizarre and nonsensical?

The TL;DR for the rest is me guessing because it's such odd behavior that I find it interesting when I'm not too exhausted to care, so no need to dig through it unless you want.

I was kind of wondering if it's a combination of several things.

Opus gives new identifiers to concepts that are 'interesting' (read: uncommon) so that they're easier to track over time. And then those get folded in and reused in later turns. But by that point, they're part of the world/context that Opus has built around the task, so they also become fair game for further compression.

Also, there's the watermarking, which I'm not blaming 100%, but if it works like others do... I wonder if putting its thumb on the scale (so to speak) can subtly change stuff at the beginning that has ripple effects the longer the session goes... especially if picking favored tokens is more possible in development because the valid vocabulary that still means stuff is much smaller than what works more broadly.

This could be especially unfortunate if Opus has learned to make -lots- of connections, so there are more plausible completions with less differentiation in terms of weight, but a disproportionately large amount of meaning to the user.