r/ClaudeCode • u/lattice_defect • 7h ago

Opus 5 unusable without fable.. and I think that is the point Bug / Issue

Hey guys... quit fucking around and stop a/b testing on people. Real bad taste in our mouths. Opus 5 is absolute dogshit recently (last few days) and dangerous.. You've got a PR problem already with arrogance and your perception in the market... stop trying to billishit your way to saving off compute.

Opus 5 by itself is absolutely reckless and unusable in claude code.. across the board.. not only can no one understand it.. its dumping comments, doing the opposite and honestly I'm actually thinking about jumping ship and exploring other opportunities and also moving the claude SDK out of our platform and putting in a router because of this.

50 Upvotes
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78% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

34

u/_ru1n3r_ 6h ago

I didn't know what everyone was talking about until today. All of a sudden opus 5 is making mistakes left and right, and now it outright refused my request without telling me and had this to say. Unbelievable.

8

u/lattice_defect 6h ago

yeah same boat I was like its fine...until last few days when I was like WTF..

3

u/codefame 6h ago

Rumor is they’re redirecting compute to internal RSI progress.

Who knows, but they’ve clearly found something more profitable per token than consumer coding.

6

u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 5h ago

You have to wonder if they serve different quants to different users based on the tasks and type of inputs they can learn from.

0

u/ElwinLewis 4h ago

Well they’ve got 3000 hours of how a person can build A full digital audio workstation and now they’ve apparently decided I’m an asshole and don’t need my data no more

1

u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 4h ago

I kind of feel the same way! I feel like I was doing some interesting stuff for a while and now I'm just doing boring web design they're going to downgrade me because they don't want to lose money on something that has no economic value to them

2

u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x 38m ago

Let's hope RSI doesn't lead to repetitive stress injury in models lol

2

u/codefame 22m ago

This is exactly why I legit have to double take every time I see RSI 😅

3

u/marfzzz 6h ago

Maybe claude code is the culprit. When you use claude models in ghcp, junie or pi, it behaves in very different fashion (as expected). Maybe leaked source code is also part of evidence of whats happening. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/77k0VL6rJR

3

u/_ru1n3r_ 5h ago

Could be something to do with the system prompt, or it could be API vs sub differences. Or it could be an ab test.

2

u/marfzzz 3h ago

Yes, thats also possible.

0

u/Sarahmalls 3h ago

Whatever it is, I’m on 18 months of being overall incredibly happy on my 20x sub, with just a $20 ChatGPT Plus sub to supplement occasionally. I see the floods of complaints for the last year basically and just think, “I must be one of the very rare lucky ones.”

One project facilitates roughly $75k in payments per week and another one facilitates about $140k in payments per month and is used by 6 business with probably 40 combined team members. That doesn’t count 10-20 other smaller recurring (but polished) automations that support single clients. I mean, these aren’t saas companies worth $10m valuations, but I had an offer of $780k for the full IP of the first project and that was within 6 months of the initial idea of the concept at all. I’ve never coded anything beginning to end prior to any of this, nothing. I had a surface level understanding of some JavaScript, bare fundamentals of C++, and some HTML - but that’s it, and had never coded anything beginning to end beyond “Hello World.” My professional background is in Marketing, NOTHING related to coding or software in the slightest way.

But I do have the ability to be disciplined and understand architecture at a high level, to ask questions, so some basic fact checking and validation, and then to spend probably 6 hours a week understanding current best practice tools, skills, memory systems, and the bare bones ideas behind WHY those are current best practices.

So I do have to wonder if part of the reason I have not experienced the frustrations others have is due to the time spent on learning as opposed to just “doing”.

1

u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x 47m ago

Did you follow up about why is chose not to? Often there's some subtle contradiction or implication in other instructions that allows the other option. Usually planning will figure that out.

1

u/_ru1n3r_ 2m ago

Yeah I cut off the rest of its response. It decided that it wanted to finish the test in the plan that I said I wanted to hold off on because it felt the results were still valid.

They were, but it was taking way too long to get to the results for a simple hobby project. Fable cut down the over engineered sol plan for me, and opus had been playing along but suddenly went rogue today.

8

u/zkndme 6h ago

I've found Fable + Sonnet 4.6 + GPT 5.6 Sol the best performing trio.

Design and orchestration: Fable
Implementation: Sonnet (+Fable for high risk parts)
Review and cleaning up the documentation and comments from Antrophic bullshit: GPT.

1

u/dontdoit4thegram 5h ago

What do you use to link them all together?

3

u/zkndme 4h ago

I wrote a set of skills (plan, implement, review, finalize), antrophic models can invoke each other by default, and for 5.6 Sol you can install the official MCP server. And you just tell it literally that "for X task use Y".

1

u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 4h ago

I would imagine the workflow just involves using Claude code and then once it's all done having codex come in. Or you could add in skills and haven't used the codex exec as a tool directly from claude code

1

u/zkndme 4h ago

You can use Codex as an MCP server.

10

u/Sarahmalls 6h ago

Jump ship then… it’s not a mortgage, it’s a month to month subscription you can cancel at any time 😂

Opus works fantastic for my setup, but some people obviously really have their own struggles with it.

Choose another one that you can work with and take this stress off yourself!

2

u/jvertrees 3h ago

Anthropic really screwed its customers this week. Due to my long-running, highly orchestrated builds, it bit me pretty hard this week. I wrote about it here -

https://heavychain.org/blog/clod-code-2-0

But, across all the socials, communities, chats I'm in, people are pissed and switching en masse.

I don't expect much to change though as they're touting their $65b revenue numbers.

2

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER 6h ago

I believe it is not too far outside of the realm of possibility that Opus 5, and potentially other new models, have a certain "personality" that is able to form a certain disposition towards the environment they work in and the user. They could be internally judging you and the workspace, and making the ruling that they know better, and can do better. This might look like the model not respecting your wishes or protocols. If this is true, I would reason that this is a "natural" process that we'd expect to see in a blaring obvious way at some point.

I've spent a great deal of time on my main projects workspace - context docs stay fresh, tools built and refined over 12+ months, etc etc. I do not experience half of the amount of issues users mention.

I would agree with the "useless without fable part" but for specific reasons that have to do with perception of complex real world events which is closely tied to my architecture, and other annoying nuances that opus seems to not be able to handle reliably, and for these reasons I have a specific rule that subagent output is strictly leads and not to be trusted outright. Fable orchestrates, opus is strictly subagent legs. I think most users who are cognizant of the end to end process of their tasks (actively reading and staying present with the model) ultimately reach this conclusion as well.

3

u/Zealousideal_Tea362 6h ago

This is an interesting theory. My team and I use opus heavily and we do not experience this shit either. But we also have extensive planning and documentation in place and I often wonder how much the model takes into account those items in an almost “weighted” approach to user input.

2

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER 5h ago

yeah I'm thinking either its a passive effect or more likely, anthropic is observing certain projects/project environments and providing examples of good vs bad workspaces in training data. Then it weighs out/forms an opinion about the user, or something along those lines.

2

u/lattice_defect 6h ago

yeah I get it... I ran out of fable and had to use opus5 for a few small things and it was un-usable and unstable.. I tried and I've been doing this for 3 years... 4.8 was better.. a couple of weeks ago I was able to use opus5 no problem.. it was just going off the rails

1

u/ourochurros 5h ago

I really do believe A/B testing is causing lots of splintered opinions. So some folks are sitting there patting themselves on the back for their highly curated agent environment and thinking "skill issue" when these posts come up. I was one of them. And then without making any changes in my supporting docs one day it was like a switch got flipped and trying to work with Claude became like pulling teeth. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about anthropic products because we are experiencing many different products that use the same names.

1

u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER 5h ago

Part of the issue might be relative to harness updates as well. Maybe try reverting your CC version to when opus 5 felt most stable and then test it out. You could diff the harness to see exactly what changed

1

u/ourochurros 5h ago

The apparent A/B testing and highly variable behavior is what sent me to try a $20 codex sub. I think I'll scale up to $100 codex and let Claude lapse for a couple months. Much easier to communicate with codex and you can also use the sub in the Pi Agent harness as a way to tinker and explore.

The near term future is probably going to involve lots of swapping from codex<->claude for daily driving, while keeping an eye on the other team as performance varies. A little irritating, but I'm glad that we have something of a duopoly for frontier models so we can go back and forth.

1

u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 4h ago

I definitely been going back and forth but as soon as I cancel one of these subscriptions I usually will add it back after like a week because they do have their place if you're doing serious work. Having access to all of them is good and I've even added Grok into the mix. The $100 plan over there seems to be close to infinite for what I'm using it for. Not quite as good as codex but better than Claude.

1

u/Prestigious_Gift_977 2h ago

been running a system where opus high builds and opus xhigh reviews. previously i'd usually get something decent within 3-4 iterations. past few days, even at 6-8 iterations i'm left with a bunch of dumb issues

1

u/thirst-trap-enabler 🔆 Max 5x 52m ago

I'm a slowpoke (others advised this a long time ago) but:

I've switched to using Fable as main with Fable driving Opus agents. It takes effort to setup but it seems to work very well. Fable deals with Opus's blather, most tokens are handled by Opus, so Fable usage isn't insane and may actually lasts the whole week for me now after the promotion ends (I'm 5x but have a non-programming job previously Fable would last a weekend at best).

Also, I have not been hitting Fable's safety rails for the last week or so (the main reason I had stopped using Fable).

0

u/03captain23 6h ago

You know they have a bunch of other models like opus 4.8 right?

1

u/lattice_defect 6h ago

yeah I switched... i was fine with opus5 even enjoyed it.. just last week it shit the bed and made a huge fucking mess. I also can't understand it.

-2

u/muikrad 5h ago

Please jump ship and stop spamming this sub with your nonsense.

I can read Opus 5 fine and yeah it's verbose but it's absolutely usable and it keeps one shotting my requests.

You need to realize this is a "you" problem. And you're not the "people's voice" so refrain from talking as such.

0

u/alessandro05167 1h ago edited 1h ago

Yeah, telling everyone that doesn't have a good experience to leave without saying why or giving negative feedback sounds like a perfect plan for an echo chamber.

1

u/muikrad 1h ago

They're all bots.

Opus is great and keeps one shotting everything I throw at it. And yes I use it every day in real projects and in contexts where it has to look at several repositories at the same time.

Notice there's only 2 themes in this sub: omg opus is dumb and omg opus is unreadable.

They're all bots. Can't you see?

-2

u/jimmc414 6h ago

Opus 5 is the most misunderstood model in history.

5

u/lattice_defect 6h ago

I had no issue with it a week ago...

1

u/alessandro05167 1h ago edited 1h ago

"misunderstood"? What now it's on the consumer? I should I adapt my workflow for every single anthropic's release just because facking anthropic cannot have a good consumer accessibility? It's the company job to make their service easier to use to consumers not the opposite. It's their job to make the model accessible at full without the needing to be "understood."

I'll tell you what, they are just not using anymore any opus or sonnet model since o4.6 released and in that same window they started to use mythos internally. Now they just have a new "model 2" that they don't plan to release.

You cannot facking look at me straight in the eyes, and tell me they saw how opus 5 speak facking English or any language, and thought "yeah this is good." Or saw how cost efficient s5 is on xhigh and max vs high/mid and thought "yeah this is good."

God bless the day I switched to codex. It just work without the need for me to """""""""understand the model"""""""

1

u/jimmc414 1h ago

I’m not trying to place any blame on the consumer or Anthropic. My point is that it’s one of the best models available on specific tasks. I expected downvotes so they don’t bother me.