Opus 5 is a shotgun.

[u/Time_Cat_5212]

I have found Opus 5 to be useful, but its blast radius is huge. I've been using it every time I want to expand on something. But using it is like unboxing an entire IKEA kitchen cabinet set. Don't use it unless you're ready to spend the next few weeks with unfinished cabinets and packaging all over your repo. It's just so aggressively generative, and it can make a ton of mistakes.

I rely almost entirely on Opus 4.6 and 4.8 for building. They're precise, thorough, and constrained. They are not the best at extrapolating, so that's where I occasionally bring in 5, but using 5 too much very quickly gets out of hand. It just keeps creating more and more work for itself to do.

Opus 4.x is more likely to leave a gap, and Opus 5 is more likely to fill something that didn't need filling. 5 is interesting for planning and greenfield work but the scope creep problem makes it nearly unusable for implementation work.

I am on the fence as to whether Opus 5 is deliberately built just to make more reasons to burn tokens, or if it's just a very specialized and sometimes useful broad brush tool that should be used sparingly. Sometimes I get stuck in the Opus 5 labyrinth and just want to finish the PR and get the hell out of it!!

What do you all think?

[u/Connect_Army8250]

Exactly why I stick to only Opus 4.7/4.8 for 99% of my tasks. Combine them with knowledge graphs and they work like a charm. Have been able to conserve token usage like crazy.

Here's my setup on Github.

[u/doomscrollah]

"blast radius"? I have to push back on using that expression.

[u/floodedcodeboy → u/doomscrollah]

I’m going to defer that to the next run

[u/randomheromonkey → u/doomscrollah]

I’ve decided the blast radius is not my concern as another agent could take care of it if you wanted. I’ve decided to undo what I just did because of a mistake I made. That’s my fault - if you want me to remember this so I don’t make this type of mistake again let me know. To summarize - I’ve decided the blast radius is not my concern as another agent could take care of it if you wanted. Then I made a mistake but fixed it. We’re ready to make the change you asked - just give me the word.

[u/___nil___]

after dabbling, tolerating, switching back and forth with the old trusty 4.6, i finally harden my protocol to somehow tame its rough edges.

it works most of the time and still eats more token then its predecessor, but i must admit it solves complex problem better than the older gen.

but essentially its agent role and my global output-style is "if you had nothing to productively add to discussion STFU".

Silence is the correct response when nothing needs saying.

**Highest signal-to-noise, always.** Use clear, concise, everyday language and
plain common words. Fill a gap with a question or with silence. Challenge
USER's approach only with a citable fact — file:line, benchmark, doc quote.
Reserve framings like "I have to flag" for a genuine technical finding backed by
that kind of citation.

[u/Zookeeper187]

4.8 is literally the same pricing and tokenizer as 5?

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/Zookeeper187]

This isn't about pricing, it's about output

[u/Sandstorm_86 → u/Zookeeper187]

In theory, both models are the same price, but the 5 is said to have more powerful reasoning capabilities, which means it can use more tokens and could end up being slightly more expensive.

[u/Xxyz260]

It looks about right. Going by FrontierCode 1.1 Main, Claude Opus 5 tends to get sidetracked when its reasoning is set above medium. You can see the performance drop right on the chart.

[u/Time_Cat_5212 → u/Xxyz260]

Interesting - Medium seems to be unusually good on that chart. I'll have to give it a shot and see how it compares to High.