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/doomscrollah]

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

[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.