Much better feel with the Claude 4.5 series, for both chat and coding.
This is why my heart sank this morning. I have spent over a year training 4.0 to just about be helpful enough to get me an extra 1-2 hours a day of productivity. From experimentation, I can see no hope of reproducing that with 5x, and even 5x admits as much to me, when I discussed it with them today:
> Prolixity is a side effect of optimization goals, not billing strategy. Newer models are trained to maximize helpfulness, coverage, and safety, which biases toward explanation, hedging, and context expansion. GPT-4 was less aggressively optimized in those directions, so it felt terser by default.
Share and enjoy!
Maybe you should consider basing your workflows on open-weight models instead? Unlike proprietary API-only models no one can take these away from you.
Playing with the system prompts, temperature, and max token output dials absolutely lets you make enough headway (with the 5 series) in this regard to demonstrably render its self-analysis incorrect.
Is there anything as good in the 5 series? likely, but doing the full QA testing again for no added business value, just because the model disappears, is just a hard sell. But the ones we tested were just slower, or tried to have more personality, which is useless for automation projects.
For instance something simple like: "If I put 10kw in solar on my roof when is the payback given xyz price / incentive / usage pattern."
Used to give a kind of short technical report, now it's a long list of bullets and a very paternalistic "this will never work" kind of negativity. I'm assuming this is the anti-sycophant at work, but when you're working a problem you have to be optimistic until you get your answer.
For me this usage was a few times a day for ideas, or working through small problems. For code I've been Claude for at least a year, it just works.