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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

Opus 5 is an overconfident stupid model. It tries to generate too much slop, tries to act like everything will fall. I have reversed back to fable and codex sol.

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yes sol is still my daily driver for most coding tasks

I did find opus 5 quite handy for general knowledge work and visual design, without the cost of fable (e.g. the graphics in this post are made by opus 5)

but its not noticeably better than opus 4.8 in those regards, and I would not miss it if forced to go back to 4.8

I almost prefer Opus 4.8. Opus 5.0 has the overly scholastic tone of Fable but without the intelligence.

We've been running automated code reviews on claude with a bunch of skills/subagents with different specialties. Any review feedback is then fed back into claude to fix. Since switching to Opus 5 I've noticed the reviews are overly pedantic, and that leads to feedback loops where each fix generates more feedback, which requires more fixes, i.e. slop. I had, for example, a simple SQL migration script with a single CREATE TABLE. After a few rounds of review, it ballooned into a complicated 200 line script.

I'm not ready to blame Opus 5 for being stupid. Perhaps we have a prompt buried somewhere that's essentially asking it to be pedantic, and it's just obeying the prompt.

> I'm not ready to blame Opus 5 for being stupid. Perhaps we have a prompt buried somewhere that's essentially asking it to be pedantic, and it's just obeying the prompt.

This is a known failure mode. Sadly, working on a software engineering team doing agentic engineering now means we need to build and maintain suites of evals that measure these things, so that we can measure the effects of changes to harness components including how they perform under model upgrades.

But... for a traditional software engineering team that has no experience in this... How do we even do it?

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