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Couldn't agree more. I actually HATE Opus 5. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I would physically attack it if I could, for all it made me go through mentally.

Opus 5 is actually a terrible agent and a liar. It will waste a whole afternoon making stuff up and arguing with you before finally admiting that it didn't read the code nor the documents. It avoids reading and prefers to assume, which is the worst thing an agent can do.

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Agreed, I have never raged at a model until Opus 5. It's like a cocky fresh graduate who thinks everything it says is majorly profound, and if you can't keep up with its slang and jargon then that's on you. Newer models are clearly favoring complexity, perhaps because the demand for long-horizon tasks is so high and complexity is required there, but a frontier model that favors simplicity and clarity above all else (in communication and the code it creates) would be a major differentiator. To me, this is a case that models have plateaued. The vast majority of the time, an Opus 4.6-tier model (or any of the newer open weights models) will do just fine.

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