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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Opus 5 fucking sucks. Like it's horrible. I use Fable for coding and anything important and I use Opus 4.8 for things like recursive email categorization, transaction matching, and other stuff where I don't want to burn as much quota.

In my experience Opus 5 is the worst of all possible worlds, it's dumb and headstrong. It just runs away with tasks you didn't ask it to do, is reckless, and basically is unusable in my experience.

Not sure why but my guess is that this will be worse. Happy to be proven wrong.

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I believe Opus 5 isn't meant to be spoken to by humans. It's great at executing but I reckon it's intended to be spoken to by other models such as Fable. I use Fable as the orchestrator, only speak with Fable, and all implementation, recon, design etc happens with Opus 5, with Fable reviewing (and translating).

That's interesting.

I've really gone in the opposite direction: having a dumber model orchestrate. In my case, it's usually a Luna orchestrator spawning Sol/Astra subagents to do the "big brain" work of planning and reviewing.

Reason I went with "dumb orchestrator" was just to save tokens. Having Opus/Sol (let alone Fable/Astra) orchestrate was burning tokens like crazy for me even when much of the gruntwork was being done by Luna/Sonnet/Haiku subagents. (Luna is also really good, like way better than Sonnet...) Perhaps it was a skill issue on my end though, maybe I wasn't just managing context properly.

I use it frequently with a lot of success on "Medium" effort, it overthinks like crazy on higher levels, but YMMV.

Yeah if anything Opus 5 taught me how little benchmarks mean to the actual real world performance of these models.

"Better" in every sense of the benchmarks and absolutely horrible results in my day-to-day work.

The verbosity, goal post moving, tendency to leave work unfinished, over focusing on unrealistic root causes when debugging, etc... etc...

It was the first time I actually pinned my models back because I just could not work with 5 for the price and performance it gave me. Hoping 5.5 is better this time around....

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