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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

Opus 5 has made me question my sanity on a daily basis, especially as all my coworkers started lobbing Opus 5 slop grenades everywhere. It had the worst and most infuriating writing style I've ever seen.

I hope Opus 5.5 is better, if for no other reason than all the Claude slop I have to read will be at least more tolerable.

One funny side effect of all of this: realizing that coworkers that use AI for almost all the text they generate at work have their writing style change every time a new model ships.

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I really wonder how it converged on its style. It's pretty unique and terrible. It's not like it's just mimicking something or it was purposefully design to be that way. I mean the reason may be diffuse and uninteresting... just the result of a lot of factors and lack of control over the writing style probably.

But oddly enough its still great at coding. Just like a lot of people it either interfaces well with people or machines but not both.

It truly was bizarre. I've used every major model since 2022, and not a single one had a writing style as bad as Opus 5

Fable 5 was pretty bad too, but they fixed it with 5.1. Now with Opus 5.5 it seems they fixed it as well

Fable 5.1 is still intolerable. I invariably filter its prose through Astra before inflicting it on myself or anyone else.

I assume it’s largely a side effect from the final RL in post training?

That’s the step that causes the most significant gains in agentic performance.

But the RL doesn’t care about anything except maximizing the score, so if you only score based on coding benchmarks, anything can happen to the writing style (as long as it doesn’t hurt the coding performance).

That’s why it often gets worse on models that simply had more RL post training from the same base.

Reinforcement learning for specific use-cases like coding that degrade it's writing style... makes sense. Maybe it stands to reason later version of Opus were improved more by this sort of fine-tuning. Feels consistent with the observation of diminishing returns and worsening writing style. Wonder what changed (supposedly) in 5.5.

Does Xiaomis approach help with this? They do all the post training steps at the same time instead of one by one, switch topics after a couple prompts so writing style is mixed with coding and tool use.

Apparently it helps generalize skills between areas, which makes sense when you compare it to how humans learn but I don't know if it's the same for LLMs.

For whatever reason, GPT models simply don't have this problem.

I've been listening to some old Acquired podcast episodes and they do often talk in this type of Claudish. So it's getting it from Silicon Valley startup podcasters... Great...

I have a theory that they pushed the model away from human writing styles to not get copyright violation nags. In Opus 5.5 they've found a better point in the latent space of styles that is still far away from the human ones.

Astra is better here, but the one I'm the most impressed with is Gemini. It's always been good, but 3.6 Flash is even better. It writes in a pleasant, human style. Not perfect, but it has a good balance between technical accuracy and readability that is better than what I've seen from any other mainstream model.

Yes, it made me want to vomit. If the new Fable only changed the writing style to just sound like a human, same performance for everything else, I'd be pretty happy.

Opus is only usable if you have a post-turn formatter that strips all comments from the generated source. I'm not even kidding it's that bad.

Just run all comments through Sol or Astra.

It's not X, it's Y, not A, not B, not C, and he haven't even woken up yet! Here's the catch, the detail is in the devils and the twist is that it's designed!

You're right to call this out, and what's more, it's not even solving the original problem. I overlooked this in pursuit of the load-bearing seams and finding the wedge needed to uptick engagement.

Here's the X that Ys the Z:

You're half right, but the half where you're wrong is hiding the real unlock.

Here's the part that nobody is talking about: corporate always had their jargons and unique writing style – LLMs have just created their own :)

But is it load-bearing if their writing style changes tho?

> especially as all my coworkers started lobbing Opus 5 slop grenades everywhere

People that produce slop have to be fired asap, they're just human relays anyway.

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