Interestingly, on my Windows machine, the Claude Code stopped auto updates and so I’m still on Opus 4.8, on Macbook I’m on 5 and I didnt find a standard way to lower it to 4.8.
OndrejValenta
OndrejValenta
Man, this thread really helped me, I was beginning to question myself.. Especially in web-components world with CSS properties and variables being accessible on different layers, the texts Claude produces about technical details of some solutions are really like reading Stephen King’s novel when in one paragraph you travel through 3 different spacetimes.
And the worst part? You ask Claude “What do you mean by that?” and it answers “You are right to push back, I was not precise and mislead you, it’s actually this and that”. So not only it’s hard to read, it’s also hard to invest your time into understanding it because it’s probably not true
1
dli
tozz
This is fantastic 
I had one I laughed out loud in the office. It was something to the effect of.
“We need to have a timeout of 30 seconds in case the user loses the connection, like if they go into a tunnel”
What? Does it matter what causes the disconnect? Why mention tunnels, maybe the user got kidnapped and thrown into a van with a faraday cage!? Anyways, I’ve switched to GPT 5.6 Sol and it’s night and day.
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nathanl
Ha, just today I have said this in my Claude prompts:
holy cow you talk in such dense language. Please try again and speak clearly like a human
and
ok slow down and assume I’m an idiot
1
mindok
Or copy / paste into Grok or Codex and ask it translate into human.
I have this in CLAUDE.md in one project and the outcome seems a bit better:
# Writing style
Applies to chat, comments, docs and commit messages.
- Follow ASD-STE100 writing principles adapted for software: active voice, short clear sentences, one idea per sentence, consistent terminology, no unnecessary synonyms or hedging.
- In code comments: explain why / constraints / non-obvious rationale only. Do not restate what the code does. Prefer brevity.
- Use project/technical terms freely; otherwise stick to simple, single-meaning words.
- Say it once and stop. No aphorisms, no "X is the whole point", no paired contrasts for effect, no restating the same idea in a second, more lyrical sentence.
- Answer the question that was asked, then add context if it is needed.
But I still get stuff like this as the context builds and it forgets:
I should be plain about a trap here, because a defensibility product is the worst possible place for me to bluff: the principles are the kind of thing I could produce a plausible-looking list of from training, and some of it would likely be right, but I can’t reliably distinguish, from the inside, a faithful recollection from a confident reconstruction. If I hand you “the principles” and two of them are subtly my invention or drawn from a different release, you’d be building schema and audit language on a fabricated foundation — exactly the sin the system exists to prevent. So I’d rather flag the uncertainty than perform completeness.
which translates to “I don’t know”
Maybe it’s a cynical ploy to burn more tokens ahead of IPO?
1
jhogberg
Erlang Core Team
dli
Perhaps relevant: Model collapse - Wikipedia
Lol’d at “Habsburg AI”.
I switched to GPT-5.6-Sol. Good stuff so far, I can easily throw away >50% of my AGENTS.md (sorry, CLAUDE.md). Oh, and it integrates nicely with Zed Agent where I can granularly approve edited lines, and it uses the built-in read/write/grep tools instead of making edits with bash python3 -c '...' commands (wtf).
Preliminary totally non-scientific evaluation results: GPT-5.6-Sol Medium > GPT-5.6-Terra Xhigh >>> Opus 4.8 > Opus 5
This roughly aligns with https://deepswe.datacurve.ai.
1
Lucassifoni
The tractable beachhead was a ratchet all along – honest caveat : we’ve been building this as a spike, but the real insight was finding it to be load-bearing. What I need from you is your honest feedback : if you want me to rebuild it, just say the word.
Yeah. It’s quite mentally taxing. Maybe the idea is to progressively stop reading agent traces ? For the time being I still follow along every session and those new models developed a rather infuriating vocabulary and mannerisms.
That, and I used to use “load-bearing” as a joke. Like in “load-bearing paint”. Now I can’t.
Edit : just saw The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude which could be of interest to you
2
OndrejValenta
What model is this, I don’t see load bearing that often.. But the “The tractable beachhead was a ratchet all along”, and here I though I’m quite proficient in English.. :-))
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