Reddit user says Opus 5 codes better, but is far more pedantic and hard to steer
Veraticus · reddit · 2026-07-27
Opus 5 feels stronger at coding, but much harder to work with
A Reddit user argues that Anthropic’s Opus 5 is the most capable version yet for coding, but also the most painful to use in long-horizon work.
- Compared with earlier versions and Fable, Opus 5 more often:
- escalates minor ambiguities into human-intervention issues
- invents new mechanisms outside the acceptance criteria
- gets stuck relitigating the same point instead of moving on
- The author says its judgment feels “anxiety-shaped,” especially in chat, where it tends to build strawman arguments and then slowly walk them back.
- They also complain that Opus 5’s prose is increasingly padded and self-editorializing, with caveats and rhetorical flourishes that add little clarity.
- Their core claim is that the model’s higher intelligence seems to come with more pedantry, scope creep, and slop in the output style.
More from coding & agent
- 'My intelligence stack': developer splits AI coding work across Opus 5.5, Fable and Astra with human review gates — sh_reya · 2026-10-27
- Baseten webinar: evaluate open models for coding agents by benchmarking on your own merged PRs — baseten · 2026-10-27
- Thorsten Ball on working with agents: run more evals, automate everything, use the best models — omarsar0 · 2026-10-27
- Where to draw the approval line for scheduled agent jobs — Reddit discussion — MemStrata · 2026-10-27
- 4 MCP servers worth a look: full-text YouTube search, Chrome session reuse, Framer editing — Prior_Engineering486 · 2026-10-27
- DeepMind paper: LLMs can't sample randomly on their own — pass random numbers from code instead — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-27