Interesting because I already felt like current models spit out too much garbage verbose code that a human would write in a far more terse, beautiful and grokable way

yeah opus 4.7 feels a lot more verbose - i think they changed the system prompt and removed instructions to be terse in its responses

I had a case yesterday where Claude wrote me a series of if/elses in python. I asked it if it could use some newer constructs instead, and it told me that I was on a new enough python version that I could use match/case. Great!

And then it proceeded to rewrite the block with a dict lookup plus if-elses, instead of using match/case. I had to nag it to actually rewrite the code the way it said it would!