Are those watermarks why claude suddenly started being even more unbearable to work with lately?

Man. That would make a lot of sense indeed.

I'm not sure. I noticed it immediately with Opus 5; strong for code, though it chews longer than I like, but really weak at explaining things. If it didn't just implement the thing, I would often think it didn't understand it and was hallucinating the explanation.

It seems to speak in a shorthand that only it understands, referring back to conversations I never had with it (stuff like "your instinct was right"), and using unusual words for common concepts. That was before the watermarks were announced, but that doesn't necessarily mean they weren't there before the announcement. I don't know what the cause is, but I've begun to have to ask it for explanations a lot more often, and I hate asking it for explanations because it does go on. All models go on, but Claude models are a class of their own in terms of verbosity and purple prose.

It just feels like they're not focused on the models lately, and instead on whatever kind of lobbying and propaganda they're up to. Meanwhile, a handful of much smaller Chinese companies are focused on nothing but the models and are about to lap the US makers while they fart around.