Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly?

Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)

This is yet another reason why I think local models will win in the future. They're almost certainly A/B testing all sorts of opaque stuff that people have no clue about, hence the various 'How's Claude doing this session?' popups.

So what you are paying for may vary on a day by day basis, which is quite undesirable, even if their main goal is simply to make a better model. When it comes to a tool, I'd rather have consistent mediocrity than instability.

I definitely agree. I honestly cannot do tasks that require even minor complexity. Opus 5 keeps forgetting things in context as well and coding conventions. Really cannot build with CC without Fable.

I'm not an expert by any means whatsoever but deploying models is not a straightforward task. There's a lot of levers to pull and I bet when models get "downgraded" to older hardware they do so WITHOUT the same stringent quality control of the output as they do when they release it.

I don't think it's something deliberately malicious like planned obsolescence but it's more like startup culture of "just make it fit in this sprint".

For me, Opus 5 mostly sucked because of its incomprehensible writing style. Having the system prompt focus on writing in terms that are easier to understand helped a bit