> Communication. Opus 5.5 communicates more naturally than prior models. Early testers found its writing clearer and easier to follow, which addresses some of the common feedback we heard about Opus 5. It puts the most important information up front, and its style makes it a better work partner over long sessions. As one early tester put it, “it writes the way I do.” In our own use, this has made Opus 5.5’s work easier to follow and check—which is a safety benefit as well as a practical one.

I think this is what I'm most interested in. I mostly moved to Astra because I just can't work all day with the Claude Opus 5/Fable writing style. I don't think Astra is a better model, but it's the first OpenAI one that seemed good enough to me. Definitely keen to try Opus 5.5 and see if this claim is real.

I would happily pay more for a claude model that performs the same but speaks normal English. The proliferation of claudespeak in the workplace is driving me insane. Every ticket, every PR feedback, every comment in the codebase is poisoned with its ridiculous unnatural vocabulary

So far it seems the same. I used Opus 5.5 for an hour this evening and it was just as painfully verbose as Opus 5. It also used the term "load bearing" 4 separate times.

I'm surprised that you're getting so many replies saying it's the same. So far in my usage today Opus 5.5 does seem like a noticeably better writer. Opus 5 frequently made me want to strangle it while 5.5 has been producing a lot less incomprehensible gobbledygook.

As someone who uses both, Astra was 100% the better model. I have yet to give 5.5 a spin so maybe that’ll be the new top contender.

Yes this is a big part of what has turned me off Opus 5 completely. The other (more dangerous) one is how often it gets assumptions wrong. These both (along with Astra) caused me to split my time 50/50 now between the two models.

Not a day goes by when I push back on something, to which Opus 5 very unambiguously say "You were right, I was wrong" - this never happened so often with past models, nor with Fable.

We'll have to see how much Opus's ability to communicate has improved. It's already giving me better summaries of where we are in the conversation.

I did the same switch (that reason along with the newer models seeming more "lazy" and needing constant prodding to finish long-horizon tasks) but my issue with ChatGPT/Codex now is that it too roundabout and doesn't get to the point. I tried adding instructions and using the personalization settings to make it more efficient but haven't seen much change. Claude seemed to follow settings more closely. Has anyone had any success to make ChatGPT more succinct?

The writing style is insufferable but it’s not just that. https://opusfived.dev/

after a few hours use, my impression is that Opus 5.5 writes like gemini. drastic improvement over all opus 5.1's claudeisms.

and i think i was generally more tolerant of 5.1's writing style than most people.

Much better than Opus 5. prompt:

> hi, can you explain how the scheduler works. keep it brief, but include important correctness details

some excerpts:

>Flow: 1. Data arrives. The appender calls prepare/commit around the krolik write. The prepare step leaves a phantom row, so a write that is still in flight is tracked. The commit publishes STREAM_INPUT. 2. Poll. It first reclaims expired leases. Then it sweeps sdirty (a candidate index) in a rotating order, oldest since first, which prevents starvation. It re-derives the exact period and rewind for each candidate from snode_out/snode_in, then claims it: writes the sassign lease plus a per-edge sassign_edge snapshot. 3. Complete. Each edge's watermark is set to the snapshot taken at dispatch. Anything published after that gen stays dirty automatically. A failed or partial job writes nothing, so its dirt persists.

> - Folds are monotone single statements. gen only goes up, extents only grow, processed periods only union, rw_start only moves earlier. So replays, out-of-order writes, and concurrent writes can at worst hold a watermark back. The worst outcome is a spurious rerun, never lost work. There's no read-modify-write and no truncation of the dirty period, so a write that lands during a job can't be swallowed.

> - Rewrites are declared by the publisher, never inferred from overlap. An unflagged write that overlaps already-processed data means "unchanged", which makes retries and redelivered tasks free. Each publisher has its own reason for being sound (see the table in scheduler/CLAUDE.md). A new publisher needs a row in that table.

> - NULL means dirty, and DELETE is the fence. Every node and edge has a row from the moment it's created. A lost parent or a settings-only edit can't be derived, so both go through one forced-rerun path: capture_rewinds reads the processed span before the DELETE, and apply_rewinds publishes it as a rewrite on a config root.

All the non-standard programming jargon is stuff from the repo. I can actually read it and understand what it's talking about. I used Fable to handle Opus 5 as I just couldn't stand it. With this I'll probably go back to Opus.

I don't know what they did but opus is really good while Astra/Sol are comparably bad. For my own tests and taste this might be the first time (fable perhaps excluded) where claude models are better than openai, since codex 5.3.

Oh god yes.

Fable 5.1 is a lot better than Fable 5 btw (edit: in terms of writing style). Not sure about opus 5.5 yet since I’ve only got one session in so far.

I worked with Astra for two weeks and the output was really bad compared to Opus. It made so many wrong decisions within C++, Go, Python and Typescript code bases. My college made the same experience and we moved back to Claude.

Opus 5 has made me question my sanity on a daily basis, especially as all my coworkers started lobbing Opus 5 slop grenades everywhere. It had the worst and most infuriating writing style I've ever seen.

I hope Opus 5.5 is better, if for no other reason than all the Claude slop I have to read will be at least more tolerable.

One funny side effect of all of this: realizing that coworkers that use AI for almost all the text they generate at work have their writing style change every time a new model ships.

Please update with your feedback

Yes, it's unbearable. Hopefully they've actuallu lly fixed it.