What bothers me most with Opus 5.5 is its verbosity.

Claude Code has an output style setting that I set to "Concise", with no apparent effect.

I am told this is merely something in the system prompt that the model tends not to pay attention to with large contexts.

Opus 5.5 writes whole essays at the end of the turn, with the important actionable steps somewhere at the bottom.

When prompted to give a concise summary, it usually overshoots into a super short summary and then you have to dig into the details again anyway.

In general I find Opus 5.5's writing to still have more "ticks" or "Claudisms" than the OpenAI models.

Its explanations often appear overcomplicated for simple concepts.

Sure, it's leagues above the ridiculous writing of Opus 5, but Anthropic still has a long way to go here.

> I am told this is merely something in the system prompt that the model tends not to pay attention to with large contexts.

IIRC it's a system reminder injected after every single turn.

It must be pretty ingrained to be so resilient against prompting. I think RL on relatively short-horizon programming tasks has given the model a tendency to write down absolutely everything, so it survives compaction. Longer-term (project-scale) tasks where this crap starts to pile up and cause problems are in the evolutionary shadow, so to speak.

With accumulated "writing style" memories after 5.0 the new 5.5 seem to be quite great, it is concise enough. But I am bothered by another thing, 5.5 seem to be over-eager and agreeable, when I ask stuff like "why is that like this?" it just goes and applies tons of edits instead of clarifying what I mean or what I want or push back. And similarly it changes stuff and then asks if that is how I wanted to be, ignoring three memories that tell it to ask first.

ask claude code to start new claude sessions while refining the output style. until it looks right. my claude code now writes well.