alt Hacker NewsI compared the writing style of Opus 5 vs Fable 5, and Opus 5 continues many of the "Claude-isms" of its 4.8 predecessor in a way that Fable broke away from.
Opus 5 still uses "carry the argument", "worth stating plainly", ", and the trap", "The X matters more", the use of "move"
We need an "annoying English" benchmark.
- Fable 5 Max: https://gist.github.com/deet/3d97f854b48eac6658d642fa18bb24d...
- Opus 5 Max: https://gist.github.com/deet/1a43693a732dfccb4d0d914bfc42692...
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Fable might be using those phrases less, but its writing is still terrible and exhausting to read.
I know this is not "as designed," but I kind of like it? Because, as long as it stays this way, it's still at least possible to tell if a human wrote something. Like, I know it's not much, but it gives you the ability to classify information as human generated or machine generated. Machine generated information may not be useless but it is different and IMO needs to be treated with a different level of skepticism. Not that you can simply trust human writing but it seems like the type of people who would publish machine writing have a different distribution of motives than those who would publish human writing.
I do think they're gonna figure out how to fix it at some point. :(
I've found Opus 4.8 and Fable 5 both difficult to learn from purely because of how annoying their writing style is. I'm finding GPT 5.6 Sol to be much better for this.
I think a signature Claude style of writing is good since it makes it that much harder to pass off Claude written text as human.
I found 4.6 more amenable than 4.8 to style directions, we'll see how 5.0 does. Super-small-sample-size: I think part of its "Claude-ism" style comes from its propensity to try and "proactively" move the conversation/work along. Not sure how this would fare in non-obviously-productive environments, I'd guess "it's still annoying" considering your evidence.
I'm also thinking of another benchmark: (quantified) stylistic range across different prompts. Just putting it out there if anyone wants to do the work for me :D
That's what led me to make https://slopsift.dev/editor/
I don't understand why Claude sounding like Claude is a bad thing?
What's next - complaining that `make` says "nothing to be done for 'all'"?
These are relatively easy to nip in the bud with a brief addition to claude.md
The user is making an extremely sharp point – full stop.
I’m pretty sure Opus 5 is adapted to tricks from long reasoning in Kimi K3 and based on original Opus 4.8. It is not fable in any form.
And this is the most important observation in this thread. It’s load-bearing!