I agree.
I've come to believe this is also a side effect of the desire for less (/goal: no) human in the loop on the part of the people driving all this capex spend. I think if you actually want to manually review output there will be a moment where you will actually want a separate interface to a stupider or "simpler" model. I suspect sometimes dealing with Fable 5 that this threshold has already been crossed. It's not that the raw code output is so good, it's that it just doesn't speak to me in a way I would like. Perhaps the verbosity is worthwhile when generating code as a sort of first pass some other model can auto or adversarially chop down. The best place for a human is probably outside of this part of the loop all together.
So I might as well just let it auto /goal it's own thing with sufficient constraints while myself and a model that can converse in parallel with less "deictic" (thanks for this word btw) volume as you put it for the areas of the code where I want to "frame" the vocabulary or where my personal understanding is of high value. I know people already do this in many ways, like use one company's model for planning and another for coding. It just feels inevitable at a certain point that the "natural language" output of LLMs writing the bulk of the code is not targeted towards humans. And really, why should it be?
I think Opus 5 might have crossed the line on this where Opus 4.8 just barely didn't. Working with Opus 4.8 came to feel pretty natural eventually, but I hate working with Opus 5. I'm always telling it to go back and rephrase basically everything it said. And it doesn't even answer my question without burying it - it outputs reams of babbling and summarised summaries upon summaries, and if you glance at the shape of what it's saying it looks like it's being thorough or that it's found useful new info, but it's never actually saying anything. It's like it gets caught in a loop of self-congratulation over what it said before.
Making the experience more hostile for the human feels exactly like what it's doing, but I don't think that's intentional, I think that's a side effect of newer models being optimised for agenticness. No one is benchmarking DX.