One thing I've noticed and HATE, is that when you increase thinking-effort, that seemingly increases response-length. Meaning that X.High is longer than High, which is longer than Medium, etc.

Which is kind of the inverse of how people work; a really smart person can condense difficult ideas into simple[r] terms. Whereas people who struggle speak a lot but say very little.

High/X.High do seem to deliver better quality results, but it sometimes feels like needle-in-haystack extracting that from the word vomit.

I just can't stand how often Claude says something like "And the honest part? It's..."

Like, were the other parts not honest? I don't understand how Anthropic let it get like this, it's been such a clear regression

"Humans have a token limit too" - that's so good and it explains so much of the fatigue that myself and colleagues/peers have about Claude in particular.

> Prose density is not the same thing as succinctness

Can't agree with you more. I review 2-3 PRs a day from my team of eight data engineers. Most of my team members use Claude to write SQL, dbt and Python code. Some of them use Claude a lot, some less so. I can easily tell when I review the code that is mostly Claude generated vs. the one that is not. In dbt models where we have a lot of biz logic in intermediate layers, that's where I really have a difficult time following Claude-generated comments. So much jargon copied over from other adjacent dbt models (yet inconsistently), and the prose is super choppy (for the lack of better word).

After reading a looooong sentence/comment line, I still can't figure out what it really means. Had to always re-read the line 2-3 times (sometimes, more) to sort of understand. Reading code, however, is so much easier and usually, I just skip to reading the code and then come back to the comments. :D

I've developed a habit of adding into my prompts "please keep your response concise and succinct" or "I'm trying to cram, please only provide the minimum level of technical detail necessary to understand this topic"

I find it helps immensely but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do that.

Amen. I would trade some stupidity (say ten points on any benchmark) in exchange for a version of Opus or a similar model that actually gave me direct, concise answers.

You can change CC's output style (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles). You can also put style notes in your global claude.md. I've instructed claude to treat me like I have adhd, get to the point, and be succinct, ... More or less eliminates the problematic prose.

I took time to figure this out after Fable spat out "...then stays purely as cascade-debugging provenance rather than load-bearing arbitration."

I switched to using Codex for the last two weeks, and while the prose has been better, there have been a lot more technical oversights. I'm now having fable review codex commits and it finds deep issues. I'v also done the reverse where opus/fable do the work and then I have codex revise all of the prose prior to reading anything myself. This has also been effective; I'm not sure which is the better approach.

It still talks the same claudish, but now it's indeed denser. I'm not quite sure what step up they're talking about.

My biggest frustration with Anthropic with Opus being too verbose is that they tried to put this on users. It’s pretty clear that Anthropic employees don’t use the day-to-day models that everybody else use. They have access to the next tier model so they don’t see the problems that everybody else is dealing with.

Same, currently on a mix of Kimi Vivace (K3), GLM Max (5.3 and 5.3 Flash) and OpenAI Max (Sol and Terra mostly).

I will say that Kimi feels nice but slow, GLM feels faster but has limited tokens (even off-peak) and OpenAI is nice and fast but has limited context (258k shows up in Codex, really).

Neither of them are perfect, but I prefer their type of prose across the board to what Opus 5 and Fable 5 kept outputting. I'll probably check out Anthropic again in a year, but for now I need a break from its brand of slop. Oh also all of the other ones allow usage in OpenCode with their subscription plans.

> In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.”

This sentence reads like Claude wrote it. Perhaps it did, or perhaps Claude has learned to write like the folks who work at Anthropic?

(Had I edited this, I would have said that a colon is not the right separator here. The second clause does not _explain_ the first, per se, bur instead expands upon it. Consider instead: "In some cases, however, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's, with longer sentences and fewer paragraph breaks.")

Just remember Charles Dickens was paid by the word too

I wasted a lot of tokens last month asking "Please explain the meaning of this sentence in plain language"

If you ask any model to write as tables to enumerate points, and BDD for logical flows, it’s like 50x less strain on you

> sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks.

Gotta fit in the watermarking.

Same here. I still have access until my account churns but Anthropic has huge issues comparative to everyone else with token / usage burn down. K3 Swarm also delivers better results than Fable at a fraction of utilization. The Pro plan is definitely not worth it anymore and if I do want to burn some money I can always just leverage the API. But Anthropic went from simply amazing last year to a dumpster fire in less than 6 months for my use cases, anyway.

> In some cases, though, its prose is denser than Claude Fable 5's: sentences run longer and there are fewer paragraph breaks

that feels like they just blocked words like load-bearing but can't actually fix the real problem. The insane word slop density and run on sentences was the real reason it became annoying to work with claude, colored with way too many analogies and pointless linguistic comparisons.

Yes! I have my .md's have

"If you respond with more than 3 paragraphs, give me a TLDR"

"Do not assume I know all technical jargon, please explain things plainly"

Just the other way I was thinking that if I asked "What does Lamborghini do?" the only correct way to answer is a single sentence "Which Lamborghini are you referring to?".

But LLMs will fail at this question: they will tell you about Lamborghini's latest car and mix some history in it. Just try.

Which is the wrong answer anyway, because there's at least two major companies called Lamborghini, one making cars, one making agricultural equipment and at least one famous person (Elettra) with that family name.

This very simple test/question makes me realize how much do I hate LLMs in a sense: while I agree that the answer it gives is the most plausible for 90% of the users, it's ultimately both wrong and long. And that 90% compounds.

But there's no "correct" answer in my eyes than "who are you referring to?". Possibly without listing all the possible Lamborghinis.

I just used it to do a review of a ~100k SLOC codebase that Fable 5 / Opus 5 largely built, cost like $2 and caught some good stuff, but more importantly, it communicated very directly and was pretty light on bizarre metaphors. No "let me read the source before opining" type verbiage launched at me. Honestly night and day for me vs before.

I don't think they care about humans... ... ...

Today, Opus talked about "rotation slabs" in relation to logging. (and not log rotation). I didn't even bother asking what that was supposed to mean and switched over to Sonnet.

Forgive me this long letter, I hadn't the time to make it short. —Pascal