> “Verbose, hard-to-follow output has been my biggest frustration with frontier models, and Claude Opus 5.5 fixes it
God I hope so
It hasn't just fixed it, it has introduced a new paradigm in anti-obscurity.
So did I. Unfortunately it's even more verbose according to https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5#token-u...
That's the load-bearing seam in this blog post.
The improvement in writing sounds great! I want OpenAI to follow it. Writing in recent models is a disaster.
So far in the past 20 minutes it sounds much better in my sessions. Way better than 5.0 so far.
It is hilarious to me that in the examples they show side by side Opus 5.5 still uses 4 times more words than it needs to use. IME, if you eyeball how many words the thing they're trying to say actually needs, and tell them to use only this many words, they become excellent communicators. I assume something about Anthropic's grader for writing just really wants to tick all its tidy tiny boxes of information the models need to cite. It's terrible.
'frontier models' - seriously, it was you and only you!
That's literally all I'm hoping for. Is it an insufferable cunt and does it write awful text, or is it nice to work with?
I thought about taking a shot every time Opus 5 said "load bearing", "bites", "teeth" (real oral fixation it had), "real {concern,issue,problem,...}" and realized I'd be dead of acute alcohol poisoning by lunch if I did so.