Anthropic's Opus 5.0 draws backlash over verbose, jargon-heavy writing style
A GitHub issue summarizing hundreds of Reddit and Hacker News complaints says Opus 4.8/5.0 responses are bloated with invented corporate jargon and hard to parse; Anthropic's Claude Code lead says he couldn't reproduce it.
What to know
- A GitHub issue consolidating a 450+-upvote Reddit thread says Opus 4.8/5.0 default output is verbose, jargon-heavy, and repeats invented terms like 'load-bearing' and 'hand-waving'.
- Developers report the style bleeds into code comments (changelog-style, contextless explanations) and causes scope creep where the model does partial work then goes off on tangents.
- Claude Code product lead Boris Cherny replied to the issue using a Claude-generated response saying he could not reproduce it and handed it to the model team, which several commenters called tone-deaf.
- Users are compiling banned-word lists and invoking plain-language style standards (e.g., ASD-STE100) as workarounds while Anthropic has not issued a broader response.
The dispute Whether the issue is a narrow, hard-to-reproduce bug (as Anthropic's reply suggested) or a pervasive, systemic style regression affecting most heavy users, as the volume of complaints suggests. · positions read across 26 posts and comments
Opus 4.8/5.0's default style has genuinely degraded: bloated, jargon-filled, and hard to parse in both chat and code.
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“Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall... their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments.”
jampa · Hacker News
Anthropic's own reply to the complaint, generated by Claude, was tone-deaf and undermined the response.
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“Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don't use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.”
cobolcomesback · Hacker News
The unreadable style is a byproduct of Anthropic optimizing Claude for autonomous agent swarms rather than human readers.
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“Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans.”
somesortofthing · Hacker News
“I'm a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic 'Claude-isms', claims they didn't see any of the patterns being complained about.”
cobolcomesback, HN commenter · Hacker News · Aug 18
Boris Cherny Head of Claude Code project, AnthropicAnthropic Developer of Claude Opus 4.8/5.0r/ClaudeAI and GitHub issue commenters Claude users/developers
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
- summary covers to here · Aug 19, 4:35 PM · 1 piece above arrived after
What people are saying 23 voices from 2 sites · best of 26 · verbatim
- Why couldn't Anthropic's product lead reproduce a pattern hundreds of users report daily?
- Will Anthropic issue a model-level fix, or will users keep relying on banned-word lists and style-guide prompts as workarounds?
- Aug 26
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I've seen this pointed out in an internal discussion and it's absolutely fascinating: it seems that the output of Anthropic's LLMs is becoming increasingly verbose and convoluted the larger the model gets. This has gotten to the point that it's becoming grating to users. We've seen a huge amount of ways in which LLMs can fail, but "the computer…
- Aug 20
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That response is freaking ridiculous and does nothing but proving the very point of the issue.Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more…
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Directionally bad https:// github.com/anthropics/claude-c ode/issues/77136
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AI hypnosis:Your eyes glaze over and you feel the light of consciousness fading, not peacefully, but an angry falling.You plummet deeper into into the void. Your vision blurs. Words appear in front of you but they hold no meaning. Something is bubbling up within... A scream with no sound, trapped, tortured.You are attempting to read a dense…
- Aug 19
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Yeah it's really, really bad. It's borderline unreadable. Claude seems to choose the most clever word choice it possibly can instead of the simplest. It's like the perfect inversion of how writing should be. Why say "load-bearing" when you mean "important"? Also, 50% of the stuff can't be load-bearing.Another problem I didn't see mentioned in the…
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Claude Code already has a feature flagged improvement for this. I stumbled upon this today. Better initial vibes.`$: CLAUDE_CODE_BASALT_COVE=1 claude`
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A big part of it is just the thinking tokens leaking into the main output. Imagine how weird it would be if our "thinking" was evident to the people we are having a conversation with.Just with those two sentences above, there were about 10 different considerations that if typed out would have resulted in a jumbled mess.
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I've been using Opus 5 for coding a lot lately, and compared to Codex (which I never had trouble understanding), this issue is driving me up the wall.So much so that every time Opus 5 finishes a plan and shows me the summary, I have to prompt it again to explain everything it did in an “ELI5” way so I can understand what the heck it is saying.For…
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I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help…
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Opus 4.7+ and 5 being annoying and incoherent reads like a portent of things to come: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere…
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Not any engineer, but Boris Cherny, the head of the Claude Code project! With a nice "[robot emoji] Generated with Claude Code" signature. Normally it would be nice to get a response from the head of the project, but somehow Anthropic manages to make it insulting.I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is…
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If I am not mistaken he is also active on HN.And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
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not just "an anthropic engineer", he's the product lead for claude code lol.i wonder what percent of the average anthropic employee's day is spent interacting with claude
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I suppose what I’m surprised by most is the degree to which the text bloviates. Rarely is it encoding a dense concept. Instead it’s a simple concept expressed with great complexity. I wonder what tuning resulted in this because the output programs it writes are superior to prior iterations for my use-case.It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as…
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I've had a lot of success combating this by adding "All summaries need to adhere to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standards" [0] which I discovered from another HN thread [1][0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1]
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Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by…
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I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths: "... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... " The em-dash. The 'load-bearing'. Other than that, Opus 5.0 is…
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I'm reminded of this tweet by roon:> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not…
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I have created a be-terse plugin that appends> respond tersely in Simplified Technical Englishto every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:
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Kind of unrelated but a while ago I was trying to cancel a Zoom contract and the contract manager’s emails had urls to their articles etc. with utm source ChatGPT in them.
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Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t…
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This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it).blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in…
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Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples."Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the…