Opus 4.8 has been apologizing to me a lot (almost once every hour or so). I found that I’m correcting assumptions regularly, and I’m having to be much more hands-on with my experience in domain knowledge. I’ll send it to research an architecture decision for my distributed systems codebase. It’s been returning with recommendations that don’t consider the nuances of the existing code, the problem constraints, or even the technology it’s recommending. It feels confident too quickly, which is something that I didn’t feel I experienced in Opus 4.6 and saw to a much milder degree in Opus 4.7. I’d love to know if anyone else has experienced this or found ways to improve their prompts here. Example: I described an architecture problem with a complex, expensive fanout. I asked it to consider my original design, research specific optimizations, and provide feedback. It:
- Insisted 2 network hops were 1, but then admitted it was undercounting (and apologized!)
- Suggested the problem could be simplified by caching more keys in Valkey, but then it failed to see that the keys span across Valkey clusters (it had warned about Valkey not running in single instance mode a couple turns back, it forgot & apologized!)
- It suggested new invariants that didn’t align with the original prompt/problem (further complicating the underlying cache invalidation correctness problem, then apologized!) It feels like it wants to decide an answer faster, rather than spend more time and energy deliberating on it. For reference, my prompts are detailed, averaging about 2-5 paragraphs. I’ve been running on high effort with 1M context. It’s running in a 50k line codebase with tuned CLAUDE.md files, skills and agents. It’s allowed to use tools in its sandbox and browse the web freely. Has anyone experienced this? What’s helped? submitted by /u/algorithm477
Originally posted by u/algorithm477 on r/ClaudeCode
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