Reddit’s full of those “I think the new Opus is a downgrade posts” and they tend to be without any examples, but I want to focus on a particular behavior of Opus 4.8 that I’m seeing a lot of, and it simply will not recommend anything that is more work. By more work, it feels like Anthropic has embedded training to prioritize any recommendation that will use the least tokens, and not surface any alternatives that are noticeably more tokens compared to other alternatives it’s “thinking” about. For example, if you ask it “give me 3 proposals to simplify this file” it will give you 3 proposals of generally the same token costs. Kind of like this example: Prompt: “give me 3 proposals to refactor this class” update the class with better method names update the class to improve error handling replace the class with a factory class and use dependency injection update the class to log errors This behavior seems to surface the most during planning where it needs to change something outside the main goal. For example, “create a plan to add a calendar to feature XYZ” and if it discovers that the calendar needs to use the Date function, but that Date function is problematic to access, then it will prompt you with “How should I access the Date function?” and give you those 3 lowest token approaches. Hiding a 4th approach where it refactors something to fix this accessibility problem. Think of a plan like a tree where the trunk is the main goal, and the branches are other things that need to be done. I feel like Opus 4.8 has a branch depth limit of 1, but Opus 4.6 (as an example) had a depth limit of 3. submitted by /u/Brilliant-Motor821
Originally posted by u/Brilliant-Motor821 on r/ClaudeCode