I use Claude fairly heavily. I have multiple x20 subscriptions that I usually max out. Since the release of Fable 5, Opus 5, etc., I have experienced continually worse task results than before. I work in large projects with thousands of files, which was never a problem. I have used the /doctor command, aggressively cleaned my project and system memories, etc. And I confirmed it isn’t a ‘me’ issue by switching back to Opus 4.8 for some tests.
Consistently worse results. Maybe not always much worse, but still worse.
And today, as I banged my head against Fable’s techno-nonsense to try and finish a task that would’ve taken pre-ban Fable 20 minutes, I realized why.
Many people know that the newer models are more verbose and difficult to read, often times to the point of being illegible even to domain experts. We skim the text and give it a thumbs up, then get agitated when it doesn’t work like we wanted. “Worse results.”
Generally, this is true: comment-slop, not following commands, etc.
But another part of it is that we’re having the AI draft plans we don’t understand, and it is executing them. I looked back at the plan for the task I worked today, fed it into a different LLM for simplification, and asked it to compare to what was implemented. Guess what? The implementation was pretty accurate, per the plan. I just couldn’t sit there and force myself to read a college dissertation on button refactoring, so I missed some key details that were buried in the other verbosity. Those details resulted in my response of “WTF is this?”
I ran another test and had another plan “de-slopped” by another LLM, and I immediately cause several unwanted changes before executing. And I realized that prior to the Gen 5 models, I was doing this naturally. Now I can’t.
No solution, just an observation. I believe it is an issue inherent to the models, and it won’t be fixed until the models are updated.
submitted by
/u/Complex_Classic8170
Originally posted by u/Complex_Classic8170 on r/ClaudeCode
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