I have been running into the same issue as many others with Opus 5 where it is overly verbose, technical, and abstract in its output - making it difficult to understand. Example: What it says: Fixed. The retry path now short-circuits on the tombstone marker, which keeps the dead-letter lane honest. What it should say: Fixed. Deleted records are now skipped during retry, so failed jobs no longer reprocess them. Verified with test_retry_skips_deleted. I have had some success in improving this behavior by creating my own “Plain English” output style . I searched and didn’t find anyone else sharing a good output style to specifically address this issue. So I wanted to share mine to see if it helps others and get some feedback to learn how it might be further refined. You can find the Plain English output style here: https://gist.github.com/sam1am/190ea377921d1ca4b6da50b8c131c992 Place this file at ~/.claude/output-styles/plain-english.md Then select it in Claude Code with /config -> Output Style -> Plain English As with anything, you should read the instructions before applying them so you understand what it is doing. It is best to try this in a fresh session. Switching output styles mid-session is not going to work as well because the model has already established a pattern of spewing nonsense. Curious to know if this improves things for you and if you have any suggestions to further refine the instructions. submitted by /u/gthing
Originally posted by u/gthing on r/ClaudeCode