I’ve been transitioning to Opus 5 and it’s been a long journey with some pretty rough patches. I’ve heard very mixed reviews about it (some love, some hate), so I thought I’d share a quick note about what seems to be working for me after a period of struggle. First, the context: I’ve been using CC with a custom toolset I developed prior to the launch of v1. I actually ran a manual process with Aider, which I then ported and refined over the years. I mention this because I have a very established workflow that works well and has done thousands of hours of autonomous coding in a production environment. Opus 4.8 was a champ. When Opus 5 came out, I briefly switched and found it would wander off into the weeds, getting stuck for a long time on things that 4.8 nailed. Following the advice of the “prompting Opus 5” post ( https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5 ) I modified my CLAUDE.md files to accommodate it, but it still struggled. However, there is one key prompt I use regularly as part of my process: Please review all the relevant .md files and compare them to what you know now. If you can improve them please do so. Use modular documentation, with concise CLAUDE.md files at the appropriate places in the dirtree that point to full docs in .md files which you can read as needed. So while I had updated the root CLAUDE.md , the hierarchical files, both CLAUDE and the referenced .md files, had all been designed by prior Anthropic models. As I’ve been working with Opus 5, I’ve continued this practice, and I can see it regularly refining the existing md files. As time passes, this seems to be steadily improving the performance. This is based on feelings, not hard metrics, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, I thought I’d share this observation in case it helps anyone else who’s experiencing the same thing. submitted by /u/mrothro
Originally posted by u/mrothro on r/ClaudeCode