I think you're being overly harsh. I don't match his temperament at all because my first real skillset(WoW :D) was literally looked down on by society rather than admired, so if anything the contrast was confusing to me to have a skillset that has value.
However i can't imagine if during my WoW days, overnight my role was suddenly just replaced with someone doing my role and 4 other roles highly automated, with just a general knowledge instead of an absurd depth into one role, and all my peers thought i was being lazy for not wanting to automate as well.
I take issue with a ton of youtube style articles, and this video is an example of a version of youtube video essays done like a literal essay instead.
It seems very much to me like video essay format on youtube is being used as a crutch. You can pump out your rough draft and hide it behind visuals or whatever else, and you benefit from the longer run time, and the viewer likely hangs around.
You can't do that in an essay, if you lose the reader for a paragraph or two, they're likely gone. To me that is why this reads more intimate, its an essay crafted as a video and an essay which i LOVE, i want the choice, and almost no youtube essay or whatever you want to call them would give that choice because it is so filled with filler content hiding the rough edges.
just dont fall in love with goofy memory style features and its likely gonna be fairly easy to just plug and play whatever model for a ton of use cases.
I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.
Every project I have tends toward coding agents over time partly for this reason - if nothing else, I want have both control, visibility and portability over memory and a log of the reasoning that went into the current state of things.
The US government didn't make the choices to release the worst version of Opus and label it 5.0, and then isolate portions of their subscribers to limited usage of Fable.
They may have been unfairly targeted by the US government, but they are doing more damage to themselves without government help as well.
Fable only being temporarily included in cheaper subscriptions was because anthropic is severely GPU constrained. They still are, and it impacts almost all of those unpopular decisions. They did announce from the beginning it was temporary.
Horrifying excuse, gpu constraint can be used by all of these companies to justify a shit user experience. If the user isn't properly weighed in their priorities, they have their priorities setup wrong.
Their 20$ tier currently isn't serving their best model, and they insulted their users by putting out an ill tested opus 5.0, which is the worst experience ive personally had using a model in probably 2 years(obviously adjusting for expectations at the time of release).
Yes, as a user you pick what works for you. But it is a reality for them that growth has been huge, and GPU manufacturing is bottlenecked.
People were very skeptical about how much investment most companies put into hardware/data centers two years ago, and anthropic was more conservative than OpenAI here, so it's potentially hurting them now.
(Opus is a separate story: it does seem to have improved in coding in my experience, most weirdness seems to be its human communication)
it just doesn't interact good with human beings, and it leaves incredibly strange long winded comments within code filled with session context that will likely not be relevant later on.
Also always seems to have this annoying tendency to leave "questions for you" at the bottom of every output.
Just a high friction human interaction type model, imo should never have even been released, regardless if it scores better on whatever tests, its a horrible experience and a downgrade over past models.
I have to wonder if everyone else is just running these models raw without any custom instructions. I hear all these things about voice and code comments and those are all things I've dealt with long ago via claude.md instructions, rules, and hooks. My claude can already respond in any "voice" I want and the quantity and quality of comments is within my control.
My claude.md has a section about not writing those comments, it has stored this in memory, and still every session I need to remind my good friend to stop writing so many garbage wordsalad comments
Maybe system prompt has priority or something but Opus just really really likes writing bad comments
That's why I mentioned hooks in particular. That feels like the right layer for this sort of adjustment. A PostToolUse hook on Edit|Write would be much more reliable than just a CLAUDE.md instruction. The consistency I get from CC comes from instructions at multiple layers.
CLAUDE.md heirarchy: At the top level you've got general instructions you want all contexts to follow and each subdirectory can add more specific instructions in their own CLAUDE.md files. References in CLAUDE.md are not fully loaded into the context. They are loaded opportunistically. So keep important instructions in the CLAUDE.md file itself and not a referenced or linked file.
Rules files: These offer path scoped rules via frontmatter. So you could have specific rules for certain types of files Claude Code interacts with. Certain rules for handling all .cs or .js files for example.
Auto-memory: You cannot rely on this one. I use auto-memory as a cache for potential future CLAUDE.md instructions. I have an audit process that kicks off when the auto-memory gets beyond a certain number of entries.
Skills: On demand context. I don't tend to use /skills explicitly. I tend to have them used in context. I've got a task tracking system I call threads. So whenever I say "Create a thread for X" it has always reliably followed the specific instructions. I've got skills for managing my NAS for searching historical session for sharing content and other things. I use them a lot of times in place of MCP servers.
Hooks: Deterministic scripts run on lifecycle events. I've got hooks that run linters on code files post edit and hooks which tie into the request / response events to push my history into a SQLite database.
Output Styles: CC ships with a few different styles, but you can create your own. This is key for changing the default voice. CLAUDE.md instructions are appended to the system prompt and can fight against the system prompt. A custom Output Style would let you replace the instructions in the system prompt with your own instructions. This can be done at the user level or per project.
Currently, I'm using custom instructions plus reinjecting the writing cues Opus 5 ignores most frequently via a UserPromptSubmit hook. Again and again, I'm reminding the model what voice I want. Again and again, Opus 5 ignores it.
it really just seems like people pump out that its on the end-user, and i just disagree. They have a walled garden around claude code and using their models within it, it should work instantly out of the box when going from an opus 4.8 to an opus 5.0 with the same workflows. it doesn't.
claude.md for all my projects are fairly tight, its seldom where im upset at anything a model does, and if it happens, its likely because i swapped provider and didn't realize i was failing to feed it proper context beforehand.
Opus 5.0 fails in different ways that I haven't had to deal with. Its insufferable with its choice of language, something I've never had to compensate for on any other model across any provider, so of course I have no preexisting rules for that, it also is sometimes just incredibly stubborn and just WONT finish, and requires several just "keep going" prompts.
This is much different than the issues people would make fun of users for in regards to treating models like slot machines and just pulling the lever over and over, this is more its stopping for no reason short of its task, and literally just needs to be told to continue? absurd.
Most of my workflows have reference material, with standards set, why opus 5.0 is the only model that fails to follow those standards and inserts wildly long weird code comments is not a failure on the end-user, thats the model failing. I can be MORE explicit of course, but i shouldnt need to be, this is supposed to be 5.0, its a downgrade. I went back to 4.8 and all these issues vanished.
Opus 5 is remarkably bad at instruction following over long chats. I have to repeat “Be succint”, “talk like a friend or colleague would”, “no rambling” or some variant of it every few messages
Have you tried a custom output style? CLAUDE.md instructions are appended to the system prompt. A custom output style can replace the system prompt. At least the part of it pertaining to voice and persona. The reason it forgets over long chats is the context size starts getting too large. Instructions weigh more strongly the later they appear in the context. This is necessarily true otherwise you couldn't change your mind in a conversation. The model would stick with what you originally said. For the output styles, there is a per-turn "reminder" that gets added to the context asking it to "remember" the content in the system prompt. That's why it has more staying power than the CLAUDE.md instructions in long conversations.
Kinda surprised not to see their next update being an Opus 5.1, even if its minimal changes, they've already had to address it with the concise mode or whatever.
So my current usage as a Pro subscriber... Not able to even consider using "Sota" unless i shell out for 100$ a month, (lately i've been a bit burned out i am literally struggling to use 50% of my pro plan per week). Beyond that, I have given up entirely on the top Opus model and reverted back to 4.8. If i have work i deem somewhat complicated, i now have an openai 20$ sub, and i just toss out sol after planning with 4.8. Both subscriptions not anywhere close to capping my usage per week, one of them says i can't use their Sota unless i pay for 5x more usage, and the "best" model they do allow me to use, they are neglecting and its by far the worst model I've interacted with in 2026.
I don't wanna pretend to be some expert, but i think the contention is that they were gutted so resources are sparse for inspections, leading to higher recall numbers.
I am also hesitant to really invest feelings into anything i see posted over and over like this though, and assume its intentionally being pumped, so I'd wanna see more actual numbers to prove its actually an uptick compared to normal. I remember having to get rid of some carrots just a few years ago personally, Chipotle seems to have some sort of e coli lettuce issue every couple years, none of these single events shock me.
I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.
However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.
I try to pressure people into just turning off the absolute majority of the social media / algo type recommendation stuff on youtube. I still "use" youtube, but my experience is night and day compared to the typical usage, I have my sidebar with a handful of creators i care about, tiny blue indicator next to their name if they have a new video i haven't seen, just like the normal UI. I think this portion is vital, it removes the "clickbait image" meta on youtube, I have to make the first move and say "I wonder what {user} posted".
So i pretty much see, search bar and that text sidebar on my main screen for youtube. Its absurd seeing the standard youtube ui, after using it like this for a couple years now. This also just really really tightens who i follow. If i find myself clicking through to their profile and seeing what they posted and deciding not to watch, i consider that a waste of my time and after a handful of times i might just unfollow entirely.
However i can't imagine if during my WoW days, overnight my role was suddenly just replaced with someone doing my role and 4 other roles highly automated, with just a general knowledge instead of an absurd depth into one role, and all my peers thought i was being lazy for not wanting to automate as well.
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