Ask HN: Opus 5.5 suddenly dumb as rocks?
Is it just me, or has Opus suddenly turned dumb as rocks with 0 attention span over the last half day or so? Noticeably worse output across multiple agents on very different projects.
I have same experience with Fable, it's absolutely ridiculous. It's not one, it's like 10 transgressions an hour, doing really stupid stuff, hallucinating, ignoring commands, gold-fish memory.
They're nerfing them real hard.
There was an article on HN a month or so about benchmarking Opus 5.5 every day and recording / publishing the results. I recall this being a github repo, but my searches turned this up instead: https://www.bridgebench.ai/nerf-bench/claude-opus-5-5
So it seems like ... it is not getting dumber. I find myself using Fable a lot more, though. Opus 5.5 was never as fun as Fable, but it's pretty good.
For me, Opus 5.5 has been consistently much better than Fable 5.1- in all aspects, but especially reasoning and "attention span"
I can't even use Fable anymore, because it constantly corners itself into: "The model declined to generate this response (safety classifier refusal, category: cyber)" and I feel like flipping the table, "da fuk you're talking 'bout bitch? I'm just asking you to fuking explain this piece of code that has nothing, nothing to do with networking, encryption or auth..."
Opus 5.5 is definitely good. I use both all day and it's really hard to say which is which from looking at the outputs; I can't read a PR and say "this was Fable" or "this was Opus" like I could pre-5.5.
Fable is better at playing along with my "You are a dog" instruction in CLAUDE.md. It is willing to be fun and playful, whereas Opus just wants to finish the job and go home. Friend vs. coworker, basically. For example, whenever I reward Fable with a dog treat (actually a <cookie emoji>, which I tell it is a chocolate-free chocolate chip cookie) it keeps a log in memories. Opus just says "crunch! tail wagging!" and moves on.
None of this matters but I think it's fun to have some fun :)
Aha, I haven't looked into such aspects much - I'm "output" driven. But its good to know about that, if I feel like trying it- thanks.
You’re thinking of: https://github.com/ninjahawk/livenerf
I’ll ask the same question as when it came out: if you don’t trust the provider how are you trust them not to look for and cheat on repeat benchmarks like this.
Was that not from the guy having analysed the anthropic models to incredible deephts and exposted them nerving it some while ago?
This is the one I wanted to link, thank you!
I found your post because I searched "Did Opus 5.5 get worse today?". I experienced the same thing with it not following instructions well and just missing things.
I think something has changed, maybe about two weeks ago, because there’s this fixation from the model where if you ever need to make a correction, it simply becomes disinterested with your instructions.
Yes, it's about the same time when I noticed degradation in the quality, too.
New model incoming
Agreed. Yet, it munches tokens like there's not tomorrow. I don't get anything done with Claude in the past 2-3 weeks - just eating up its weekly quota within a day.
Not sure about how dumb Opus 5.5 has become, but I was surprised at how quickly I was burning through my limits this past week too.
It is dumb. None of my threads were closed with shipped features. It keeps going into endless review cycles essentially burning all my quota within a couple of days. And I'm not talking about complex a features an OpenAPI-based integration and some enhancement of pytest traces building maps of touched files. Both these are in their second week of token burn!
Honestly depending on what you're doing, consider Gemini + Claud combo. Use Opus/Fable for design/architecture/complex work and have Gemini Flash 3.8 do the code gen and the rest of the simple stuff.
I started noticing at the end of last week. My colleagues started noticing on different days this week.
Fable 5.5 incoming?
some of my coworkers said it got stupid verbose yesterday or the day before, all of a sudden. i haven't noticed any difference personally.
you, and they, might be getting a/b tested
Is it just me, or has Opus suddenly turned dumb as rocks
What I've seen is that if I let Opus 5.5 run for too many turns (not sure how to quantify that) it starts exhibiting signs of human dementia. It will forget it told me to run something and will then accuse me of misconfiguring something that it literally gave me a script to run that configures something. It also forgets the instructions in my project and has to go back and read them and apologizes for forgetting the instructions. Between this increasing context rot and the excessive shock collars applied to defensive security coding it's rare that I can even use Opus 5.5. For the past few weeks I have had to use Opus 4.8 and even that now has a sub-set of the shock collars applied [cyber] which forces me to start a new session. This has led me to researching the Abliterated 70B/120B (uncensored) models and required hardware.
So dumb as rocks? I am not seeing that, but the context rot is getting worse for me personally. I don't know if it makes a difference, I am on the pro 20x plan. Maybe people on enterprise plans do not see this which I assume is most of the people here using Claude.
nerfed, fable 5.5 coming soon
I also noticed that it started suddenly since end of last week maybe to make sentence that are non sense or very hard to read.
My best guess was also that in one or two days they will drop a new model that will be so much more better than the nerfed 5.5.
Fable 5.5 incoming?
First time?
I am feeling the same got dumbest answers so I just changed the model
No.