Claude is Losing Me After Being Heavy User Since Release

[u/madscene]

I've been using Claude - mostly Claude Code, but regular Chat as well - almost since it came out. It's been incredibly useful and seemed to only get better with new releases. I've seen lots of posts in this sub and related subs when new models would come out about them not being as capable or getting nerfed or causing all sorts of problems. I rarely found that to be the case for my work, or at least for any extended period of time. It seemed with proper prompting and context management most of this stuff was totally manageable.

But Opus 5 and Fable 5 feel totally different. Fable was great at release, but post- Opus 5, both models are driving me crazy. It's hard to even fully explain or give examples because it's just a language change - it just feels harder to read and have a conversation with. It uses weird jargon and shorthand. Some examples:

• It refers to many things as "chips." I never used that term once in 30 years of software dev, but now it's Claude's favorite word. And it applies to literal UI elements, like tags/badges or slices of work "the 'multi-select' chip remains open". I asked it to stop using it, but you know how Claude be sometimes.
• Instead of speaking in plain English, it will try to be cool, like instead of saying "Next, we need to repoint the API Call to the new server" it will say "One thing still on your side: the server repoint." It's shorthand to the point of me not even understanding the context and needing to read back through, often STILL not finding context, and just having to prompt it to speak in plain English, with clear steps.

Another thing it does that might be the most maddening of all: it CONSTANTLY ends replies with a laundry list of things it found that it "didn't touch" because it wants my "eyes" on it or something. I'm not against it being helpful and raising issues to my attention, but it literally goes on for round after round, to the point where a simple task becomes a huge project.

Often I'll try to just capture this stuff in docs / roadmaps but it's like it won't let you cleanly out of a chat.

• "A few things I caught, but am leaving untouched for your feedback:"
• "One thing I noticed that you should be aware of..."
• "One thing I didn't touch, but you won't want to leave hanging..."

Sometimes it's really stupid stuff, like CSS color mismatches, or components that do basically the same thing and could be consolidated - something I've tried to put in skills/instructions to avoid (e.g. DRY code).

Most times it's stuff Claude itself did, and now is making it my problem to think through instead of just cleaning it up when it has clear goals and principles around software dev that I've given it.

I've been on the Max 20x plan for months, but I'm working with Codex more lately, and downgraded to 5x, and might downgrade to Pro if this isn't improved. Codex feels very reliable and at least as good as Claude used to be before the 5-level models. I kind of still feel more comfortable in the Claude ecosystem, but I get super aggravated when dealing with these crappy communication patterns over and over.

I know some others have said similar things - not sure if this helps anyone not feel like they're going crazy talking to Claude, and hopefully Anthropic sees enough of these posts and considers undoing whatever they did to lobotomize Claude 5 models.