km144

The time between public announcement -> public release seems to be a tacit admission that Google is still a bit behind the frontier labs. Google is justifying the delay by pointing to cyber risk and a closed-access period reserved for analysis of safeguards. I'm dubious of this justification. But if it is true, I'm pretty sure the other labs are doing similar sorts of things in private. I think most of us prefer it that way—if Anthropic public announced Fable 5.5 two weeks ago with no availability that would add to my annoyance. Maybe they learned their lesson with Mythos, or maybe it's just that Google also does not have an IPO looming. Who knows?

Most people I run into seem far less sensitive to the bad writing of Claude than I am (and I assume you share this). For most people, they were satisfied enough with the improvements in Opus 5.5 to finally accept the prose. I still find it wildly unacceptable for models that are so good at writing software. After all, language is a pretty important part of writing software. This writing is very bad. I tolerate reading it for work but I cannot tolerate reading an article written by these models.

I think this release is really going to give them a hard time selling Fable:

> On our benchmarks, Claude Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. That said, at these levels of capability we’ve found that benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.

In general, "benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences" sounds like a big problem. It was certainly the biggest problem with the previous generation of Claude models for a different reason, because the non-code output was nonsensical, and that is not being benchmarked at the moment. But I'm not sure what to make of this admission.

Can you fix the link on that post then? I duped because that post links to a diff that tells me nothing about Opus 5.5

When I read that, the only thing I could think was "holy shit get off your fucking phone". But I agree with you as well.

The biggest jump was Opus 4.6. Since then they have gradually gotten better at finding issues in your reasoning, not hallucinating, and being rigorous with the code, but much much worse at explaining things and generally just talking in a way that a human can understand. All the models I've tried seem to be suffering from the same fate so it must be something going on with the training meta right now.

Yep. Simple answer is they want to IPO in the fall, and a new Haiku does literally nothing for them

That would actually be a reasonable thing to do with a model that is good at writing though. I'm sure if you used that method on Opus 4.6 you'd get a pretty decent result, because Claude models used to be quite good at that sort of technical synthesis. Asking a model that is bad at technical writing (e.g. Opus/Fable 5) to write your docs is a bad idea.

I believe AI technical prose peaked with Opus 4.6. I still use it (mostly for that purpose) and I think it's legitimately great. I'm hoping they are able to reverse the trends that benchmaxxing and RLAIF have wrought on Claude's non-code output with the future models.

I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")

> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.

A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.

The entire ecosystem of CC is designed to facilitate burning tokens. You have to ask the LLM to write a script for the app to tell you which folder you're working in and which branch you're on. There are commands that just diagnose your Claude Code setup and try to "optimize" it. Adding skills or plugins bloats the context window. Developing plans means that you work through questions before you get to it in the code, but that matters way more for human programmers than LLMs, so it's probably just a waste of tokens.

What output style have you found to actually fix Opus 5's grating prose then? I find it leans hard into its preferred grammatical structures and rote sayings no matter what I include in the output style.

> because it's really hard to learn anything by skimming code that's being pooped out by Claude.

I think this is pretty dubious. It's true that you have to do more proactive learning with an agentic workflow, but it doesn't mean you can't learn stuff. Software engineers forged in the age of AI are not learning the same things their predecessors did or thinking about code in the same way, but the more curious people will still be better at the job, which is I think how it's always been. It seems a little unclear how much "AI brain rot" will be a force unto itself that neuters even the smartest of the juniors, but I think it's still an open question.

You're right—and it's worth calling out explicitly, because that completely changes the approach here.