Using Opus 5 Without Going Insane

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Opus 5 as my daily driver for a few weeks now across a bunch of projects and it’s a really capable model, but it has two habits that drove me a little nuts before I figured out how to deal with them:

It is verbose in a way that actually hides the answer. You ask a yes or no question and get four paragraphs of context, a code snippet, a caveat, and then the answer somewhere in the middle.
When it doesn’t understand something it does not go look it up, it guesses, and then it builds a lot of confident sounding structure on top of the guess.

This isn’t a post about whether Opus 5 is good or not (it is), it’s strictly what I do day to day to keep it useful. None of this is clever, most of it is just repeating yourself.

Claude on Random Ramblings

Using Opus 5 Without Going Insane