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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Until Opus 5.0 I'd have agreed with you, but Opus 5.5 is honestly one of the best I've ever sparred with, vastly better than the rest, including Astra imho. Especially so when prompting for clear top-down, first-principles communication.

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Disagree, I review a lot of Opus 5.5 code and its comments and docs are still pretty inane and Claudish. Is it better than the 4.x and 5.0 era, sure. But it's still nouning the verbs, using colons everywhere, a-not-b, "a foos the b" etc. A lot of lingual knots that need a human hand to untie.

Opus 5.5 is much better, but IME I always have to force it to review its writing (Opus 5.5) to get it to put the most important facts first (and not bury the lede). It loves to park the main point far away after intermediate clauses. It always writes “premise, so consequence.” It takes a prompt asking to review against rules in context for it to fix it.

The ‘concise’ output style setting is bad with Opus 5.5, as it will often spit out a cryptic (is this really English?!), allergic-to-commas concise response, which takes more time to parse.

Oh it loves to bury a lede.

    < mundane detail>
    < If you don't run this command your computer will explode>
    < exposition > 
    < mundane reminder to follow up something else >

Then 3 back and forths later, your computer explodes, and claude has the cheek to point out when questioned that it did warn you.

I was using opus5.5 for everything but since I tried google Argon4 that has been my favorite for writing. It’s clear and to the point.

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