"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

rzk

Damn, I've been telling the same thing to Claude, good to know I'm not alone. I've also noticed that Opus 5 is much worse in this regard than Fable. It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.

feverzsj

They scan too many classical literature.

chantepierre

I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y". A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.

rzk

An interesting solution suggested in the replies ( https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2081534245370314816 ): The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English. More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

Havoc

Looks like pure hallucinations just in a more poetic sophisticated register?

veganmosfet

Tangentially, Opus-5 is the first model to understand my (bad) jokes: " Site refuses non-curl user agents (joke 266 status). " [0] [0] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-07-27-opus5/

usui

I've had to make the same request multiple times recently. Has anyone noticed it getting worse with the more recent models? It reminds me of when someone is trying to convince you of their intelligence by replacing simple and straightforward explanations with words pulled out of a thesaurus, so maybe that's the objective of these more recent iterations. Throwback to grade school.

j-pb

Ah that's just because the new training set also includes "The King in Yellow".

carloseduardopx

thanks this isn’t just an individual experience… I was starting to think i’d become too dumb for opus

ThePowerOfFuet

https://xcancel.com/mykola/status/2081450468178579594

mmarian

Good to know it's not just me! I also found it's way too verbose. So much so that I added an entry in my Claude.md telling it to be concise.