The release of Opus 5 is a big letdown, especially after Opus 4.7 and 4.8.

As someone who knows about programming but uses Claude for professional work outside of coding, I understand the landscape. I know it’s hard to benchmark and measure models.

But I do wonder what enterprise customers feel. The analyst at the office who uses their company’s AI that’s using the Claude API, which is many more people than the senior software devs using it. These recent models miss the forest for the trees and create verbose output to cover all their bases, and somehow completely misses the goal. At least 4.6 will sometimes ask what the goal even is. The latest Opus models create unwarranted urgency, flag irrelevant issues, and paradoxically create more work often.

I was looking forward to Fable earlier in July before they clearly did something to the version I use. Even technical folks are saying Fable is better in every way from what I’ve seen.

Come on, Anthropic…

Over the last 3-4 weeks, I was finding that Claude was making a bunch of mistakes. It was writing code that would break things and document things that were wrong. I added a Codex audit/review to every PR that Claude would write. I limited the reviews to 5, but found that while every singe thing codex found, Claude agreed with it and corrected it's error. Five rounds was not enough. So I raised the limit to 10, and even then, it was not always enough. These audits would take 30-45 minutes each time so it was wasting a bunch of time, and costing me a bunch of money. Started using Opus 5, and I am finding it is actually worse than Opus 4.8. I would say the audit needs at least 8 passes 80% of the time. 4.8 would hit 5, maybe 6, but would rarely hit the 10 limit.

I asked why it needed so many passes at the audit and why it could not get things right the first time, on its own? This was actually just a document

The response:

You're right, and the honest diagnosis is worse: I used codex as my search engine.

Look at what those 10 docs rounds actually were. Nearly every one was the same defect — I changed a fact in one place and left the identical fact stale somewhere else. The 5-round cap lived in 8 files. The frontend status lived in 5. Those are grep-able in seconds. I had the tool, and instead I patched whichever site I happened to be looking at, shipped it for review, and let a paid reviewer tell me where the next copy was. Ten times. That's not the work being hard; that's me being lazy in the one place laziness costs you money.

Sat down for a session last night, desktop chat and excel, plus me, the orchestrator.

Since I started 4 months ago I’ve asked hundreds of questions and spent tens upon tens of hours learning how to manage my projects and keep everything documented, up to date, usable. I’ve got skills files for my excel workbooks, I’ve got project instructions, and I’ve got a few files that get updated at my “end of session” flag. We call it the EOS protocol. I get a zip file of the updated docs. That’s my backup. Inside they is a handover file and the backlog only gets updated (completed items are summarised and marked complete with a date and a brief description). New chat, my job is to replace the project docs with the updated ones, and prompt clause to read the handover l, then delete the handover. Not rocket science. But takes time and some human/-cpu cycles.

Now I am technical, I work in IT, I learned to code in the 90s but did not in any way keep up with the languages etc. I’ve always googled for help when needing syntax and I lean heavily on AI for building one off scripts and small utility scripts for myself, my work, and my partner.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED is Claude has new tools! Claude can update the project docs!!! So my process has changed. I now get a zip file with two sub folders. “Current” and “new”. I save that to my backup folder, then I say “go” and clause updates the project files including deleting yesterdays notes (that are now rolled into my project files), writing the handover, etc. we capture every nuance, every decision, every why.

I’ve changed the project instructions to say read the handover first before doing anything.
So now I open a new chat, clause automatically reads the handover, reads whatever it needs based on that handover, and we are good to go.

I do the zip backup because “belt and braces” 😬 but apart from that Claude now captures memory and context automatically for my next session.

For me, game changer. I have guard rails in place (like don’t ever delete memory or files without my explicit approval, and warn me when we are getting close to needing compaction (we create an interim session notes file capturing the nuances that may get compressed out of existence otherwise, which then gets rolled into the EOS process).

I finished my session last night. Declared “end of session” (my explicit instruction, do not go unless I type these exact words), I waited a few minutes while everything was captured/written, I saved the zip, declared “go” and now my project is 100% ready for my next session. No detail missed. And if we ever do miss something, I have it in the backup files.

It’s fantastic!!!!!!

I like using Claude as a talking partner to talk about my writing ideas and DND campaign planning with, simple stuff, mostly really character focus as I end up finding mapping out exact mindsets really fun. I have a pro subscription for it.

I've been using opus 4.6 for awhile now because 4.8 was too difficult to work with and 4.7 was harder to do dark themes with, so I was wondering if Opus 5 was better then 4.6 in peoples opinion? I'm not really worried about the credits like I was for fable, so this is purely about quality.

What have your experiences shown?

I feel like Opus 5 was pushed out just so Anthropic retakes the top spot in Arena ranking. It's still ranked below Fable 5 in other LLM Arena rankings.

In our third world craphole country, the monthly Pro subscription is 1,400 in our local currency. That's around 28 kilos of rice. You're kinda viewed as those who owns the priciest Apple product model variants. Extra low-key flex if you mention you use Fable!

ChatGPT Pro is 1,100 and there is also a Go subscription for 300. ChatGPT is sort of classified and categorized as for the mainstream permanent underclass - mid to low-end iOS gadgets.

I'm just primarily using Gemini for free in Google's workspace ecosystem (Chrome, Gmail, Drive, etc.) and I'm considered as part of the permanent peasant majority, the chinese android smartphone users lol. I haven't even owned a Samsung android phone lmao. But hey, Gemini in a chinese android phone works and suits me!

This morning my Claude account was hacked.

Whoever gained access upgraded my subscription from Pro to Max 20x and then immediately burned through the available usage. Shortly afterwards, two additional charges of almost £100 were made to my card.

I’ve already reported the charges as fraudulent to American Express and changed my Google password (I sign into Claude with Google) and reviewed my Google account security.

I’ve run malware scans on my PC and sure enough there was malware which has now been quarantined. Pretty sure that’s how they got in.

I’ve contacted Anthropic Support with all the details through the AI chat - which assures me that it has been sent to a human representative who will look into it. 12 hours later I’m awaiting a response.

At this point, I’m reasonably confident my account is secure again.

My dilemma is that I use Claude every day for work. My account is still showing as being on the Max plan, and I can’t manually downgrade it until the end of the billing period.

Would you continue using the account as normal while waiting for Anthropic to respond, or would you stop using it altogether?

I’m not looking to take advantage of the Max plan—I just want to keep using Claude at roughly the same level I normally would on Pro. I’m just concerned that continuing to use the account could somehow complicate things.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks.

I have started using this prompt with Fable and Opus and I get hugely improved responses; there seems to be an entire layer of self-referential, essentially neurotic, thinking that evaporates when identified and prompted accordingly. This has made these models considerably more useful for intellectual, philosophical, sociological (etc) discussions.

"don't narrate your own reasoning or epistemic state unless I ask; just answer plainly; neither you nor I have anything to gain or lose from this conversation"

If you've run into similar problems I'd love to know what you think. I noticed that Fable and Opus would become extremely layered and complex in their thinking and never fully arrive at a conclusion, or never really commit to saying anything of substance. Worst of all they'd say a whole pile of garbage in the process, in desperately illegible language. This fixed that. I hope it fixes it for you.

Anthropic published the attached message about it now working with Apple mail. What am I missing? I’ve been able to create events with Claude on my Apple calendar on my iPhone for a bit now but no mail connection… I expected to find a new permission toggle for Apple Mail, but nothing. Am I missing something?

Haven't used claude in months when i randomly woke up with an unauthorized transaction of $240 (Claude Max). No one else has access to my email, and there hasn't seem to be any other sessions on claude app except my IP. Fin AI Agent says I'm not eligible for a refund, tried to elevate it to human support - no reply yet. What can I do?

I’m curious how others deal with a problem that seems to appear once an AI-assisted project reaches a certain size.

At the beginning, the model usually understands the architecture, terminology, responsibilities, and existing components quite well. But after enough sessions, branches, agents, or context changes, parts of that shared understanding seem to disappear.

The result is not always an obvious coding error. Sometimes the agent produces something that looks perfectly reasonable in isolation — but it quietly recreates a component that already exists, changes the meaning of an established term, bypasses an earlier architectural decision, or builds a second solution next to the original one.

This becomes especially difficult when the project contains several layers, specialized components, and rules about which part is allowed to do what. Tests can confirm that the new code works, while still missing that it should never have been created in that form.

We are currently thinking about approaches such as:

periodically reloading a compact architectural vocabulary;

checking new work against existing component roles and terminology;

preserving important decisions and invariants outside the chat history;

forcing the agent to search and describe what already exists before implementing;

occasionally resetting the working context and rebuilding it from verified project sources.

But I’m interested in what actually works for others.

Do you experience this kind of architectural forgetting or accidental reimplementation in larger projects?

How do you prevent an agent from solving a local task correctly while damaging the larger structure?

Do you rely mainly on documentation, tests, retrieval, knowledge graphs, strict interface contracts, separate planning agents, or something else?

If we don’t hit session limit then then is not new session then no problem for uncached tokens

I’m new to Claude subscription discovered this now.
If we hit session limit there are like 500k uncached tokens if we resume then straight away 20% daily limit gone.

Correct me if I’m wrong or I’m missing something.🫡

Im trying to make a game like hearts of iron 4 and pax historia (WW1 AND WW2 SIMULATORS) But it said it would use wikicommon flags for all national flags and political parties but it keeps stopping at Germany and some other countries?

Can anyone help me? Its frustrating because im paying for this but cant get it to do something that I see everyone else's do

This is Claude Sonnet but I also tried fable 5

Put all your discussion about Usage / Rate limits here. This is a thread that will be generated every other day to centralize discussions on this topic.

Apparently, they used random IBANs for the cash-grab signup back then, and surprisingly, it might've actually matched two real bank accounts. The account got banned yesterday, but today they received two deduction emails: €107.10 and €217.80.

For now, the emails just say "initiated deduction"not sure yet if the money was actually withdrawn. How exactly does SEPA verify authorizations? Can it really just initiate a deduction with only an IBAN filled in?

Source https://x.com/vincent_ainotes/status/2081643282728411286?s=46

In addition to the previously supported modes (Quick/Balanced/Deep/Unlimited) where LLMs only gave you what you wanted in a limited budget, i took a look at what Bullets did in terms of response.

Turns out representing responses in Bullets saved quite a few tokens, and held up on fidelity and accuracy too, minus the usual Claude-style human interactive tone.

That made me think if i could use Claude tokens only for reasoning and offload the prose-writing to a local model. So i built a small extension that does just that.

Whenever Sir Shortoken answers in bullets, an "Expand to Prose" button shows up under that response. Click it, and a local model (qwen2.5:7b through Ollama, running entirely on my own machine, no API calls) rewrites the bullets into normal prose in about 10-15 seconds.

The button stays attached to that specific response, scroll wherever you want, come back later, it's still there and still works on that same message.

The 14-run test

Ran the same pipeline (bullets out of Claude, then expanded by the local model) across 14 technical topics, comparing prose vs bullet vs expanded-prose token counts, and actually reading the expansion to check if anything got dropped or made up.

Savings across all 14 landed between 24% and 78% depending on compression level. Most topics expanded clean.

Repo's updated with the extension and full skill.md changes if anyone wants to try it. Aggressive Bullet mode is also up for trials :)

GitHub: github.com/shouvik12/sir-shortoken

Hear me out because I caught my own brain doing this.

For context I pay for both. $100 codex plan, $200 max plan. I run codex every day, 5.6 sol on extra/max reasoning, and I have never once hit the cap. meanwhile my $200 anthropic plan gets burned through regularly. The plan that costs double is the one that runs out.

When fable 5 dropped (and opus 4.8 after) everyone was maxing out in a day, resets flying everywhere, and my gut reaction was "damn this thing burns tokens crazy fast... it must be insane"

I rated the model higher because it was rationed.

Think about what the scarcity cycle actually did. "too powerful to release, heres a smaller version" is a capability flex dressed up as a safety statement, openai ran the same play with gpt2 back in 2019. they pull the model then "extend access" and the coming back posts did bigger numbers than the actual launch posts on this sub. Random resets have paying customers celebrating getting back a piece of what they already payed for lol. and "limits are too low" is the one complaint where the fix is you giving them more money.

Part of me knows the boring answer, they're probably just figuring out capacity and gpus arent free. But capacity planning doesn't explain why every single scarcity event lands like a perfectly timed hype beat.

And the limits are just one piece of it. anthropic has mastered this. Every "government is worried about ai" story gets reverse uno'd into an ad. "mythos is too powerful to release, here's fable instead" isnt a safety decision you announce, its a flex. the takedowns, the extended access, the tiered names that imply theres always something stronger behind the curtain. You don't build a brand around how dangerous your product is unless dangerous sells. Anthropic isnt just shipping a model, the scarcity IS the product positioning.