I use Opus 5 almost exclusively at low effort, and get good results. Especially on high it seems to go out on completely unasked-for tangents. Same seems to be true for Sonnet 5. Older models did not behave like this.
The mood change in just six months is wild, in February this year Claude was the most liked LLM by far.
Yup, both Claude v5 models to me feel like they have extreme ADD or something. Using them feels like walking a dog that was never leash trained and constantly needs to be kept moving in the right direction.
I think it's optimized around beating benchmarks and running fully autonomous in pursuit of a clearly defined goal. It makes sense: fan out aggressively, chase down every lead, but go depth first because that's easier for the LLM and you're either a sub-agent with a narrowly defined task or you're a top-level orchestrator agent with a /goal loop that will catch and fix errors and omissions on the second, third, fourth pass.
The mood change in just six months is wild, in February this year Claude was the most liked LLM by far.