For me, Opus 2.6 has been a huge regression. It now hangs for 10+ minutes on a task that it used to take a few minutes to complete, and all I see is some "Reading 3 files" etc. messages showing nothing else. The 2 issues where Opus 2.6 is absolutely not as good as 2.5 at all by miles and also showing just some obscure unnecessary messages makes me say "why?" Why did you decide to screw something up that was awesome and dumb it down and keep insisting that the "verbose" mode is the way to go?? Seriously who wants to see messages that are essentially the same? 2 patterns, 3 files read?? Seriously? Who is that mode for? Why is it even a default??
Actually this is how LLMs (with reasoning) work as well. There is the pre-training which is analogous to the human brain getting trained by as much information as possible. There is a "yet unknown" threshold of what is enough pre-training and then the models can start reasoning and use tools and the feedback from it to do something that resembles to human thinking and reasoning. So if we don't pre-train our brains with enough information, we will have a weak base model. Again this is of course more of an analogy as we yet don't know how our brains really work but more and more it is looking remarkably aligned with this hypothesis.
For these kinds of blogposts where the content is very good but not very approachable due to assumption of extensive prior knowledge, I find using an AI tool very useful, to explain and simplify. Just used the new browser Dia for this, and it worked really well for me. Or you can use your favorite model provider and copy and paste. This way the post stays concise, and yet you can use your AI tools to ask questions and clarify.
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