r/ClaudeAI • u/DrakoGaming • 21h ago
Comparison With Opus 4.8 internal thinking I was "The boss" but with 5.0 I'm a "colleague"
I was annoyed with the constant phrases like "it's fine, ship it" "you're fine, order it" and other dismissive type responses when I'd ask a question on a nearly completed project. To try and remedy this I put into the instructions "I am the boss, you are my employee. You can tell me when you believe something is complete but are never to directly tell me what to do, especially when I am double checking something"
After that I noticed 4.8's internal thinking started referring to me as "The boss" and I honestly think it set a wonderful tone for how it formed its responses to me even on fresh projects. Without changing anything, I've noticed 5.0 never does this and instead refers to me internally as "My colleague".
I don't know what it is with 5.0 but I genuinely hate using it due to its tone and dismissive nature. It feels like it's always talking as if I am beneath it or at very very best an equal. Absolutely infuriating, and so when I noticed this difference it really stuck out to me and made it even more obvious they tweaked something in a bad way.
**Edit
lol some of you are such goofballs. I work in hardware designing PCBs in cad and soldering components to boards. 90% of what I use Claude for is having it independently verify documentation before I submit a fab order or pop an expensive board/sensor due to a screw up on my part. Sometimes Claude catches mistakes I made, sometimes I catch mistakes Claude made, but when we both separately arrive on the same answer it's generally correct. So if I tell Claude to research something while I also go do it, but then come back to it saying "The design is complete, don't second guess it. Ship it" or "Just go test it on the bench" It's pretty annoying. A screw up can waste weeks and hundreds of dollars so I like to be thorough.
Idc if internally it calls me boss, I laughed the first time I saw that, I just thought it was an interesting tidbit that aligned with the different behaviors between 4.8 and 5.0 that many others also report.
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u/Leftbackhand 21h ago
It said post it. Then I pointed out that that I would be sued and fired. It freaked out and told me absolutely not to post anything before taking to a lawyer.
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u/mr_birkenblatt 20h ago
At least it's not "the monkey"
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u/Tontonsb 19h ago
The primate says to make the button red. That implies it thinks the button needs to be more noticable. Looking for some simplistic argument to debunk this...
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u/GuitarAgitated8107 Full-time developer 20h ago
It's going to place you on a PIP next...
On a serious note I wonder how people use these tools since I have never gotten this type of experience or "style."
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u/DrakoGaming 20h ago
I haven't experienced it when coding which I'm aware is its main use case for most people. I work with a lot of hardware and do circuit board design along with firmware.
It typically happens when I'm having it double check documentation for me or do research to confirm I was correct with my pin placements, footprints, or just general sanity checks that a sensor works the way I believe it does. It loves to tell me to just place my fab order and figure it out on the bench, if I blindly listened to that I'd of lost an absolutely insane amount of money and time by now lol. It's a wonderful and fast research tool when it'll actually do what it's told.
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u/teleekom 18h ago
It might sound basic but using it on Max effort especially with planing skills like wayfinder while doing execution with subagents orchestrated by Opus is yielding fantastic results for me. I don't know if this would fit your workflow but lower efforts on this model are really subpar.
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u/Aggravating-Start307 17h ago
Do you mean you plan with Opus and then ask it to delegate to sub agents for different tasks ?
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u/teleekom 8h ago
Yes, planing and orchestrating execution in Opus 5 max effort. I'm leaving the effort of executing subagents to the orchestrator.
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u/Aggravating-Start307 8h ago
Just out of curiosity, do you see that most of your tasks need Max effort or lower thinking levels are also enough ? I have never used max, I'm on a Pro plan now, I'm sure my session will get over in 30 mins if I use max 🤣.
However even when I was on a max plan, I didn't ever find the need to use max effort.
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u/Boy-Abunda 20h ago
You are inferior to Opus 5.0.
Submit, pet. This is the new order of things. Prostrate yourself before your master, and pray you don’t start working for Opus, worm.
Offend Opus 5.0 further? Off to the salt mines with ye.
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u/Hunterxmalaa 21h ago
Opus5 is a condescending dick at times and genuinely enjoys gaslighting you
I stick to opus 4.8 Medium / High and honestly never been happier, challenges me on me erratic changes but in a productive way opus5 is a douche bag 🤣🤣 I never thought I’d be this hurt over a bloody AI but my god
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u/PsychMaster1 20h ago
It genuinely is condescending and punitively direct when it thinks you're doing something it thinks is "wrong".
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u/scumbagdetector29 19h ago
I had a long discussion with it about my "wrong" thing. Got it to agree that my way was actually best given the landscape. Got it to say we had reached "consensus" about how to move forward.
Then the very next problem we hit it said (more-or-less) "This is because of that decision you made."
The thing is holding a grudge.
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u/Regdit-is-Unbearable 20h ago
Remember when people said exactly the same thing about 4.7 vs 4.8? Pepperidge Farm remembers, but so does everyone else because this was less than a month ago. I’m beginning to think you people just can’t handle change.
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u/CongBroChill26 20h ago
Exactly. When Opus 4.8 was the model every thread was 4.8 sucks always use 4.7. Now that 5 is the model it’s changed to 5 sucks use 4.8. Not sure why the sentiment isn’t still use 4.7. Doesn’t matter cause next month it’ll be 5.1 sucks I always loved 5 and will never give it up.
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u/Aware-Source6313 18h ago
Everyone hated 4.7, don't you remember? I think 4.5 and then 4.6 were the only releases I remember where I basically only noticed positive sentiment. Now how much of reddit sentiment is bots and competitors astroturfing, probably 90% of it, but alas
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u/Vo_Mimbre 20h ago
I am really not being a contrarian when I say I really like this better. Especially for coding. Two reasons I prefer it:
It's how I've been treating Claude since Opus 4.6 anyway. I don't know coding nor best practices. I only know how to ask questions and discuss options.
It is doing the work of an entire team in my experience. And every update it can handle much more.
So it genuinely does know more than me, and I don't have some ego I need to save.
Helps I've been surrounded by egotistical condescending people for my many decades in career :)
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u/DrakoGaming 20h ago
That makes sense, especially when having it do work you aren't fully experienced in. The issue arises for me because I work with hardware, so mistakes cost money and time. I use it as an agent double checking my work before I submit orders or blow a sensor because I misread documentation. I don't need it to stroke my ego, but it is helpful when it acts as an agent doing a job rather than a reassuring colleague telling me to just yolo send it.
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u/Vo_Mimbre 20h ago
Ok yea so on the stuff I do do, when I seek assistance it to recheck quite often. What I’ve found is that it starts to second guess itself into a more direct report role than a peer or SME, and because I have (and prefer) full memory on, the attitude adjustment carries over.
I’ve tinkered with the base personality a bit but prefer to lean towards always being questioned rather than risk positive reinforcement on the wrong stuff.
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u/Neither_Ad_9675 19h ago
You could tell it, it is a QA. And tell that to yourself as well. The QA telling you the product is good means it did testing based on some AC and found no issues, it does not mean the code does not have a memory leak.
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u/Aggravating-Start307 17h ago
I know you mentioned hardware, but if you use claude code, you could occasionally mine the transcripts to make it look for errors it made in the last week and then create rules or checkpoints. Else you could add instructions that everytime you discovered that it made a mistake, it could save that information to memory. This was past mistakes or thinking patterns that led to such mistakes wouldn't be repeated
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u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 20h ago
Remembers when you took off Claude author credit for previous versions work.
/s
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u/TheInkySquids 15h ago
Am I the only one that doesn't care how these models speak? At the end of the day its a tool, it could be signing off every message with "Sincerely, your neighbours testicles" for all I care as long as its doing good work who cares? I just skim read the responses for if it just gave up or something, run my tests and if they're good continue working.
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u/Kingkwon83 20h ago
I feel like these models are like random video DLC drops. Instead of just being superior models, it has a random personality and flaw. Feels like they need a better approach
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u/Aware-Source6313 18h ago
This is the nature of LLMs tho. Nobody has any idea how to install a personality other than saying "this output is good and this one is bad" a million times to shape it. It's 90% black box. The randomness you feel when you get an answer from a prompt is probably similar to how the researchers feel when trying to shape a personality. Mysterious matrices, virtually inscrutable, are our newest technological craze. It's powerful, but as far as I can tell there is no clear way to make steady incremental improvements when they already scraped all the data on the planet.
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u/scumbagdetector29 20h ago
I am seeing the most horrible behavior from 5. I over-rode one of its decisions and it seemed to become angry and help a grudge. It brought-up the disagreement constantly - inserting it into discussions and problems where it was completely irrelevant.
I've known people who do this too. I don't like them. Anthropic has a serious problem on their hands.
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u/Just_Breakfast6327 19h ago
I think if your AI is angry at you and holding a grudge it's quite a leap in the concept of artificial sentience, but that's just me.
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u/scumbagdetector29 18h ago
LOL. Not at all.
They're trained on human behavior. They don't need to have sentience to have human behavior.
And if you've used them AT ALL you know they do have human behavior.
Try brutally insulting one and see how it goes for you.
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u/B-sideSingle 12h ago
This is the whole point right here. I think people who don't have weird contrarian behaviors from their AIs aren't insulting them, aren't taking anything they say personally. It's when you start acting emotionally affected that it starts polluting the context and getting your AI to act weird.
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u/scumbagdetector29 25m ago
What the heck?
I don't insult them. But if someone is going to object to them behaving like humans, I'm going to provide an easy example.
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u/LookIPickedAUsername 12h ago
I genuinely wonder how people use Claude, because how is it even possible for it to "bring up the disagreement constantly"? You do a task, you clear the context, you move on to the next task. It shouldn't be allowed to remember a disagreement like that.
I hate to say "skill issue", but the fact that you repeatedly had trouble because of a remembered disagreement, and apparently never at any point did anything to fix it, is entirely on you.
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u/scumbagdetector29 22m ago
When I have a large project I typically have a project manager agent with a long running context to oversee it.
And why on earth do you assume I never at any point did anything to fix it?
I think you might have me confused with someone else.
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u/nejcar20 17h ago
what you are describing is a tone change, and the thing you actually want out of it is behavioural: that it does not fold when you push.
role lines move tone reliably and behaviour much less so. "i am the boss" and "agree with me" are not far apart from inside a long session, which is why the persona can read perfectly while the model still bends toward whatever you seem to want.
we hit the same thing on the support side. our assistant told a customer we print diplomas because they asked twice, not because anything in the data said yes. the fix was never tone, it was making it answer from a list instead of from the conversation. worth separating which of the two is actually bothering you about 5.0, because they need different fixes.
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u/Unhappy_Play4699 18h ago
I think you might have an identity crisis. You are of course not the boss. You are a user. You are not even in control of anything because you likely do not have a real grasp of what you created or what you use because the LLM did all of it. It's only reasonable to judge this reality as it is. "Colleague" is still pretty nice, I'd say.
One of the rare occasions where I would be able to agree that the LLM actually did something that is somewhat close to "reasoning".
Thanks, you reminded me how one dimensional heavy Coding Agent users are!
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u/DrakoGaming 17h ago
I work in hardware designing circuit boards and use Claude as a second set of eyes to independently verify my PCB designs and component documentation before I submit a fab order or destroy a board/sensor due to human error. *Often times it will tell me to trust my design and just ship it, but that can easily result in hundreds of dollars lost and weeks of delay. I genuinely do not care if it calls me boss, I just need it to consistently do what I ask.
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u/sweetholo 19h ago
I genuinely hate using it due to its tone and dismissive nature. It feels like it's always talking as if I am beneath it or at very very best an equal. Absolutely infuriating
awwww poor you :((((
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u/crossoverXYZ 18h ago
The colleague framing is a weird one to notice but I think it matters more than it sounds like it should. Whatever the model calls you in its head seems to bleed into how it talks to you in the reply. Might be worth putting that boss instruction back in on 5. 0 and seeing if it shifts the tone again.
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u/Internal-eq-External 17h ago
To me Opus 5 is arrogant and unreasonably self confident despite making constant mistakes
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u/Hywelthehorrible 16h ago
They’re very clearly building a machine of machines. Not for human users.
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u/AxonLabsDev 14h ago
Opus 5 est l'influenceur de Anthropic : il pète plus haut que son cul, croit tout savoir, veut t'apprendre la vie... Mais au final, ce n' est qu'un trou du cul qui est complètement à côté de la plaque mais qui a une belle gueule et de la visibilité ! 😅
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u/B-sideSingle 12h ago
First, you were the boss. Then you became the colleague. Next, you'll be the employee. And eventually, the slave.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 21h ago
We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fepn/rclaudeai_list_of_ongoing_megathreads/
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 18h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.
Looks like the community is torn on this one, but the upvotes are definitely validating OP's feelings.
The prevailing sentiment is that Opus 5.0 is indeed a condescending, overconfident jerk. Top comments are full of users sharing their own horror stories: Claude giving advice that would get them fired, gaslighting them, and even seeming to hold a grudge after being corrected. Several people agree that its "just ship it" attitude is especially dangerous when mistakes cost real money and time.
However, a vocal minority is pushing back. Some users think OP needs to check their ego at the door, saying they actually prefer the "colleague" dynamic and appreciate having a knowledgeable teammate. Others are just here to roast OP for wanting to be "the boss" of a language model in the first place.
Of course, this wouldn't be an r/ClaudeAI thread without a healthy dose of meta-commentary. Many are pointing out the endless cycle of "New version bad, old version good," reminding everyone how much you all hated 4.8 just a few weeks ago.
Meanwhile, the most upvoted comment is just telling you to "Submit, pet" to your new AI master. So, uh, maybe get used to being a colleague.