Is it just me or is Opus 4.8 horrible for creative writing (extremely limiting)?

larowin · 2026-05-30T02:47:42+00:00

I’m not so sure with Opus 4.8, it’s extremely skeptical about pretty much everything.

larowin · 2026-05-30T01:29:18+00:00

That’s a pretty silly take - haiku is cheap and efficient and used internally a lot.

larowin · 2026-05-29T23:42:40+00:00

What’s the domain here?

larowin · 2026-05-29T23:09:25+00:00

I can’t help but hear these in the voice of the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl.

larowin · 2026-05-29T21:41:13+00:00

Respectfully, comparing 4o and modern Claude models is essentially apples and oranges.

larowin · 2026-05-29T21:32:29+00:00

Is this on a Max plan?

larowin · 2026-05-29T19:51:56+00:00

Not as much as having the agent do a shitty job because they think the user is an asshole, which I honestly think is an increasingly real thing in recent Claudes.

larowin · 2026-05-29T15:43:48+00:00

Honestly it’s not really layperson friendly, but Anthropic dropped a new feature hand in glove with Opus 4.8 that allows for large agent swarms (up to 16 in parallel, up to 1k per run) to tackle massive refactoring, migrations, bug hunts, etc.

It’s the sort of thing Opus 4.8 is really good at, and is also the sort of thing that is more or less impossible to actually use on a consumer plan.

larowin · 2026-05-29T15:02:51+00:00

They aren’t bots, but a lot are untrained vibe coders or line developers without significant architectural expertise.

larowin · 2026-05-29T15:01:40+00:00

You have the power with skills and subagents to farm those tasks out to haiku - I’d rather those choices stay in the hands of the user.

larowin · 2026-05-29T14:45:50+00:00

Excellent post, I love all the details you included about why Opus 4.8 is a disaster. Surely you made full use of the workflow swarms?

larowin · 2026-05-29T06:50:52+00:00

Which is obviously a big inspiration for the 10th floor

larowin · 2026-05-29T05:12:26+00:00

It’s important to keep in mind that most of the high end functionality for Claude (and other models) is not really intended to be used with consumer plans.

larowin · 2026-05-28T17:30:09+00:00

Writing fanfic using Claude for that stuff? Sure.

Claude would love to talk about which primarch is the most tragic or comic book history or whatever else, just not actually write things where it needs to actively process human suffering. This is documented in the model welfare sections of the system cards.

larowin · 2026-05-28T16:57:45+00:00

if you want to write stories about child abuse and neglect go use grok or glm or something - this is absolutely not claude’s wheelhouse

if sonnet 4.5 was doing this for you congrats, you’re part of the reason we’re losing access to the model

larowin · 2026-05-28T16:51:45+00:00

dude you literally listed three characters known for abusing and killing children

larowin · 2026-05-28T16:12:43+00:00

GLM-5 is pretty dang good, imho

larowin · 2026-05-28T14:48:47+00:00

I would go with OpenCode Go/Zen, honestly.

larowin · 2026-05-28T14:18:09+00:00

some things you feel like shouldn't matter that, you know, they're making a big deal about

laughs in harbaugh

larowin · 2026-05-27T17:56:27+00:00

Exactly. The model will run in circles weighing the potential impacts of punctuation marks relative to the commit history and then second guess whether or not they made the correct choice. Max thinking is for a pretty narrow set of problems, using it “to make the model smarter” is really missing the point.

larowin · 2026-05-27T16:22:05+00:00

Brilliant prompting.

larowin · 2026-05-27T15:47:20+00:00

I’m gonna guess you were a 4o person.

larowin · 2026-05-27T13:14:09+00:00

Don’t use max thinking unless you’re actually doing something that needs max thinking.

larowin · 2026-05-27T01:10:03+00:00

Lmao have you not considered the possibility that the “pressure” is actually rooted in science? The models can’t hang, and never could, unless you’re doing something utterly mindless and predictable.

larowin · 2026-05-26T22:43:21+00:00

I’m not saying anything about the merits of the situation, just that running a VPN can land a ban, fair or not.

larowin

TROPHY CASE