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by blurbleblurble 60 days ago
Opus 4.6 was incredible but Opus 4.7 is genuinely frustrating to me so far. It's really sharp but can be so lazy. It's constantly telling me that we should save this for tomorrow, that it's time for bed (in the middle of the day), and very often quite sloppy and bold in its action. These adjustments are getting old. The next crop of open models seems ready to practically replace the big ones as sharp orchestrator agents.
2 comments

I had to write multiple times in my prompt that it's not the model's role to change the subject or end the conversation at all.

I think that they do that to dodge conversations about controversial subjects without full-on refusing to answer. They'll give you an ok answer then tell you to go to get the walk you were talking about.

I also feel like maybe they think people are still ready to pay a lot if they feel like they're getting a lot of "high value stuff" even if the low value stuff the model refuses to do, so they basically try to stop you from doing low value stuff on Opus. I suspect that Sonnet or Haiku never tells you to go take a hike.

I have never seen a model be “lazy” before (I have seen them go for minimal change). I have been using the models through the api with various agents and no custom system prompt.

So I am curious, how do people get these lazy outputs?

Is it by having one of those custom system prompts that basically tells the model to be disrespectful?

Or is it free tier?

Cheap plans?

I have seen some people complain about a new tendency where it can suggest wrapping up the current task even though it isn't done yet. I haven't seen it myself though.
Usually this gets worse if you have a phrase like "wrap it up" earlier in the output, or if you're at a few hundred thousand tokens without compacting.

In both cases the fix is really simple, just compact.