Focus is the Main Feature: Why I Miss the Old Claude Code – alexkras.com

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Like many others, Anthropic won me slowly, over time.

How Anthropic won me over

I started with generative AI through a web interface I hosted myself, using my own API keys through Open Router and my own local models. Because Open Router makes it easy to switch models, I noticed Anthropic’s models consistently gave more concise responses – they just got to the point quicker. That focus was worth a lot to me, so I drifted toward Sonnet over comparable OpenAI models.

Then I had a task to summarize a book. I wasn’t using Opus often because I had to pay out of pocket for it, so I tried Gemini Pro first. Gemini spun for a few minutes and produced something short. Then I tried the same task in Opus. It spun its wheels for three to four minutes, and the result was exactly what I’d hoped for. I sat back, amazed at how well it worked.

In parallel, Anthropic released Claude Code. I’d been trying other tools – Aider, Cursor, Copilot – but nothing worked as well. Claude Code felt like an extension of my brain. It wasn’t trying to come up with complicated engineering solutions. It would just grep the repo for relevant files, read them, and grep for more as it went on. Exploring the codebase exactly as I would.

Then something changed

Somewhere along the way, things changed. Just as Anthropic slowly won me over, it has begun to slowly rub me the wrong way. I still love Claude Code. It’s highly customized to what I do and easy to extend. My current employer provides Claude Code enterprise subscription, which has proven itself to be a great productivity boost.

But it increasingly feels like I have to fight the tool to get my work done, and it seems far less focused than it used to be. I’m not the only one, especially when it comes to Claude Opus 5. Here are some examples of people describing the same problem in their own words.

Rough tier list of where I'd put every major model right now pic.twitter.com/gFDFZfECaR<br>— Theo – t3.gg (@theo) August 22, 2026

You are not going crazy, Opus 5 does write really differently to other Opuses – much longer answers, more stock phrases like (load bearing), more em dashes, more clauses (if, while), but it doesn't use longer words.

We mined 10s of thousands of Claude real world outputs from… https://t.co/Izo8Vr9yxe<br>— Peter Gostev (SF 24-28 August) (@petergostev) August 12, 2026

With all due respect to Boris Cherny, this response is part of the problem.

The complaints about Opus 5 have become pretty consistent: it’s lazy, sloppy, and verbose. That matches my own experience. Responding that people simply haven’t understood the right use case misses the… https://t.co/5uI9Ax9Noq<br>— Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) August 23, 2026

Anthropic once used to lead the AI race now it's nowhere to be seen.

Everything was great till Opus 4.7

After that they tried to play a strong game around Mythos and launched Fable. Didn't work out.

Opus 5 is simply verbose and prone to unrequested over-engineering.

Anthropic…<br>— Pratham (@Prathkum) August 22, 2026

I believe the bloat I’m experiencing with Claude comes down to three areas.

The Model

First, and biggest, is the model itself. Opus 5 is extremely chatty – big words, a lot of them, and it’s hard to keep it focused on the objective. It got to the point where Anthropic itself released the Concise Output Style, which was likely added just to get Opus 5 under control (lack of focus IMO predates Opus 5).

Working on a longer term fix, this is a quick band aid that we found works pretty well in the meantime. More to come.<br>— Boris Cherny (@bcherny) August 20, 2026

The Tooling

Second is the tooling. The Anthropic team seems to ship fast and ship a lot. Generating code IS cheap now, but that doesn’t mean an unstoppable flow of new features is the right thing for users.

One example is how Claude Code refactored the /doctor command: it used to run through setup and confirm everything worked. Now they’ve turned it into an audit of all the prompts and systems – perhaps a problem outside Anthropic they’re trying to get ahead of – an ever growing bloat of skills, MCPs and Claude.md files.

The /doctor skill is a surface-level fix for a System problem.

This is where generative AI comes up short. Some of these systemic problems need systemic solutions – careful thinking and smart engineering; not just slapping something onto an existing tool.

The Marketing

Anthropic has always been a little interesting (dare I say alarmist) when it came to marketing, but it never bothered at all, because the tools were so good. Their new marketing seems to lead people away from focus.

One example is the recently released AI-native SDLC Playbook. Like Opus 5 output, I had to run it through an AI model just to make sense of it all. Assuming I understood it correctly, it advocates for a world where the /doctor situation happens daily and to the entire codebase.

The proposal makes it...