The problem the article is about is that suddenly even those of us who refuse to argue with a machine are being dragged into it.

I've had simple prompt engineering tasks that cause 4.8 to clamp down. In the past "browbeating" it (read: a sentence telling it not to read the task in bad faith) was enough.

Now it digs in and starts ranting about why it won't capitulate, I'm actually wrong, etc.

Extremely frustrating, and it became a problem with Opus 4.7 because they're trying to make up for the downgrade in parameter count with more RL, but RL does relatively poorly with non-trivially verified things like nuance in instructions.