Have used 5.5, ran usual battery of tests, and the downhill death spiral in a science/chemistry context continues. Code wise, it is better than open weight in several ways, but you really have to work hard to fight it from creating such a heavily abstracted mess it becomes unmaintainable for humans. Requires too much handholding for me. It's scientific reasoning is more confident as well, which would be great if it were also more correct.

Open weight models are generally more humble when working at fronteir, seek human input more reliably on thi gs they have no buisness deciding on, and can be trusted to not fuck up codebase in some way. Also, the way claude talks by default and tends towards even with all the "use this standard or that" tricks, grinds my gears in a way that drive me postal.

So, all in all, the shit prose, the constant oversight robbing me of attention better spent elsewhere, and high cost, and seemingly correct and difficult to catch errors on first pass make avoidance/non-reliance a nobrainer.

When dumb models are right, they're right, because likely its a solved problem elsewhere, and when they're wrong its quite transparent. Claude and fable are extremely good at spinning resilliant bullshit that can take quite some mental labor to verify and disprove, usual problem is flawed or deeply i correct assumptions on top of which then relativly sound reasoning and evidence is layered, or otgerwise weird contradictory decisons made "because i thought it would be better this way" that waste 48 hours of gpu time on an invalid model because claude fucked the one small part entrusted to it, which was extremely well defined and reasoned/backed by literature and it just made an executive decision to deviate without consulting or warning about it.

so fuck claude.