This seems a worsening that seems to have started at Opus 4.8.
When I (was forced to) switched from 4.7 to 4.7, I noticed that 4.8 had a very strong bias against viewing tool output or reading files. It ALWAYS wanted to 'grep' things. So for example, it would run the test suite and grep for 'PASS', thus completely missing the 4 tests that FAILed. Its bias is so strong, that it does this despite explicit instructions to the contrary, and continues to do so even after having noticed its own mistake, in the same (claude code) session.
For editing files, it again seems to prefer writing small python scripts, rather than read the file and rewrite it (even small files, like notes). This again causes it to constantly miss duplications, inconsistencies, etc.
And from 4.8 to 5, it doubled down on this. At this point not moderately-long-horizon task is getting done consistently, due to its pigeon-hole view of the workdir.
Comments
This seems a worsening that seems to have started at Opus 4.8. When I (was forced to) switched from 4.7 to 4.7, I noticed that 4.8 had a very strong bias against viewing tool output or reading files. It ALWAYS wanted to 'grep' things. So for example, it would run the test suite and grep for 'PASS', thus completely missing the 4 tests that FAILed. Its bias is so strong, that it does this despite explicit instructions to the contrary, and continues to do so even after having noticed its own mistake, in the same (claude code) session.
For editing files, it again seems to prefer writing small python scripts, rather than read the file and rewrite it (even small files, like notes). This again causes it to constantly miss duplications, inconsistencies, etc.
And from 4.8 to 5, it doubled down on this. At this point not moderately-long-horizon task is getting done consistently, due to its pigeon-hole view of the workdir.
Anybody else notice this?
oh yes, exactly the same things are happening to me