Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
by kasey_junk on Monday November 09, 2026 @06:42AM
(#50424249)
It’s also true that people that perform their own evals see wide variance uncorrelated with “nerfing”. Human cognitive bias makes them only see that variance at specific times and then they start projecting.
Everyone really should keep a few tasks around that are indicative of the work they do and run them a few times with the same model and a few times across model families and when new models drop.
It’s extremely informative to see with your own eyes the variance that always exists. Even if you can’t afford statistical relevance it’s valuable.
Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
by dugmartin on Monday November 09, 2026 @08:30AM
(#50425338)
I've "called" the last 3 out of 4 new model releases. Maybe my account it perma-tagged as one that gets downgraded to re-allocate resources before a release but about 5-7 days before a new model Claude suddenly gets dumber and dumber on executing canned skills that I've used for 6+ months with no issues. The cynic in me thinks they are dumbing down models right before a release so the new model seems much smarter.
In my own work I have not once noticed a degradation where I could have said with any certainty that it's not within usual deviation or me having a bad day.
Conspicuously the model seems to be especially dumb and annoying when I did not get a lot of sleep the previous night.
When OpenAI and Anthropic engineers post here on HN that they do not quantize models and silently replace checkpoints in the API, I believe them.
I saw nothing that convinced me the people who are constantly making these complaints don't just mistake any suboptimal result for changes in the model.