Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:04PM
(#50429117)
Yes, I'm aware that there have been a number of isolated platform and harness regressions (bugs and behavior changes).
But the model NERF conspiracies are bunk.
Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
by cma on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:42PM
(#50431778)
I think the bug one wasn't bad intent, but it was a fact that even without the bug you got different behavior with the approximate logit sampling on TPUs. I say that was jut a minor platform optimization though and wouldn't be too upset about them not disclosing it.
But the harness one was not just a random harness regression; they were getting a huge influx of users and pretty clearly did it to save capacity. Not a great thing when you might be relying on attention to those thinking traces to reduce the risk of prompt injection etc. and it could have gone beyond major task degradation into a safety/security issue.
Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3
by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:06PM
(#50432138)
Yeah, perhaps but they are also trying to make the harnesses more efficient so they are competitive with their competitors on efficiency. Reducing token use can also reduce context size and improve aligned accuracy in general..
Through the lens of a conspiracy theory this could be viewed narrowly as "cheating" their users to reduce load.
But there are other motivations for the constant work going on in the harnesses that paint a fuller picture.
If you got routed to a TPU instance at some point in your chat another bug kept you there.
Earlier this year in 2026 they decided to save usage by stripping out all thinking tokens if you left your chat idle for one hour (cache timeout) and then came back to it, causing massive degradations. They fixed that, but recently they switched to doing auto-compactions for long running chats in anticipation of them going stale in cache. I think that one is usually what you want anyway and there is at least a way to recover to the uncompacted chat if you really need it, but it might also be a source of some degradation people are seeing now.