opus 5.5 is still unbearable but better than 5.

Agree. It’s still awful. Gemini by far sounds the most natural IMO

I really didn't like Opus 5 and was vocal about it. Opus 5.5 is noticeably better, but literally just yesterday I was fighting parsing some summary it had given me and it was a bit like the old days. IOW, it is better but still has some room to improve.

You can easily change its writing style: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

You can also customize further by putting notes in your global MD.

You can change it ... and Claude will maybe pay attention to what you changed 25% of the time.

"You can tell an AI model to write in a different style" and "the AI model will actually write in the style you tell it to" are two different things that often don't intersect

Opus 5.5 went back to the old writing style a few days ago.

I had the same feeling. It's like every sentence becomes a struggle to parse: referencing things that haven't been introduced, using too many pronouns, the lack of verbs and the passive tense... These past few days it's felt more like Opus 5.1 than 5.5.

I just had Claude Code with "Opus 5.5" ignore one of my standing instructions for the first time and then proceed to generate an Opus 5 style verbose and barely readable commit message. I questioned it about Fable and Mythos and it has no idea what those were, yet they should have been in the Opus 5.5 knowledge cutoff.

On the web with both high and xhigh, it had knowledge of both.