I thought about taking a shot every time Opus 5 said "load bearing", "bites", "teeth" (real oral fixation it had), "real {concern,issue,problem,...}" and realized I'd be dead of acute alcohol poisoning by lunch if I did so.
The problem with 5 wasn't just the verbosity, but its insane way of communicating. It had this bizarre circuitous sentence structure that always buried the lede, and always tried to be faux profound. I'm okay with verbosity if it's actually readable.
It is hilarious to me that in the examples they show side by side Opus 5.5 still uses 4 times more words than it needs to use.
IME, if you eyeball how many words the thing they're trying to say actually needs, and tell them to use only this many words, they become excellent communicators. I assume something about Anthropic's grader for writing just really wants to tick all its tidy tiny boxes of information the models need to cite. It's terrible.