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Until Opus 5.0 I'd have agreed with you, but Opus 5.5 is honestly one of the best I've ever sparred with, vastly better than the rest, including Astra imho. Especially so when prompting for clear top-down, first-principles communication.
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Opus 5.5 is much better, but IME I always have to force it to review its writing (Opus 5.5) to get it to put the most important facts first (and not bury the lede). It loves to park the main point far away after intermediate clauses. It always writes “premise, so consequence.” It takes a prompt asking to review against rules in context for it to fix it.

The ‘concise’ output style setting is bad with Opus 5.5, as it will often spit out a cryptic (is this really English?!), allergic-to-commas concise response, which takes more time to parse.

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