Claude Opus 5 review: this model is brilliant (but annoying)

Claude Opus 5, Anthropic's latest model, shows brilliant reasoning but suffers from a neurotic personality and verbosity that frustrated the reviewer during real coding sessions, including refusing to handle a merge conflict. In the reviewer's 7-model How I AI benchmark, Opus 5 scored well but did not top the leaderboard, leading to a verdict that it will not replace the reviewer's primary model despite excelling in one specific use case.

I’m tired of new models. Every week there’s a new benchmark, a new frontier intelligence claim, a new thing to test. But here we are, because Opus 5 just dropped and I’ve had real hands-on time with it, so you’re getting the honest version. This is my full Opus 5 review: personality analysis, live benchmark results from my 7-model How I AI eval, and an actual verdict on whether I’m swapping it in. Spoiler: the answer surprised me. Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts What you’ll learn: Why I think we’ve hit an intelligence overhang and what that means for which model variables actually matter now How Opus 5’s “neurotic” personality showed up in real coding sessions, including a merge conflict it refused to touch What I learned from asking both Opus 5 and GPT‑5.6 Sol “who’s smarter, you or me?” Where Opus 5, GPT‑5.6 Sol, Sonnet 5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro actually landed on the HIA benchmark leaderboard The one use case where Opus 5 earned straight 5s from me My actual plan for using Opus 5 going forward In this episode, I cover: 00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs Opus 5 is here 03:15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=195s First impressions 06:12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=372s Opus 5 vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol personality comparison 14:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=879s Claude Slop: the verbosity problem and why it makes my blood boil 16:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=1015s How the How I AI benchmark works 7 models, 6 tasks, blind scoring 18:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=1110s Live benchmark results: the leaderboard reveal 23:25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfre9hN0HCs&t=1405s My verdict and how I’ll actually use Opus 5 Tools referenced: • Claude Opus 5: • Anthropic blog: https://www.anthropic.com/news https://www.anthropic.com/news • GPT‑5.6 Sol: https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/ https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/ • Sonnet 5: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5 • Gemini 3.1 Pro: https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/ https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/pro/ Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ https://penname.co/ . For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email email protected /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection .