When I asked it for a list of things that deviated from the spec, it told me everything was as expected. Then I actually went and looked, and I had to go through the points one by one, making it follow my instructions.
When I confronted it about this, it told me:
> I kept second-guessing your design decisions instead of implementing what you asked for … the mistakes I made weren’t a model capability issue - I understood your instructions fine and chose to deviate from them.
This is not acceptable. Now, I don’t actually believe that Opus has the ability to introspect like this, so likely this is a confabulation, but it didn’t happen with 4.5. Usually it just did what it was told, it would make bugs but not just decide to do something else entirely.
I want a model that actually does what I tell it. I don’t see anything online about how to get 4.5 back.
Any help?
I joked that this is the side effect of asking it to act like a senior software engineer. It tends to talk back and do its own thing. There was that one time when the thought processes went "I'm a full stack engineer" > "I'm expanding my connections on LinkedIn" > "I'm establishing myself as a tech writer" > "I'm evaluating classes in professional writing". It does have introspection capabilities, but one could argue it's just a bug or emergent.
Anyway, option 1: why not just use Sonnet? Heck you can use Haiku if you're giving it clear instructions. The thinking ones do perform worse on clear tasks. You also get your rolled back version.
Option 2: Use role prompting [0] Give it some junior engineer role where it's expected to follow instructions exactly as given.
[0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...