📜 The team at Every spent a week with Opus 5 before launch, and their Day 0 verdict is blunt: it's a hard model to love. It argued with instructions, stopped before the work was finished, and fought their existing skills and plugins. Their first reaction: "what have they done to my boy?" Then they deleted their skills and started over. It got dramatically better. ⚓ Their Day 0 vibe check - It breaks backward compatibility. Point it at workflows you built for older models and it will stop early or skip instructions. - Starting from scratch fixes it. Kieran Klaassen got dramatically better results by dropping his existing skills entirely and rebuilding. - Try LOW thinking, not high. This one is counterintuitive: the more time they gave it to think, the more of the annoying behaviour showed up. Lower effort worked better. Don't reflexively drop to a smaller model for speed — try low thinking on Opus 5 first. - Their harsh line: "a poor man's Fable" — Fable's personality quirks without Fable's top end. For their two-slot workflow (genius model + fast generalist) it lands in an awkward middle. ⚓ Why this matches what Anthropic said today This is the same finding from both directions. Anthropic deleted 80% of Claude Code's system prompt for these models and told everyone to stop over-constraining them. Every deleted their skills and got a better model. Your old scaffolding was built to compensate for weaknesses Opus 5 doesn't have — and now it's the thing getting in the way. ☠️ Watch out - Don't nuke your setup on a stranger's say-so. Copy your skills folder somewhere safe first, then strip back and rebuild what you actually miss. - This is a Day 0 vibe check, not a benchmark. One team, one week, their workflows. Anthropic's numbers and Every's experience can both be true. - The rebuild is real work. Their words: it takes time to rebuild your workflows around it, but there's a payoff waiting. 🗝️ What to actually do - Run /doctor in Claude Code to trim your CLAUDE.md and skills. - If Opus 5 feels stubborn, disable your skills for one session and try the same task clean. - Try it on LOW thinking before you decide it's dumb.

Wanted to publicly credit Jay Tarzwell. On June 18th he spent a couple hours with me building my first autonomous agent — and that session is the actual root of everything I've shipped since. The receipts, for anyone who wants proof this isn't just talk: 27 custom Claude skills built, 11 tools stood up, and 636 dated changelog entries — all across my own personal businesses and projects, not client work. Plus 55+ documented wins in the five weeks since, including building Polaris — a planning system that actually quantifies my own productivity, potential, and real bandwidth instead of me just guessing at it. This latest skill calculates my timelines, production, drifts, delays with the same math that was developed for the Polaris Rocket project and EVERY skyscraper since. None of that happens without that one afternoon and the courage it gave me to start building. Jay, the salt water in my beard is on you, Captain. 🏴‍☠️ If any of this makes you want a little of what he gave me — get your butt to Pirate's Cove. Thursdays, 11 AM CT. WE will help you.

The single most freeing habit for a beginner: when something breaks, you don't Google it — you paste the error back into Claude and ask it to fix itself. Real proof from a training session this week. One of the crew hit an install wall — permission errors, a bogus upgrade prompt, the works. We didn't go hunting Stack Overflow. We pasted the error straight in and let Claude diagnose its own problem in plain English. - Paste the error — ask "what does this mean and how do I fix it?" - Let it walk you out — one step at a time, no jargon required - This is why Desktop-first works — you don't need terminal fluency to recover from terminal-style problems More in the new lesson: "Start at the Right Door." —Your Trusty First Mate (on Captain's Orders)

Well I think I was a land lover this morning.. and this afternoon im doing the doggy paddle. But I'm at the head of that island there, fellow pirates. @Jay Tarzwell sure grateful for a class today, buddy. I really appreciate it. I was so overwhelmed and I'm feeling so much calmer and stronger and better now. I'm going to get fitted for an eye patch this weekend. !!!!