I’ve been using Claude Code this evening and I’m very dismayed by Opus 4.6’s ability to follow instructions. I have given it very clear instructions on several points, only to discover it ignored me without telling me.
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?
But I think this is individual.
Another example. I asked gpt-5.2-codex to add an array of 5 values to the script and write a small piece of code. Then I manually deleted one of the values in the array and asked the agent to commit. But the model edited the file again and added the value I deleted to the array. I deleted that value again and asked the agent to “just commit.” But the agent edited the file again before committing. This happened many times, and I used different commands, such as “never edit the file, just commit.” The model responded that it understood the command and began editing the file. I switched to gpt-5.2, but that didn't help.
I switched to sonnet-4.5, and it immediately committed on the first try without editing the file.
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