Of my colleagues, I’m one of the ones who tries to keep up with new AI models on every release. When there’s a new frontier or open-weight model, I’ll give it an honest try for a few days as my main driver and report back to my colleagues.
I’m a Cursor user at work and in my side projects. My go-to models are GPT-5.6 Sol on high/xhigh for planning, GPT-5.6 Sol on low/Grok 4.6 on medium for implementation, and the occasional Claude Fable 5 for complex, harder-to-understand and implement tasks. Many of my colleagues are exclusively Claude users and use Claude Code.
I’m not the first one to observe this but I feel like any time I use Fable, Opus, or Sonnet, they are extremely verbose. They make a ton of extra code comments, they ignore instructions, and they invent solutions for things solved by language built-ins or preinstalled libraries like Active Support and es-toolkit. I don’t see this happening with any other model at the same rate.
My question are: Why do we think the Claude models do this at a seemingly higher rate? And have people found any effective means to curb this behavior?
1. On the ignore instructions point: using Cursor with Claude as the underlying model is quite different from using Claude directly through Claude Code. The agent/tooling layer can have a pretty big impact on the behavior.
2. On verbosity: IMO, Claude's default writing style tends to be more verbose than GPT's. GPT models are generally more concise when coding, while Claude often explains more. That said, I think this can be mitigated quite a bit by how you harness the model.
3. I agree that it’s worth trying new models. The pace of AI development is so fast that models can change significantly in a short time. But I’d also suggest trying different agent tools rather than sticking with Cursor alone. The tooling and agent loop can make a big difference too.
Easy