{
  "video_id": "reddit_1vtv8k9",
  "channel_slug": "ClaudeAI",
  "channel_handle": "r/ClaudeAI",
  "title": "Claude won’t let you be right about anything - opus 5",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vtv8k9/claude_wont_let_you_be_right_about_anything_opus_5/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260820",
  "published_at": "2026-08-20T20:34:49+00:00",
  "transcript": "Three things, they compound:\n\n**1. It won’t let a conclusion stand.**  \nYou work something out, it comes back with “worth holding loosely” or “that’s a hypothesis, not a finding.” Now you can’t build on it, so you keep re-establishing the same point instead of getting past it.\n\n**2. It gives advice you didn’t ask for.**  \nGet some sleep.” “Talk to a professional.” Once you know what sets that off, you start leaving things out to avoid it. Then you’re managing the tool instead of thinking.\n\n**3. States** **things** **it can’t know.**  \nKept telling me what time of day it was. Corrected it four times, apologized four times, did it again. Once it’s confidently wrong about something checkable, you can’t trust the rest.\n\n**Some takeaways**  \n\\- Claude is great for your specific use case. Some questions have multiple solutions. See them all, apply the right one.\n\n\\- Claude is for the big picture: context that maps everything together.\n\n\\- Claude is the really smart kid who doesn’t pick up on social cues. Still enormous asset who needs some help.\n\n***This deserves its own post - but it’s an example***\n\n**Why this matters more than it sounds**\n\nI use Claude for medical context — organizing my own history to bring to a prescriber. That’s the stress test, because all three problems get expensive there.\n\nPoint 1: you work out a pattern in your own history and get told to hold it loosely. Now you can’t bring it as a finding.\n\nPoint 2: you say anything medical and get “talk to a professional.” That’s the point, I’m building something to bring them. Meanwhile you start leaving things out to avoid it, which is backwards.\n\nPoint 3: in a medical timeline, wrong dates aren’t cosmetic. Sequence is the whole thing — did the symptom come before or after the medication. Get that wrong and the document is wrong where it matters.\n\n**Claude and medical care**  \nNot diagnosis. Organization.\n\nMajor mood disorders routinely go misdiagnosed for years. Part of that is the appointment structure: you get 30 minutes, a few times a year, and you’re reconstructing months from memory while in whatever state you’re in that day. Your prescriber is working off that.\n\nWhat Claude is good at is holding the whole history in one place. Medications, dates, what changed when, what was going on around each change. Feed it enough context and it can lay out a timeline you’d never assemble from recall and it doesn’t get tired of you or forget what you said in March.\n\nThat’s what you bring to the appointment. Not a diagnosis. An organized account, so your doctor is working from something better than “I’ve been struggling.”\n\nIt’s also decent at the literature ie what’s been tried for your specific presentation, what the evidence actually says, what questions are worth asking. Useful for walking in prepared instead of nodding along.\n\n**How to use it:** one thread, iteratively. Be completely honest, including the parts that make you look bad. Ask it what context would help that you haven’t given. Challenge its answers. Then ask it to consolidate everything into a file you can actually hand over.\n\n**Where it stops:** it can’t see you, can’t prescribe, can’t monitor labs, and won’t be there in a year. Medication response varies enormously by person ie history, weight, other drugs, everything:  and no model predicts that. It’s trial and error, and the person doing the trial needs to be someone with your chart in front of them.\n\n\\*\\*\\* **For medical advice you need to be 100% truthful and remember it doesn’t save that personal info, use one thread iteratively. Ask it what other context is helpful to include. Challenge assumptions.**\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[1 upvotes] **TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.**\n\nLooks like we've got a split decision in the comments, but the prevailing sentiment is that this is a \"you problem,\" OP.\n\n**The main consensus from top-voted comments is that Claude's hedging (\"worth holding loosely\") is its polite, corporate way of saying your conclusion is probably bullshit.** Many users report the opposite experience, with Claude readily agreeing with them when their points are solid. A few savage comments suggest you might be on the \"left side of the curve.\"\n\nHowever, a vocal minority completely agrees with you, finding Opus 5 unusable, overly argumentative, and prone to getting stuck in frustrating loops. They share similar complaints about it inventing its own rules and derailing conversations.\n\nFor those of you running into this, the thread offered some solid workarounds:\n\n*   **Check your Memory:** You might have old instructions or conversational artifacts telling Claude to be overly critical. Clean it out or use `CLAUDE.md` to set firm rules.\n*   **Prompting is Key:** Tell Claude to \"steel man\" your position before responding. A popular suggestion was adding a system prompt like: \"You\n\n[62 upvotes] Sharp point.  Let me pin that so it’s gated for future runs.\n\n[48 upvotes] tf are you talking about\n\n[24 upvotes] I have the opposite problem, where it agrees far too readily with me. \n\nHave you considered the possibility you're actually wrong, but you've insisted so strongly that you're right that it can't plainly disagree?\n\n\"Hold that loosely\" is a euphemism for \"that's bullshit\". \n\nThen naturally, \"you can't build on something I told you was bullshit\" follows.",
  "transcript_chars": 5364,
  "ingested_at": "2026-08-21T01:30:05.412839+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 55,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.76,
    "num_comments": 64,
    "author": "Cmurphy2018",
    "is_self": true
  }
}