Every time Claude breaks, I hop on X. Over there, I feel like I’m not alone (some kind of huddling-together-for-warmth mentality).
I feel like today is the perfect time to ship GPT-5.6. OpenAI was right to hold back last week.
Because Claude is going haywire across the board. This is the “kick a man while he’s down” moment!
New trick today: tool call cannot be parsed (retry also failed).
Someone found the root cause of Opus 4.8 thinking past the timeout and ending up returning tool call could not be parsed: the thinking block returns an abnormal empty output, and tool_use has no proper tool-call block. The diagnosis is that the extended thinking mechanism is misbehaving.
The fixes:
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Turn Opus 4.8 effort down below high, and there won’t be any thinking tokens — but the capability drops accordingly.
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Falling back to 4.6 + max works best.