I ran the same prompts on 4.7 and 4.8 for two weeks. Same tasks, same context, same everything.
On 4.8, they came back padded. Longer than needed, hedged, the actual answer buried in the middle.
4.8 didn't regress. Anthropic trained it to be more careful, and for hard reasoning tasks that's great. For everything else, careful is the wrong default.
Every problem is fixable. Most fixes take under a minute. The last one solves it permanently.
Fix 1: Get specific
Most prompts look like this:
“Write a summary of this article for my newsletter.”
4.8 has no idea who reads your newsletter, what tone you want, or how long the summary should be. So it picks the safest version of all of that.
Correct. Forgettable.
The fix:
“Write a 3-sentence summary of this article for my newsletter. Readers are professionals who use AI at work. Direct tone. Lead with the most surprising part, end with why it matters to them.”
Same task. Every gap is closed. The output shows it immediately.
When writing any 4.8 prompt, always include three things: who the output is for, what tone you want, and what format you want. Those three details alone cut the padding by half.
Fix 2: Add a rules line
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