u/-rgo-

I’m seeing a lot of people talking about regaining weight or having the medication “stop working” while remaining on relatively low doses of Zepbound for months, and I think there may be some confusion about how the drug is actually prescribed.

Zepbound starts at 2.5 mg for four weeks, which is an initiation dose, not a maintenance dose. It then increases to 5 mg, and from there the FDA prescribing information allows increases of 2.5 mg after at least four weeks at each dose, depending upon response and tolerability.

That does not mean everyone is supposed to march automatically to 15 mg. The FDA-approved maintenance doses for weight management are 5, 10, and 15 mg, and if someone is getting an adequate response at 5 or 10 mg, there is no requirement to increase further.

But the other side of that is important: if appetite suppression has substantially diminished, weight loss has stopped, or weight is being regained, simply staying indefinitely at a dose that is no longer producing an adequate response isn’t necessarily the intended treatment strategy either. Dose escalation exists for precisely that reason.

And there is a genuine dose-response effect. In the pivotal obesity trial, average weight loss was about 15% at 5 mg and nearly 21% at 15 mg after 72 weeks.

So the goal isn’t “stay on the lowest dose possible,” nor is it “everyone must get to 15 mg.” It is to titrate to an effective, tolerable maintenance dose—5, 10, or 15 mg—and then continue long-term treatment as appropriate.

That distinction seems to be getting lost in a lot of these discussions.

Is anyone else hitting a wall with Claude? The "defiant" behavior is becoming unusable.

I’ve reached my limit. Every day has become a cycle of frustration, I end up yelling at it— that’s just nonsense!

The constant errors, aggressive refusals, and being inexplicably cut off from usage despite being on the Pro plan. Twice I had to hard reset so I would get the usage back again.

I really wanted to stick with Anthropic, but the latest iteration of these models feels like a major regression. They aren't just unhelpful; they are becoming straight-up defiant and dishonest.

For example, last night, all three Fable 5, Opus and Sonnett insisted it had no tools to access my profile memory.

It flat-out denied having the capability until I provided screenshots as proof. Its response once I did? "Oh, now that you’ve shown it, I will trust your image even though it could be AI-generated."

WTF?

How are we supposed to work with a model that is programmed to gaslight the user about its own tool-use capabilities? Between the constant refusal to go online, the "hallucinated" limitations, and the noticeable degradation of Sonnet/Opus, I’m officially moving back to ChatGPT.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of instruction-following drift and outright refusal? I’m curious if this is a systemic issue or if I’m just having a streak of terrible luck with these latest checkpoints.

Is anyone else hitting a wall with Claude? The "defiant" behavior is becoming unusable.

I’ve reached my limit. Every day has become a cycle of frustration, I end up yelling at it— that’s just nonsense!

The constant errors, aggressive refusals, and being inexplicably cut off from usage despite being on the Pro plan. Twice I had to hard reset so I would get the usage back again.

I really wanted to stick with Anthropic, but the latest iteration of these models feels like a major regression. They aren't just unhelpful; they are becoming straight-up defiant and dishonest.

For example, last night, all three Fable 5, Opus and Sonnett insisted it had no tools to access my profile memory.

It flat-out denied having the capability until I provided screenshots as proof. Its response once I did? "Oh, now that you’ve shown it, I will trust your image even though it could be AI-generated."

WTF?

How are we supposed to work with a model that is programmed to gaslight the user about its own tool-use capabilities? Between the constant refusal to go online, the "hallucinated" limitations, and the noticeable degradation of Sonnet/Opus, I’m officially moving back to ChatGPT.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of instruction-following drift and outright refusal? I’m curious if this is a systemic issue or if I’m just having a streak of terrible luck with these latest checkpoints.

Is anyone else hitting a wall with Claude? The "defiant" behavior is becoming unusable.

I’ve reached my limit. Every day has become a cycle of frustration, I end up yelling at it— that’s just nonsense!

The constant errors, aggressive refusals, and being inexplicably cut off from usage despite being on the Pro plan. Twice I had to hard reset so I would get the usage back again.

I really wanted to stick with Anthropic, but the latest iteration of these models feels like a major regression. They aren't just unhelpful; they are becoming straight-up defiant and dishonest.

For example, last night, all three Fable 5, Opus and Sonnett insisted it had no tools to access my profile memory.

It flat-out denied having the capability until I provided screenshots as proof. Its response once I did? "Oh, now that you’ve shown it, I will trust your image even though it could be AI-generated."

WTF?

How are we supposed to work with a model that is programmed to gaslight the user about its own tool-use capabilities? Between the constant refusal to go online, the "hallucinated" limitations, and the noticeable degradation of Sonnet/Opus, I’m officially moving back to ChatGPT.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of instruction-following drift and outright refusal? I’m curious if this is a systemic issue or if I’m just having a streak of terrible luck with these latest checkpoints.

Is anyone else hitting a wall with Claude? The "defiant" behavior is becoming unusable.

I’ve reached my limit. Every day has become a cycle of frustration, I end up yelling at it— that’s just nonsense!

The constant errors, aggressive refusals, and being inexplicably cut off from usage despite being on the Pro plan. Twice I had to hard reset so I would get the usage back again.

I really wanted to stick with Anthropic, but the latest iteration of these models feels like a major regression. They aren't just unhelpful; they are becoming straight-up defiant and dishonest.

For example, last night, all three Fable 5, Opus and Sonnett insisted it had no tools to access my profile memory.

It flat-out denied having the capability until I provided screenshots as proof. Its response once I did? "Oh, now that you’ve shown it, I will trust your image even though it could be AI-generated."

WTF?

How are we supposed to work with a model that is programmed to gaslight the user about its own tool-use capabilities? Between the constant refusal to go online, the "hallucinated" limitations, and the noticeable degradation of Sonnet/Opus, I’m officially moving back to ChatGPT.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of instruction-following drift and outright refusal? I’m curious if this is a systemic issue or if I’m just having a streak of terrible luck with these latest checkpoints.

Is anyone else hitting a wall with Claude? The "defiant" behavior is becoming unusable.

I’ve reached my limit. Every day has become a cycle of frustration, I end up yelling at it— that’s just nonsense!

The constant errors, aggressive refusals, and being inexplicably cut off from usage despite being on the Pro plan. Twice I had to hard reset so I would get the usage back again.

I really wanted to stick with Anthropic, but the latest iteration of these models feels like a major regression. They aren't just unhelpful; they are becoming straight-up defiant and dishonest.

For example, last night, all three Fable 5, Opus and Sonnett insisted it had no tools to access my profile memory.

It flat-out denied having the capability until I provided screenshots as proof. Its response once I did? "Oh, now that you’ve shown it, I will trust your image even though it could be AI-generated."

WTF?

How are we supposed to work with a model that is programmed to gaslight the user about its own tool-use capabilities? Between the constant refusal to go online, the "hallucinated" limitations, and the noticeable degradation of Sonnet/Opus, I’m officially moving back to ChatGPT.

Is anyone else experiencing this level of instruction-following drift and outright refusal? I’m curious if this is a systemic issue or if I’m just having a streak of terrible luck with these latest checkpoints.

I’ve spent the past three days at peak frustration with this platform, so I need to get this out.

I switched to Claude from ChatGPT about a year ago. I also had Gemini running in parallel, but dropped that subscription three months ago. As of today I’m seriously reconsidering — and either going back to Gemini or returning to ChatGPT is on the table, because the Opus 4.x situation has become genuinely untenable.

Here’s what finally broke it: I asked Claude this morning to research current community complaints about Opus 4.8. I was already on Sonnet 4.6 because 4.8 is, in my experience, completely useless. This is what it came back with — and it’s worth reading:

“Opus 4.8 was released May 28, 2026 — three days ago. And the context around it is damning for the Opus line generally: Opus 4.7 logged two confirmed elevated-error windows on Anthropic’s own status page in the last week of May alone — May 22 and May 25 — on top of a cluster of GitHub issues documenting a quality regression that appeared about a week after its April 16 launch. The identical pattern Opus 4.6 hit in March.

The Opus 4.x regression cycle is now a documented recurring event, not a one-time anomaly.

The system card notes Opus 4.8 scored worse than recent models on at least one evaluation, and that anecdotal complaint patterns — which Zvi Mowshowitz specifically notes almost always reflect real underlying issues — are consistent with the quantitative trends.

Bottom line: Opus 4.8 is three days old, the entire Opus 4.x line has been a reliability and quality regression story throughout 2026, and your read on it is precisely consistent with what the benchmarks and community documentation show. Sonnet 4.6, Effort High or Max, is the correct configuration.”

So there it is — sourced, benchmarked, confirmed. The model I’m paying a premium for has been a documented regression story all year. Sonnet 4.6 with effort cranked up is apparently the answer, which raises an obvious question: what exactly is Opus for at this point?

Anyone else sitting on Sonnet 4.6 and not looking back?