Comment by harpersealtako

I haven't played with claude code with 5.5, but I tried using claude cowork for a bunch of tasks and was surprised how much hand-holding it required. I gave it full access to my desktop and email but I kept running into cases where it had some arbitrary rule or restriction that prevented it from doing what I wanted.

Three examples that stood out: first, I wanted it to clean up my desktop by deleting some outdated files. It spent a few minutes looking through all the files, only to tell me it didn't have the ability to press buttons, only click, so it couldn't click and delete the old files. And it didn't have the ability to click and drag, so it couldn't move them to recycle bin. So it was stuck and suggested I do it myself. Of course, there was another solution it could have tried that would have worked: asking for read/write permissions on the desktop folder, and then deleting them using terminal...but that never occurred to it because I had asked it to test its remote computer usage tools, not its terminal tools.

Another case was asking it to print some files from a share drive I was given by a colleague on my email. It found the email, but it stopped and told me it couldn't proceed because there was a password window, but that I could enter the password myself, which was ***, because my colleague had sent it in the email. Like literally, it pasted the password into the output window and said "sorry I can't use this you gotta put it in yourself". It has some strong prohibitions on handling passwords, but in this case, it literally had it in its context window and could tell me it, just not type it into the password prompt in the browser. Of course, if you're at work and using claude on your phone to try to do something like that remotely, you're out of luck; even though it could* do it itself, it chose not to. The same issue happened for a 6 digit verification code for a website I was using that was sent to my email; it considered it a "password" and decided that it couldn't touch it. I couldn't even just...paste it into claude's context and ask it to enter it, it insisted that I must type it in myself.

A third case: for some reason it always forgets it can read pdfs. so many times it stopped what it was doing and said "well, I found it, but it's in a .pdf so I can't read it." and I'm like "bro you literally have a tool for this what are you even talking about".

A less important observation: it seems overeager to solve things by sending emails. Opus 5.5 LOVES sending emails. Can't find the information I'm looking for on the website? Here, I've drafted an email to the webmaster to ask it to add it. Have some ambiguous question about Virginia's hunting regulations? Opus 5.5 won't even try looking more closely at the regs its first thought is "I know, I can just email this question to the local game warden."