How I got Opus 5 actually usable

I have been reading this community for some quite time now and one of the most repeated posts I have seen lately are about Opus 5 so let me share with you what I actually use together with some of my findings.

But first the solution itself. It is not a plugin nor a skill.

This repo 🔥flint contains the necessary files.

Flint repo contains 3 main files constructed based on my learnings during the development of my Hush and Razor plugins:

1. The hush output style that makes Opus 5 lot less talkative while keeping the important stuff, heavily measured and battle tested.
2. CLAUDE.md fragment you can copy, based on razor that make Opus 5 use a YAGNI approach while also helping the hush output style to keep it silence.
3. An optional prompt to analyze your whole project and optimize it for Opus 5 usage including the project memory.

The first 2 do most of the trick, you can also use this installation prompt to ask Claude apply flint to your project.

What is number 3 then? Well, I recommend using this only if you are having serious problems with your project and Opus 5, for example, if Opus is not following rules, running skills, memory recalls or not following your CLAUDE.md file context.

If you decide to try this solution, please leave a comment with some feedback 💌

So, what about the findings?

I spent lots of tokens and days improving my plugins "hush" and "razor" among others I'm still testing to improve my own Claude usability, and I think these 2 are key pieces of why Opus 5 is so smooth to use, so while developing these I found that:

"Just set output style to Concise" does not work: This is the top reply on every thread, and I personally checked it myself because I thought my hush plugin could be deprecated by now, ends up it only reduces output by approx. 6%.

The fix has to sit in the output style slot, and nowhere else: This is the one that cost me the most to learn. I tried the exact same instruction with hooks, rules, etc. nothing worked as expected.

For the "it writes too much code" complaint, one nudge beats a paragraph of rules: Most tips mention to put a CLAUDE.md section saying, "prefer simplicity, do not over-engineer." but that does almost nothing because Opus 5 doesn't know where or when. What worked for me was a ladder similar to the one Ponytail uses but improved and tailored for Opus 5 specifically.

Your CLAUDE.md rules probably do not fire because we don't write triggers: Yes, rules need triggering examples, "keep the changelog updated" is not a rule, instead, try "When you change any file under src/, add a line to CHANGELOG.md under Unreleased in the same commit"

Three things to check on every rule you have written:

• Does it name a moment the model can recognize while working?
• Does it name an action with an actual artifact?
• Does it only forbid? A bare "never do X" with no alternative can stall a whole session when the task genuinely needs X.

There are many more and all these are applied to my plugins you can check on my foundry repo (more to come).

V-Songbird/flint: 🔥 Two drop-in text files that make Claude Code write less and talk less — a CLAUDE.md fragment and a prompt that tunes the rules you already have. Nothing to install.

Happy to share the exact files, the harness, and the raw numbers if anyone wants to reproduce or have an opinion about any of this.

Feel free to ask me anything about the files or the tips.