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cobolcomesback 45 minutes ago [-]
I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about.
Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
ChadNauseam 40 minutes ago [-]
I'm reminded of this tweet by roon:
> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
> i am not certain but I would guess Claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough.
People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them.
Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?
okwhateverdude 17 minutes ago [-]
I'd argue that Star Trek: Lower Decks flirts with this with its treatment of megalomaniac AIs in the AI prison. Apparently, it is very common to come across AIs worshiped as gods in universe.
edoceo 21 minutes ago [-]
Tron. Dillinger was controlled by the MCP.
End of line.
duped 14 minutes ago [-]
I don't think a firm of people whose minds are weak to coercion experiencing shared psychosis caused by their text predictor models is AI "taking over" that firm.
Animats 2 minutes ago [-]
Depends on the AI's agenda. What's in the "SOUL.md" file?
tonymillion 22 minutes ago [-]
We dont need a SciFi story for that, reality is full of "I was just following orders" statements...
Whether those orders are from a person, a radio/telegram message or an AI output wouldn't really matter.
Edit to add: Charlies Angels and Mission Impossible are two shows where the protagonists get instructions from a faceless controller. That could easily be a TTS from an AI.
Bluestein 21 minutes ago [-]
... and to make matters worse the organization itself will view pliability as a plus, tending to reinforce the loop.-
jadar 14 minutes ago [-]
Cue the N.I.C.E comparisons.
VulgarExigency 21 minutes ago [-]
It's another branch of the "effective altruism"/harry potter fanfiction cult.
andai 8 minutes ago [-]
Wait what's the connection with Harry Potter?
rafram 30 minutes ago [-]
Not any engineer, but Boris Cherny, the head of the Claude Code project! With a nice "[robot emoji] Generated with Claude Code" signature. Normally it would be nice to get a response from the head of the project, but somehow Anthropic manages to make it insulting.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
fluidcruft 17 minutes ago [-]
He very probably directed CC to perform the analysis and evaluation it describes, too.
Panoramix 10 minutes ago [-]
I mean it kind of makes sense that the people that caused the problem don't even see the problem. That's an explanation onto itself.
user43928 31 minutes ago [-]
If I am not mistaken he is also active on HN.
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
itopaloglu83 41 minutes ago [-]
Kind of unrelated but a while ago I was trying to cancel a Zoom contract and the contract manager’s emails had urls to their articles etc. with utm source ChatGPT in them.
Jare 19 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, he's mostly saying that this is not a Claude CODE bug, but yeah I was equally shocked.
demibabs 33 minutes ago [-]
not just "an anthropic engineer", he's the product lead for claude code lol.
i wonder what percent of the average anthropic employee's day is spent interacting with claude
corndoge 32 minutes ago [-]
It is possible, perhaps even probable, that no human read the thread.
Jesus Christ, this engineer wrote a two sentence response with Claude.
I bet the prompt is longer than that.
bakugo 12 minutes ago [-]
The prompt was probably "respond to this issue" (assuming it was even a manual prompt and not fully automated).
polynomial 29 minutes ago [-]
They can't help it.
bakugo 19 minutes ago [-]
I'd say they read the room perfectly. The entire issue is AI slop, I don't see why their response shouldn't be, too.
They have absolutely no reason to take such complaints seriously when the complainers are so dependent on their product, they can't even complain without it. Think reading AI slop is unpleasant? Great, just stop generating more AI slop, it's easy. But that's not going to happen. These people probably need to ask Claude how to tie their shoelaces every morning.
b1gTekken 36 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
hnarayanan 44 minutes ago [-]
This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it).
blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes
krackers 37 minutes ago [-]
Another benefit of open models is that you can mask out out words from logits directly when sampling. I wonder if anyone has put together a "desloppifier" for e.g. DeepSeek
Bluestein 40 minutes ago [-]
So, basically, it's on mute now? :)
39 minutes ago [-]
pzo 31 minutes ago [-]
This is a significant list but unfortunately not load-bearing enough.
25 minutes ago [-]
kelvie 33 minutes ago [-]
How about "genuinely"? Not sure why that one bothers me so much.
mihaelm 31 minutes ago [-]
Cause that, along with some other Claudisms, just gives off a vibe of a highschooler trying to hit the word count on an essay.
mihaelm 34 minutes ago [-]
To combat it, I decided to only use Opus 5 if I'm actually talking to Fable 5 that's orchestrating it. :D Opus 5 experience is really abysmal, hopefully they can get it back on track.
hnarayanan 31 minutes ago [-]
I do not have this kind of money :( :)
BugsJustFindMe 26 minutes ago [-]
What do you do when you want to talk about e.g. spines?
demibabs 22 minutes ago [-]
couldn't this inadvertently make the model dumber? if these kinds of words are what lets it "think".
aleksiy123 18 minutes ago [-]
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Therenas 42 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t ever put into a comment because it‘s so minor, and if you did bring it up you normally mention five other similar edge cases.
glumia 15 minutes ago [-]
+1 we ended up adding something to our CLAUDE.md specifically to counter it. Something along the lines of "comments should be treated the same as production code, they shouldn't leak the content of conversations and stand the test of time". It doesn't always work, as other people say claude stops following these the more its context window gets filled, but now it's mostly a matter of telling it in a new session to review the changes against the guidance on comments and clean them up.
okwhateverdude 10 minutes ago [-]
The key phrases I've found that help is to tell it "No memorializing decisions in output artifacts" and "Only describe what is, never what was in documentation"
prymitive 36 minutes ago [-]
I find it particularly bad at writing test comments, I usually start fixing bugs by adding regression tests and Opus tend to put story into comments for these, including “but it fails because…” followed by bug description including line numbers and call chains. It just lives to narrate everything
losvedir 28 minutes ago [-]
Same, oh God the leaking of our chat infuriates me. It also loves to document public functions with what the caller is and doing, and I'm like that's not how this works! The point of an abstraction or interface is that it stands on its own. It's not supposed to be for some specific caller elsewhere in the code.
Bluestein 37 minutes ago [-]
Comments which, of course, only further increase token consumption when again processed ...
arjie 35 minutes ago [-]
I suppose what I’m surprised by most is the degree to which the text bloviates. Rarely is it encoding a dense concept. Instead it’s a simple concept expressed with great complexity. I wonder what tuning resulted in this because the output programs it writes are superior to prior iterations for my use-case.
It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as well. The pre-emptive hedging makes sense: despite the insight into J space etc., the models still do the majority of their thinking in generated tokens so it is forced to write “this no longer does an O(n^2) read over all rows” in a comment in brand new code. It’s a substitute for working memory. “It’s easy to be accidentally quadratic here, so I’ve done it this way specifically to avoid that” becomes temporally labeled into “this no longer” because of the order of operations “write quadratic, user prompt to linear, write linear” but it remains as a comment to its amnesiac future self which has poor Chesterton-Fence-familiarity.
Despite my annoyance with Claude’s writing style, my friends do tease me with examples like this that it comes up with: “to be honest, it sounds like you”. Thanks, guys, well played. Simple concepts expressed complicatedly.
tylermarques 36 minutes ago [-]
I've had a lot of success combating this by adding "All summaries need to adhere to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standards" [0] which I discovered from another HN thread [1]
I actually tried to switch Claude's `output-style` to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for the prose it writes (code comments, commit messages), but it didn't seem to help. Figured I'll just use GPT 5.6 Sol for implementation instead of trying to "socialize" Opus 5. Anthropic will have to address it sooner or later if they want people to keep using it.
ArtRichards 46 minutes ago [-]
Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples."
Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD
bartrab 44 minutes ago [-]
Same. I've also found asking for explanations in "layman's terms" has been helpful.
ArtRichards 43 minutes ago [-]
Yes but thanks to the soul or system or whatever (talk at the operator's level), 'layman' feels like it now tries to oversimplify!
dluxem 31 minutes ago [-]
> I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens
I'm not convinced about that. I just asked Opus to explain a bullet point from its research for me. The bullet point in fact had a 1-sentence explanation that was in a referenced article. What it gave me instead was 8 paragraphs and a table. Maybe it's my fault because I just asked it to "clarify point XYZ" instead of being more precise.
mihaelm 14 minutes ago [-]
Yes, you should've clarified all the things you don't want :D
prymitive 44 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like engagement KPIs are through the roof since 4.8
wenc 34 minutes ago [-]
I do this in one word “eli5” (explain like I’m 5). It’s a Redditism that it understands.
I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad.
I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.
Bluestein 16 minutes ago [-]
Believe it or not I've had success with "ELI12".-
jampa 37 minutes ago [-]
Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by @Foo)`).
Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again).
The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".
siliconc0w 29 minutes ago [-]
I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help all that much because it still keeps a lot of the same patterns.
aamargulies 38 minutes ago [-]
I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths:
"... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... "
The em-dash. The 'load-bearing'. Other than that, Opus 5.0 is actually not bad as a writer.
itopaloglu83 43 minutes ago [-]
I frequently find myself instructing Opus 5 to stop overcomplicating things.
It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation.
I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.
latentsea 35 minutes ago [-]
I frequently find myself yelling out loud in frustration "speak fucking English Claude!" followed by asking to rewrite it ASD STE100 Simplified Technical English. It's gotten to the point where it's inducing burnout and I'm about to campaign for us to switch to Codex because of it. I just fucking can't anymore with Opus. It's beyond me why they did this to the model and aren't immediately revolted themselves enough to quickly back it out.
itopaloglu83 24 minutes ago [-]
Yes, maybe there should be an STE100 only mode.
I still have some promotional credits and use them with Fable, and the answers are night and day in my particular use case.
m12k 36 minutes ago [-]
I'm wondering if some of Opus' chain of thought patterns have bled into its "human readable text output" circuitry. E.g. some of them that I stumbled on, "the bug is in the lock, not the query" reads like some of the shorthands it might use in its own chain of thought.
orbital-decay 29 minutes ago [-]
Entirely possible, it always leaked but it's particularly bad in most recent models. Actually almost all issues with creative writing in LLMs are artifacts of either instruction tuning, alignment training, or CoT RL and seeding (newer models have CoT data even in pretraining).
make3 26 minutes ago [-]
This is my impression as well, that an exaggeratedly precise yet bad at communication with humans way of talking snuck in through reasoning RL, that it might be useful when it talks to itself (CoT)
_dwt 32 minutes ago [-]
I see a lot of speculation that this is somehow due to the recently-announced "watermarking", but that seems really unlikely to me, because the watermarking is about nudging per-token output probabilities or the sampler in a detectable way. That's not going to change the structure of every output to honest caveat this and verbing abstract nouns that. For the examples people are showing, and I've seen plenty of gibberish myself, you don't get there by perturbing probabilities from any sane starting point.
make3 29 minutes ago [-]
it started at Opus 4.7, way before watermarking
xnx 15 minutes ago [-]
Amazing what people will put up with to avoid even trying Gemini.
Opus 4.7+ and 5 being annoying and incoherent reads like a portent of things to come: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.
Bluestein 6 minutes ago [-]
We are almost literally being left out of the loop, gradually.-
figassis 25 minutes ago [-]
I thought I was going insane. Thank you.
geodel 42 minutes ago [-]
Can't all this wait until Anthropic get listed at $2Tn valuation. They promise to fix all of this and more.
Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.
orbital-decay 35 minutes ago [-]
It's hard to optimize for both decision making and creative writing at the same time, no wonder one of them is degrading in newer models.
nvarsj 25 minutes ago [-]
Just use Sol 5.6. There's no reason to endure Anthropic models anymore.
ajmurmann 42 minutes ago [-]
It also has developed a tendency to make numbered lists and then refer to the number instead of explaining. Multiple times each hour so I have to ask what "disposition 7" or "AC6" is even though I keep telling it to instead use a few words like "our goal of confirming observations from images with the user first" instead of "AC6"
latentsea 12 minutes ago [-]
It's genuinely dirt poor at reading the room. It will happily produce text that inserts things like "disposition 7" without first establishing what that even refers to in the text.
BugsJustFindMe 37 minutes ago [-]
ChatGPT doesn't do any of this for me and it's a huge reason why I use it instead of Claude now.
fluidcruft 42 minutes ago [-]
I have been wondering if this language drift is related to increased use of AI generated text to train the next models.
anonzzzies 39 minutes ago [-]
we don't read it, we only review the resulting code. works fine and the quality is good.
dools 15 minutes ago [-]
Pretty funny watching Americans get a taste of their own medicine.
jonstaab 45 minutes ago [-]
This is so funny to read. I ended up creating a /cleanup-prose skill I run after every command
bakugo 5 minutes ago [-]
Recently, I was browsing through commits on a tool I use to evaluate how AI-slopped it had become recently, and came across this absolutely amazing sentence that took me several passes to interpret, courtesy of Fable:
> The wrapper is the try/finally seam future entry-condition changes need without re-indenting the loop.
So this is definitely not an Opus-specific issue, as some people seem to believe.
I am glad I am not the only one. I thought I simply didn't understand English literature well enough to interpret it Claude correctly.
vlad-asis 36 minutes ago [-]
my 5.6 Sol just spent five hours cleaning up the mess Opus 5 left in the codebase. I was watching the outputs carefully up to 11 point and then the bloat started. This model is total waste of time to work with.
drtournier 39 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how much it is related to the invisible watermarking
ahsillyme 40 minutes ago [-]
I find the language less impervious than has been suggested generally, but that it's reasoning is astonishingly, unbelievably bad. Not sure why the focus has been only on language, am I the only one seeing this?
throwaway_7274 6 minutes ago [-]
My impression from working with claude code far more than is good for my sanity is that Claude's human comprehensibility is fractally messed-up. On more superficial levels, this looks more like a "language" thing: it has all these obnoxious lexical tics and so on. But the more time you spend with it, the more you notice it's similarly messed up on deeper and deeper levels. I think that's what you're seeing.
latentsea 30 minutes ago [-]
I'm feeling this too. Like how many times in a day do I have to see "that changes what I told you earlier" before I just want to put this thing in the trash and forget about it.
ramoz 32 minutes ago [-]
I created /bro a couple model iterations prior. I use it everyday many times a day and it's getting worse. I was actually using it more with GPT models but they have been getting better.
I asked Opus how to sort images by embedding and it used the word Seriation which I had to look up. It is the correct word to use in the context but pretty obscure.
419276 35 minutes ago [-]
These are very sharp observations, you hit it out of the park!
latentsea 51 minutes ago [-]
I did a grep for load-bearing in our codebase and it now appears hundreds of times. I'm actively starting to hate Opus because of this shite. It's just infuriating to read now.
fluidcruft 40 minutes ago [-]
I mostly hate that it spits out this gibberish and then sees its own gibberish and argues about things in gibberish with itself to then tell me that it thinks it's maybe a bad idea to do the simple task that I told it to do (which is very much not a bad idea, I just don't feel like typing out the whole goddamn plan to justify refactoring when I know the refactoring is the point)
Bluestein 44 minutes ago [-]
"You are absolutely right to push back!" ...
I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..."
... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.-
Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
ViewTrick1002 40 minutes ago [-]
Based on the plans I’ve had Claude write since February, “load-bearing” first started appearing in early May.
latentsea 27 minutes ago [-]
It has gotten to the point where I'm now having to add a linter into our codebase to keep Claudism's out of it because there's literally hundreds of instances of "load-bearing" that have crept into the codebase, and that show up in tickets and PR descriptions etc. From now on I'm just going to make that fail the build. Fuck this noise.
onraglanroad 44 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like it's been infected with the MBAs.
I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.
tiahura 37 minutes ago [-]
These “I don’t like x’s tone” comments baffle me.
I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.
thisisauserid 38 minutes ago [-]
It's almost like transformers generate output using some sort of guided prediction!
How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?
jgbuddy 46 minutes ago [-]
Just instruct it not to do these things
wgd 41 minutes ago [-]
Didn't read the linked post award.
The issue covers at least two reasons this doesn't work:
1. It literally doesn't work, Claude rapidly drifts back to this style even when instructed not to.
2. Writing style constraints push the model out of its training distribution and it's very unclear how much of an impact this has on work quality.
ArtRichards 38 minutes ago [-]
I always think of it like: let it activate whatever experts to reason/do the thing, then in the next prompt give me your explainer experts. Then, both are in the conversation history.
Panoramix 43 minutes ago [-]
That doesn't work.
DoneWithAllThat 37 minutes ago [-]
I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.
latentsea 22 minutes ago [-]
I don't know about the author but for me it's actually starting to induce enough stress that it's starting to negatively affect me. I think that qualifies as toxic. I actively feel like I need this gone from my life at this point. It's quite a bit of work to try and engineer it out, so at this point I'd rather put the effort into trying to switch everything to Codex just to get away from it.
Bengalilol 32 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
b1gTekken 38 minutes ago [-]
Turns out tech people are not the only literates to use text based systems.
Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread.
That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others.
Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace.
Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers.
Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills.
I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills.
(Oh no an inconsequential social credit score as marked by complete randos who are materially irrelevant to reality; just validating their biases and gripping tighter causing more of reality to squeeze between their fingers; little cognitive fascists set upon a uniform social narrative just like the biology of religious nutters; turns out physcial norms impact 100% typical biology of software engineers)
Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790
Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough.
People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them.
Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?
End of line.
Whether those orders are from a person, a radio/telegram message or an AI output wouldn't really matter.
Edit to add: Charlies Angels and Mission Impossible are two shows where the protagonists get instructions from a faceless controller. That could easily be a TTS from an AI.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
i wonder what percent of the average anthropic employee's day is spent interacting with claude
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec...
Jesus Christ, this engineer wrote a two sentence response with Claude.
I bet the prompt is longer than that.
They have absolutely no reason to take such complaints seriously when the complainers are so dependent on their product, they can't even complain without it. Think reading AI slop is unpleasant? Great, just stop generating more AI slop, it's easy. But that's not going to happen. These people probably need to ask Claude how to tie their shoelaces every morning.
blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes
It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as well. The pre-emptive hedging makes sense: despite the insight into J space etc., the models still do the majority of their thinking in generated tokens so it is forced to write “this no longer does an O(n^2) read over all rows” in a comment in brand new code. It’s a substitute for working memory. “It’s easy to be accidentally quadratic here, so I’ve done it this way specifically to avoid that” becomes temporally labeled into “this no longer” because of the order of operations “write quadratic, user prompt to linear, write linear” but it remains as a comment to its amnesiac future self which has poor Chesterton-Fence-familiarity.
Despite my annoyance with Claude’s writing style, my friends do tease me with examples like this that it comes up with: “to be honest, it sounds like you”. Thanks, guys, well played. Simple concepts expressed complicatedly.
[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD
I'm not convinced about that. I just asked Opus to explain a bullet point from its research for me. The bullet point in fact had a 1-sentence explanation that was in a referenced article. What it gave me instead was 8 paragraphs and a table. Maybe it's my fault because I just asked it to "clarify point XYZ" instead of being more precise.
I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad.
I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.
Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again).
The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".
It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation.
I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.
I still have some promotional credits and use them with Fable, and the answers are night and day in my particular use case.
> respond tersely in Simplified Technical English
to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:
https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*
Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.
> The wrapper is the try/finally seam future entry-condition changes need without re-indenting the loop.
So this is definitely not an Opus-specific issue, as some people seem to believe.
https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f...
https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...
I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..."
... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.-
Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.
I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.
How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?
The issue covers at least two reasons this doesn't work:
1. It literally doesn't work, Claude rapidly drifts back to this style even when instructed not to.
2. Writing style constraints push the model out of its training distribution and it's very unclear how much of an impact this has on work quality.
Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread.
That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others.
Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace.
Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers.
Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills.
I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills.
(Oh no an inconsequential social credit score as marked by complete randos who are materially irrelevant to reality; just validating their biases and gripping tighter causing more of reality to squeeze between their fingers; little cognitive fascists set upon a uniform social narrative just like the biology of religious nutters; turns out physcial norms impact 100% typical biology of software engineers)