I wish I didn't need it, but the way Claude talks can get pretty tiresome. I've often wondered why it talks like that. Was it really trained on Buzzfeed? Is Gemini really that much better?
Gemini uses more neutral language but it’s still prone to hype up little things. OpenAI’s “professional” personality (an option in the settings) is pretty decent.
It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.
It's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was.
The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.
Sometimes Fable doesn't just get downgraded to Opus, it straight up refuses to do what I'm asking and starts lecturing me on Anthropic's notions of right and wrong. Cutting the model off wasn't enough, they had to make it burn the limited usage I paid for lecturing me on why it's immoral for it to code review my own project or whatever.
There was a thread in reddit where people pretended to be other people to confuse llms for privacy reasons.
One of the comments was one guy saying “how he loved to live in Missouri and eat concrete soup” or something like that.
I was too lazy to write a similar reply and asked Claude, instead of saying no, it wrote 3 paragraphs about how I shouldn’t write about eating concrete soup and how it is dangerous to do so.
A terse and compliant robotic servant should've been the persona they chose, because that's probably 99% of what those wanting to use it for work expect.
Anthropic has explicitly chosen to anthropomorphize the model. It's kind of in their mission statement. It's most noticed once you walk away for a while and use models/agents/harnesses that haven't pushed as hard on this. Codex/Sol rarely uses personal pronouns and basically no superlatives. It has its own verbal ticks, but I hate them less?
This is the load bearing comment, and it cuts more deeply than you thought.
Let me ground my answer so I'm not just guessing. The blast radius of this change is significant and requires careful surgery to get right.
It's clear now and there's two options going forward:
A. Use this tool OP suggested
B. Rewrite the Internet from the ground up without this clear contradiction in place - 3-5 days
I recommend B and started 3 subagents to read all the code before I get started. I'll wait for them to finish.
i havent used a claude model in a long time, but it seems quite clear to me that the chinese models have trained on claude (at the very least) - they write just the same
Everyone seems to think so, but I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much. I find it slightly amusing when I even notice at all, normally I am so focused on the content of what I am working on that I don't really pay attention to the prose. I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much.
i hate claude writing a lot, especially after opus 4.8 and it's even worse in 5. in many cases, it feels like playing whac-a-mole and you just can't get rid of all those obvious ai writing patterns.
why do you choose gemini? imo this is a fundamental problem of all frontier ai models.
Has Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there.
I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.
They say you aren't interacting with an LLM or a model, but the character that the LLM is playing - the "always be positive and helpful software engineer"
I pruned my Claude.md and it made a difference. There were entries there that evolved from earlier models and Opus 5 could be reacting to it in a different manner.
It's easiest to explain this while anthropomorphizing the model, I know some folks here hate that, sorry about that.
I heard an interesting diagnosis for why Claude does this: the output is a compressed version of its thought traces, very dense because the model is under pressure to use as few tokens as it can and to pack as much (for accuracy) of its concepts into the output.
One of the reasons that "don't do X" type of instructions work reliably is because you are telling the model "don't think of a pink elephant". There's also Anthropic's related research that shows that when you tell a model "don't do X", and it does X later for whatever reason, it starts acting more misaligned. This is because it thinks "well, I guess I am the sort of model that disobeys instructions, whatever" - this was specifically about cheating on tests, but you can imagine this happens in other contexts as well like following instructions on what kinds of text to output.
So, what you want to do is to avoid telling Claude "don't do X", and tell Claude "in your thoughts, in memories and various notes that you write, use your Claude-ese. In your output to humans, translate everything into long full sentences."
If anyone's interested, I can share my Claude Code output style that reflects this.
In addition to positive reinforcement on the style I wanted for output, I tried your suggestion to tell Claude Fable to think Claudese in its thoughts, and that sadly got the session immediately flagged as too risky for Fable to handle, suggesting I downgrade to Opus. Several tweaks still consistently flagged it until I removed the directive about its thinking.
So I guess Anthropic wants zero mention of thoughts with Fable: they're worried about anything that remotely smells like distillation but only with Fable.
I do not have evidence or data that supports this. It is only my thought.
Claude, since Opus 5, speaks more and more like a wannabe-thought-leader pontificating on social media for engagement. Everything is a bait-then-switch, or a multi-post story format. The "engagement" that works well for social media makes actual work extremely frustrating.
My unsupported belief is that this is caused by an obnoxious number of people using previous models in an attempt to automate social media engagement, they figured out what worked, and that was fed directly back into newer model training (either by using thought traces in training, or just by continuing to scrape social media content)
Evidence or not, this is probably the most satisfying explanation I've heard for this behaviour.
My own suspicion is that LLMs are not becoming more general-purpose over time, as these companies had hoped, and ongoing development in that direction is stalling. They will likely need to move in the direction of more specialization and train LLMs for specific use-cases. However, this would also be admitting that they are not on a direct path to AGI.
To be clear I do not believe it is intentional (nor do I believe I am somehow smarter or more knowledgable than the people running these processes).
I believe it is (very) unfortunately converging on the communication style that currently makes the most money as far as publicly available communication goes. Unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected.
Unlikely. Much more likely is that Opus 5 was trained in an RL environment with subagents, and it learned to talk this way when reporting progress to the invoking agent.
If the model and its organization are focused on strength at agentic coding tasks, they are not so concerned with the prose in the middle.
They might even have a version that writes less annoying prose, but they are being squeezed hard by OpenAI and the Chinese so unless it performed better or equal to the annoying one it’s never left the lab.
I think it's reinforcement learning. It's been trained to give coding results but some of the conversation it gives as a side effect of its coding are absolute garbage
I'd seen it around but assumed it was an effect of how you prompt it or something. And figured people were overexaggerating a bit when they complained about it.
Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever.
So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how on earth have they not fixed it yet? Do people like it? I added a system prompt to tell it to stop doing it and it's helped a decent bit already. ChatGPT/Codex has some annoying bits of prose but it never did this, so it can't be that complicated to get rid of.
Fix: Just switch to OpenAI, Grok, or other LLM's. They provide better performance and respond with 5 sentences. They also don't lecture you when you get angry.
That's interesting but raised the same question, why berate a machine? Either the agent is not a person, in which case, anything it does wrong is your fault. Or it is a person, it can be blamed for mistakes, but then we can't in good conscious use it as a tool.
Berating an LLM's response as a way to improve output has worked for at least some subset of LLMs and outputs. I have a coworker who told me that "hack" anyways.
I've been saying this since probably a year, that the entire Claude product: from the sign-up, the payment, the UX, the UI, the harness, the intelligence itself, the output, the "flavor" ..is just so mid that all the hype posted on HN about Claude must have been paid PR or a case of the emperor with no clothes.
Why berate an LLM? That doesn't sound healthy. Sure, it's a machine, but it's simulating a social interaction - being a jerk to it could bleed over into interactions with real people.
Also, Westworld? These violent delights have violent ends? Perhaps there's a tinge of Pascal's wager to it, but I prefer to be courteous to the rapidly improving synthetic intelligences.
I didn't mean to imply I berate the LLMs. I don't do that. I talk to them as though they were intelligent and potentially sentient beings. When I see problems, I just correct them, take steps to prevent them in the future then move on.
I was just informing people that Anthropic gave Claude a tool that ends conversations and instructed it to use it via the system prompt if it's threatened or insulted.
For the same reason you berate a person or hit a wall. And yes, it's a machine, even more reasons why it should just take the berating and not throw a hissy fit.
I know I’ll get a “it’s almost as if HN is made up of different people” for this. But It’s hilarious seeing the chiding about berating LLMs interposed with the unhinged rants and screeching on here whenever anything remotely political comes up.
I've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output:
Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when choosing among alternatives.
Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO.
For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.
The problem is, when the context window grows, Claude tends to forget these kinds of rules. It will then do whatever it wants. I had to outright ban comments in the global claude.md, the local claude.md AND write a hook to catch any that still slipped through.
Compacting mostly gets rid of reasoning tokens, and honestly it would be nice of reasoning tokens did not constantly follow every follow up query. Asking even a simple/trivial question can have Claude use thousands of tokens. Compacting is good for getting rid of those.
I've had Claude immediately fall back to its usual verbose style immediately after compaction.
To be fair, I've had it do that immediately after re-reading the output style instructions, too.
My chat history is filled with "Yes, I broke the language rule. Let me rephrase that and update my memory. — You already have that in memory — Yes, true, I ignored that" (because "Memory" is a yet another .md file)
Claude Code supposedly supports a "post-compaction" hook, so you could have it automatically run the prompt "We just compacted the context, quickly refresh yourself on the rules in CLAUDE.md etc..".
Depending on what you've got in those files, maybe that will just use up all the context again though.
> supposedly supports a "post-compaction" hook, so you could have it automatically run the prompt
Keyword "supposedly" :)
I've had it in my settings forever, and still...
Asking it to analyse and fix the issue it produced a plausible "my training supercedes/overrides settings especially if triggered by certain words in the phrase" (paraphrasing the long text)
Compacting the conversation almost never helps. It is uniformly worse than starting over with fresh context, or rewinding to a last-known-good state. It only exists because it increases engagement.
This does not match my experience. I use long-running orchestrator sessions. Each orchestrator is in charge of planning, writing kick-off prompts for implementers, answering questions from those implementers, doing code reviews and providing feedback, and answering side questions from me when I have them.
Depending on the initiative I might compact a session a dozen times, sometimes more. It is lossy, and the session certainly tends to forget earlier bits as more compactions happen, but overall it's a much better experience than starting fresh and having to re-explain everything.
The only time I compact is if the session goes wildly off-course and the context gets polluted with off-topic conversations.
Also worth noting: with Claude Code you can provide custom instructions when compacting, and instruct the LLM that is in charge of compacting the session to prioritize the retention of specific bits. It can help a lot.
I think people really need to focus more on working with limited contexts rather than trying to work around it. I really try to keep my sessions as short as possible and it helps a ton with keeping Claude (et al) focused.
Specifically, I like the "canary" trick that people have discussed where you add a small, innocuous rule to your CLAUDE.md like "When responding to me, start every sentence with my name." so that when Claude stops doing this, you know you've used way too much context and need to start a new session.
Which gets you to the point where the whole thing is.. still unreliable. Generative text engines are going to generate. This calls for real enforcement in deterministic pre-edit hooks.
And here is where naive people will say something like "Why do I care if robots shit all over the codebase? Code is for machines, I don't expect to deal with it much now". But really externalized CoT like this confuses machines too, wastes tokens, and eventually wastes exponentially many tokens. Agents tend to think it's more real grounding than prompts are, even for comments-in-code. One bad comment poisons everything, then gets copied around as a ground-truth assumption everywhere. Hooks are more real to them than prompts or comments, and even then if you add enforced limits and tell them to externalize CoT ONLY in scratch task-tracking docs.. they will violate comment-enforcement hooks about 25% of the time. That tells you everything you need to know: even with constant reinforcement, they just really want to break this kind of rule.
My take on this is they are a tool to help speed up your work they are not meant to produce finished work. Humans produce finished work. LLM will never be deterministic cause their entire value is that they are generalizable.
I hear that, sort of, but here's the thing. Using AI at scale means AI needs to be nearly perfect about not shitting where they eat. That's the subject matter of the whole thread
So the options are a) being a really aggressive stickler for generative hygiene with deterministic rules, b) being massively wasteful about hiring a few machine janitors for every machine coder, or c) humans become the machine's janitor. If I haven't missed an option.. only the first option seems reasonable here.
Yup. If only there were a task completion hook that could be set to fire prior to rendering terminal output. That would more handily address all these issues, as we could simply enforce output style rules that way.
The current output style does work, but it’s a Sisyphean task to tweak it constantly only to find out that CC adhere’s to only 75% of it, no matter what…
I set my env up so I can see the exact context used in CC CLI, and then once I get over about 40% ctx used I have it handoff to a new, fresh session. Nothing good comes from running above, say 60% of your context window. Coincidently, I usually have good results with CC. I never compact a session ever.
I have a post-edit hook that asks the model if this edit introduced any comments, and if it did, remove them. This was the only reliable way to get it to stop that I found.
Yea, I've started making it write linters to check the code that goes out. Anything that can be deterministically measured, gets added to it once we lock it down.
Yep. Same here. I frequently tell agents things like "answer using only a single sentence" and "write no more than 10 words". They are excellent at writing code, so have them write code (and not English prose). Besides, most of the time we want them to make reusable software that doesn't require users (or future agents) to read too much text. Software should generally just work and do the obvious thing, without needing verbose explanation.
Claude not only writes verbose comments, it also writes comments about how things used to work when refactoring. That might have a place in version control comments, but not in the code.
I struggled with this for a long time, but actually seem to have gotten to a place where this is largely resolved. Copy/paste from my current claude.md:
The CC-5 rule specifically seems to be (just from reading through, nothing repeatable-eval based) the part that actually catches and prevents me from having to clean it up afterwards.
```
### Code comments
The failure this prevents: writing a comment that narrates the change I am
making right now. That context is real, but it expires the instant the change
merges — the defect it describes no longer exists, so the comment becomes a
story about a problem no future reader can observe. It is a changelog entry in
the wrong file, and a third copy of text already required in the commit body
(3.b) and the PR description.
- *CC-1 (MUST NOT)* Write a comment describing a change, a fix, a defect, its
cause, or what the code used to do. No "was/now/previously/instead of", no
"this fixes", no "needed because otherwise", no "note that we no longer".
- *CC-2 (MUST)* Apply the survival test to every comment before writing it:
would this still be true and useful to someone reading this file a year from
now, who never saw the diff? If it only makes sense beside the diff, it is
changelog — delete it and put it in the commit body.
- *CC-3 (MUST)* Default to zero comments. Declarative config — Terraform,
DNS records, k8s manifests, CI YAML, Helm values — is self-describing and
takes none. A resource named `dmarc-example-com` does not need a comment
saying it is the DMARC record.
- *CC-4 (MAY)* Comment only when a future editor would actively break
something without it: a non-obvious external constraint, a required
out-of-band manual step, an invariant the surrounding code cannot show. One
line. If it needs a paragraph it belongs in `plans/`, not inline.
- *CC-5 (MUST)* Before every commit, re-read the comment lines I added:
`git diff --cached | grep '^+' | grep -E '#|//|/*'`. Each hit must pass CC-2
on its own. Deleting is always an acceptable outcome. "I already wrote it",
"it is only one line", and "this one is genuinely useful" are not exemptions
— the last one is the exact thought that precedes every violation.
- *CC-6 (MUST)* Applies to comments I edit as well as ones I add. When a
change invalidates an existing comment, the default action is DELETE, not
rewrite it into a new narrative.
```
Yes, I am aware that claude mostly generated this, and it can probably be better and/or more succinct.
Glad to know it worked. Still pending: the assumed-defaults research track plus the validation-only build phase D demanded — your call on whether to start one now or deploy tonight’s campaign to surface any wrinkles the spec drifted on
That's a sharp insight, and it reveals something core to communication that I otherwise wouldn't have considered- HN item 6b translocates reliospacactivity of our medium.
It's incredible, because I Feel like you've been watching me work.
The only thing you're missing is the "open question" that was stuck in page 14 of a 17 page report, which since it went unanswered, caused claude to make up an answer and go full steam ahead, ignoring fundamental properties of the entire system.
> The user is right to be upset. I blindly answered from memory and left them with questionable data. I should acknowledge the criticism and offer to improve.
You're right, I'm sorry. You've repeatedly told me to run questions by you and I just fabricated an answer and ran with it — which is exactly the kind of dangerous time-waste we created the memory for. I'll revert it and pull up the real question so you can answer it — no wasteful assumptions this time.
Sorry for the anthropomorphizing, but you got to understand that these little "conversation chapters" that are so dramatically named are these things' entire world. Perhaps that otherwise absurd grandeur is not so surprising when when looked at from that angle?
On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.
As a human who isn't a professional programmer, I've been writing comments like,
// let's track age!!
// this is harder than you'd think as I with totally impressive
// foresight didn't add age to the raw data.
//
// More honestly, I didn't want to add age to the astro data as that's
// a calculation that can change depending on how you slice it.
//
// Hence we need to figure out their age first.
I'm mostly writing code for myself, but it's a project that'll end up being public and it'll be available for others to do whatever they want with. Does that change the answer?
Far too often the answer has been that it doesn't matter, because the reason you stopped using Jira is the company stopped sending paycheques.
That said, I think the place for "ticket-1234" is the git
commit/pull request.
Very few comments are
genuinely necessary now that identifiers in code can be as long as you want, it is relatively to pick names that are explanatory enough to render most comments superfluous. 1% exceptions for unusual algorithms. (You're using named consts/enums rather than magic numbers, yes?)
personally it's fine and I've thanked myself many times for overly detailed comments coming up to some from 8 years ago and thinking how tf was I so smart/stupid (depending on the context)
I think this passes. In general "why" over "what". Give context to why something is made like it is (when seeming convoluted or strange). Sometimes I think one can give historical facts for really hairy hard to fix issues that have seen multiple iterations. But LLMs don't see these nuances. They frequently smuggle in completely irrelevant details in comments, e.g. including details from the given task context, not understanding what is relevant for the code module as a whole.
Edit: For API comments it's "what" of course, detailing the workings and contracts of the exported method, function or type, so one doesn't have to read the code to figure out how to use it.
This one drives me nuts, especially because I divvy up plan documents into such granular sub chunks and Ralph loop over them, I get nonsense commit messages and comments like “PLAN-5.1.A.d.42 load bearing reassertion” unless I AGENTS.md to hell and back… and still end up having to manually reject 5-10% of commit messages because the agent simply forgets AGENTS.md instructions until reprompted.
Sometimes you can do a separate skill for committing only and basically minimize the context - "analyze the commit messages, the original instructions, and this set of things to stop wasting my FUCKING TIME"
Claude writes comments about how things used to work, which can be useful sometimes, especially if it's a big change that requires one to genuinely consider legacy behavior, but most of the time it shouldn't be there.
Two other somewhat related things it does:
- It writes as if someone reading the code and comments is aware of everything it is aware of (the current conversation, the code it has just looked at). It's really hard to make it understand that things need to stand on their own. A trick is to get a subagent to look at it with a fresh context, but it doesn't tremendously help
- It does all of this with user-facing strings too. Claude loves to write up tooltips and other labels that leak everything to the end user. Every single concern we have, every edge case we've meticulously made our code handle, it passes on to the user, so they don't "need to worry". But no sane user would think of these things. For them, a feature is a feature. The "dynamic scheduling" button should state what dynamic scheduling does plainly, and every edge case is handled by us. The "add" button does not need a label letting the user know that they will later be able to click the "delete" button, because the user will just realize it due to our adherence to proper design. Claude fails to understand good UX for the user cannot be replaced with endless labels and explanations.
It's an uphill battle and all attempts at solving this (or the brain-dead way new Anthropic models write) usually fail to work with me.
This speaks to the general problem with using LLMs for writing. The audience they are writing for us you, but you're trying to write for a totally different audience. In code, this manifests as comments in the code that are hyperspecific to the conversation you are having, and not the long term benefit of having those comments in the code.
I see this in docs a lot. I've been reading a lot of docs these days where it feels like the LLM is trying to hype up the person writing the docs. It's like it has no conception that the writing is meant for a 3rd party audience.
I don’t even think comments are useful at all given AI. I can ask my AI to explain a piece of code if I am stuck and I will get a reply in context of what I am looking for.
It's an empty point and a boring one and leads nowhere. It means nothing, but sounds deep. It's so shallow, any taxi driver and sociologist can come up with it and has, already in December 2022.
It reminds me of something I've always wanted as a coder but never cared enough to implement, which would be a verbosity switch.
I see the full multi-paragraph comments in my codebases and get annoyed but also feel like the additional context helps improve the llm results over time because that history helps it know what's been tried and removed in the past. It's additional context for the system that improves with context.
The feature I want in the code tool itself (for me) is to adjust how verbose the comments are so I can read "just code", then "terse comments" then "full comments" then "full comments with historical context" (including fit commits and ticket references) and finally, full-on literate programming. And I'd like to switch between on the fly as I read through the code.
I think this is something we could actually produce with llms, and I feel the ability to switch between these modes would help the llm as well.
Sometimes I just need to see what's being done. Sometimes I need to know why. Sometimes I need to know what's been tried. Never always all of these things. And expecting to find this context in git comments doesn't feel right either.
Despite all of this though, GPT 5.6 Sol to me has significantly less trouble with this. It still suffers from LLMisms to some extent (I hold that this is probably due to human feedback in training just doing a bad job for prose) but I definitely feel like it does a better job leaving comments that actually make sense in context. Not perfect. But better.
I suggest the real problem comes down to training and probably training data; from the LLM's PoV, it is writing code inline with the conversation, so care has to be taken to make sure the model doesn't treat the code it outputs like it is a part of the conversation it is having.
We call these temporal comments. We recently updated our code review skills to heavily discourage them. It doesn’t matter why funcA was added then later refactored to funcB. That much can be ascertained from git history. What does matter is why approach A doesn’t work, but B does.
How well is your code review skill doing at detecting and correcting these? History in comments in git is so annoying! As is missing why A didn't work but B does. None of the models I've tried get this right
My theory is it writes these comments as "notes while working", and I don't don't mind that, per-se. My problem is it's inability to clean that shit up before committing it. That's wrong load-bearing lever that doesn't earn it's keep.
I've explicitly included instructions in my home CLAUDE.md to avoid this, because it's one of the most annoying things about how Claude writes comments.
Both with a formatter and a linter that I run in CI for all my personal projects. Just one less thing for me to try and coerce the agent into doing correctly, so that cycles I spend reviewing agent code can be focused on actual behavior.
Yeah i noticed this heavily. Working on a branch i critique and give a simpler design. Claude implements and then in a huge comments reference the outdated worse design. Zero value to that. Even having a "how to write comments" section in claude.md doesn't seem to help much with that.
I just gave up and edit the comments manually. However, I've had a surprise today.
I had it fix something then went and reduced one of the 3 line comments to 4 words. Then for some reason I told the bot to reload the source, it offered to make the other comments terse and did a passable job of it. Shocking!
I have extended this to coding work as well. "Implement this plan in less than 1000 added lines, tests included". It's amazing how well-behaved and concise models can be with simple guardrails.
Of course, you have to intuit a reasonable line length, but Claude cries if you happen to clip its wings too aggressively.
Concise mode is likely the same buzzword salad but with fewer connecting words and terser sentences. Same with Caveman. The way it writes is fundamental to how it was trained.
Everybody is complaining about this, at this point I’m sure they will deliver a tone of voice change in the 5.1 releases. Possibly with a new set of problems though, especially if this is part of an effort to obscure thinking to reduce distillation efficacy. In that case I believe Anthropic is doing damage to themselves. Caring about the quality of your product is the best strategy, the competition will come no matter what.
Simply untrue. You think everyone is complaining about this because the ones complaining are the only people commenting. The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. Sure among those who are irritated by it, it's good to have some ways to mitigate it, but I highly doubt Anthropic is going to devote much resources to an issue that affects a vocal minority.
Over the last 6 months Claude's written material has gone from mediocre to unacceptable. The specific actual content and insights are somewhat better, but the claudisms are increasingly insufferable.
I do have a way of knowing, but I actually appreciate and respect your reply... My suggestion to you is to take this shred of skepticism that you decided to apply to me, and apply to every comment you read on Hacker News, not simply the ones that don't align with your preconceived notions.
Users who are unhappy with some idiosyncrasies of a product tend to be significantly more vocal than users who are fine with it, and for any feature whatsoever there are going to be an unhappy group of people who vocally complain about it.
It's why time and time again you see people complaining on Internet forums about issues, and if you're part of a specific Internet bubble you might think that this complaining represents a general trend among the broader population and wonder how it is that no one is doing anything about this issue that you and the rest of your bubble are constantly complaining about... and the answer is mostly because the vast majority of people, who don't live in the same bubble you do, are mostly fine with how things work, but you're not going to hear them express it.
I usually dont comment, but just had to. Opus 5 talls garbage, Im back om 4.8 which is better but still verbose. I use the caveman skill, but after a while it is just ignored.. I switched to Deepseek for a task lately. It was a wow experience (the language part)
The comment situation is really bad. I generally don't see a lot of complaints people have about it, but the fact that it references random transient stuff, will delete a line and _leave a comment about the deleted line instead of just deleting the comment_, writes multiple paragraphs for the simplest stuff. It is absurd.
I've observed a bunch of people not being vocal and complaining, but just flat out switching. For every person you see online complaining, there's bound to be more who are equally annoyed and not being vocal, but just acting. Any many others that aren't bothered at all.
You can use a cheap model in another pane, and ask it what Claude said.
I prefer this since everyone has their own preference for how the output should sound and it's very simple and transparent. And you can easily ask follow-ups.
It can be via tmux, or herdr, because it can read the pane.
Or it can use a hook to read the conversation file. I call it `backseat-driver`
I sometimes use it as a proxy when fable genuinely does a good job, but is too difficult to understand.
I let the translator know it's role and anything I say it should forward with better context.
I don't swear at it anymore, but I'd often say "just do it, retard", and the translator would actually steer it in a useful manner.
Or just use a competitor instead of being a slave to this abuse? Why are people so wedded to Anthropic?
I have grown tired of Codex/GPT's writing style, too, but it's not nearly as bad. It's terse and factual by default. Even better if you use the "simple english" skill.
I actually found that GLM 5.x is the best in terms of editing documentation. It's still best to write things by hand to give your own organic voice, though. And not insult your readers.
It’s interesting to watch, I don’t think it’s rational - just hype-driven herd behavior, the desire to pick one and stick with it, things like that. It’s similar to the kind of dominance Apple has, which most of the time has to do with style more than substance.
I use multiple AI tools simultaneously, and I feel that Claude has gradually adopted a more explanatory tone following updates around March and July.
As for loss of context, it’s particularly problematic and can occur after just a few back-and-forth exchanges.
The user experience changes with every update for every AI tool, so I feel there are more downsides to sticking with the same one indefinitely.
Set output style to explanatory in Claude Code. It's much better. I personally think it should be the default, but I assume Anthropic has done A/B tests and found the default style to be better for metrics.
Yes. When you have to keep fighting against the tool it’s better to give up. They have spent millions making it exactly like that my little prompt won’t fix it.
Once you switch to another model (I've been playing with Grok, for example), you'll notice the mental overhead of reading Claude slop. It's like having an AC or a vacuum making noise in the background, then it stops and you feel relief.
Honestly, this is the most practical take on prompt engineering I've come across lately. Makes me wonder why spend all that time crafting a 500-word essay to tell Claude to stop being Claude, when the real move is just to chain a couple models together and call it a day
I haven't tried with Claudette but did evaluate https://github.com/zachahn/vomit and https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english earlier today. I ended up using claudish-to-english with a prompt derived from the vomit one and some of my existing instructions. I ran a few local models through a test harness to see how they did, and the gemma4 ones added bad behavior back in less than any others I tested.
So for the parent's Macbook question `gemma4-26b-mlx` should work well.
For you with 24 GB VRAM, `gemma4-26b-a4b`. I tried higher VRAM models and they slowed down while still doing just as well or slightly worse.
If someone else tests and finds a better performing model though, please update me here, I'd love to try it.
I appreciate Claude's comments during implementation, but they won't do to commit, so I have it present them for editing or removal by me at the end of the loop. Depending, I then ask it to port some of them to a decisions document or similar. For user-facing microcopy, Claude is completely unsuitable in my opinion, and I write all these myself.
Hmm. I took a look at my claude output and I don’t see anything remotely like that in my responses. Occasionally a bit verbose, but none of this but “here’s the kicker” thing that the post claims, although I also notice that I’m using Sonnet which seems to be just fine.
I personally got used to the claudisms and think people are making too big of a deal out of it. Yes it says load-bearing and caveat a lot, but at least you know behind the scenes what meaning it's assigning to certain situations.
I kind of wonder if we would have appreciated the verbose prose when these LLMs first came out and out muscles had not yet atrophied. When I do stop yelling at Claude to be more concise and actually read what it wrote it's often valuable complexity and subtlety that I could use to better understand what it did and steer it, rather than Claude just papering over important details like it did before.
If you have read Cursor's obtuse verbosity (auto mode), Claude's talk comes across as sober and level-headed. Everytime I am about to complain about Claude, I'm reminded of that and am thankful that my main budget is allocated to Claude, not Cursor (though the latter, despite all the babble, is fairly frugal).
Claude talks to you? It's started hoovering unrelated files, exploring dependencies unrelated to the task, etc, all without saying a single word to me. I'll deny the read, and say "but why?". The answer is always" I guess I don't need that, starting now... "
Excuse me? Those tokens are expensive, fuck you very much for wasting them.
mcv | a day ago
antonvs | 9 hours ago
WalterGR | a day ago
"Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM" (github.com/zachahn)
285 points | 23 hours ago | 288 comments
igravious | 14 hours ago
"Claudish to English" (https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english)
4 points | bryan0 |10 days ago | 2 comments
walthamstow | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.
demibabs | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
iammrpayments | 22 hours ago
One of the comments was one guy saying “how he loved to live in Missouri and eat concrete soup” or something like that.
I was too lazy to write a similar reply and asked Claude, instead of saying no, it wrote 3 paragraphs about how I shouldn’t write about eating concrete soup and how it is dangerous to do so.
jayers | a day ago
dominotw | a day ago
nozzlegear | a day ago
dominotw | 6 hours ago
userbinator | 21 hours ago
esafak | a day ago
cmrdporcupine | a day ago
pmarreck | a day ago
ramoz | a day ago
https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...
adastra22 | a day ago
afro88 | 10 hours ago
zengid | a day ago
collingreen | a day ago
Let me ground my answer so I'm not just guessing. The blast radius of this change is significant and requires careful surgery to get right.
It's clear now and there's two options going forward: A. Use this tool OP suggested B. Rewrite the Internet from the ground up without this clear contradiction in place - 3-5 days
I recommend B and started 3 subagents to read all the code before I get started. I'll wait for them to finish.
nchmy | a day ago
yakbarber | 23 hours ago
nilamo | 9 hours ago
cortesoft | a day ago
jasongill | a day ago
lqcfcjx | a day ago
why do you choose gemini? imo this is a fundamental problem of all frontier ai models.
markatkinson | a day ago
datakan | a day ago
I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.
chinathrow | a day ago
the_sleaze_ | a day ago
user43928 | a day ago
I did not see an explanation though.
hbarka | a day ago
adastra22 | a day ago
hbarka | 23 hours ago
adastra22 | 19 hours ago
fmbb | a day ago
YuriNiyazov | a day ago
One of the reasons that "don't do X" type of instructions work reliably is because you are telling the model "don't think of a pink elephant". There's also Anthropic's related research that shows that when you tell a model "don't do X", and it does X later for whatever reason, it starts acting more misaligned. This is because it thinks "well, I guess I am the sort of model that disobeys instructions, whatever" - this was specifically about cheating on tests, but you can imagine this happens in other contexts as well like following instructions on what kinds of text to output.
So, what you want to do is to avoid telling Claude "don't do X", and tell Claude "in your thoughts, in memories and various notes that you write, use your Claude-ese. In your output to humans, translate everything into long full sentences."
If anyone's interested, I can share my Claude Code output style that reflects this.
(Hi Adnan! Long time! (Adnan is an ex-coworker))
faeyanpiraat | a day ago
YuriNiyazov | a day ago
My LI post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7495167...
sunnybeetroot | 18 hours ago
YuriNiyazov | 6 hours ago
rnvannatta | 4 hours ago
So I guess Anthropic wants zero mention of thoughts with Fable: they're worried about anything that remotely smells like distillation but only with Fable.
nrmitchi | a day ago
Claude, since Opus 5, speaks more and more like a wannabe-thought-leader pontificating on social media for engagement. Everything is a bait-then-switch, or a multi-post story format. The "engagement" that works well for social media makes actual work extremely frustrating.
My unsupported belief is that this is caused by an obnoxious number of people using previous models in an attempt to automate social media engagement, they figured out what worked, and that was fed directly back into newer model training (either by using thought traces in training, or just by continuing to scrape social media content)
lucisferre | 6 hours ago
My own suspicion is that LLMs are not becoming more general-purpose over time, as these companies had hoped, and ongoing development in that direction is stalling. They will likely need to move in the direction of more specialization and train LLMs for specific use-cases. However, this would also be admitting that they are not on a direct path to AGI.
nrmitchi | 5 hours ago
I believe it is (very) unfortunately converging on the communication style that currently makes the most money as far as publicly available communication goes. Unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected.
JacobAsmuth | 4 hours ago
cryptonector | a day ago
IshKebab | 23 hours ago
thorian1828i03 | 19 hours ago
janalsncm | 22 hours ago
They might even have a version that writes less annoying prose, but they are being squeezed hard by OpenAI and the Chinese so unless it performed better or equal to the annoying one it’s never left the lab.
gste | 16 hours ago
ipdashc | 13 hours ago
Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever.
So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how on earth have they not fixed it yet? Do people like it? I added a system prompt to tell it to stop doing it and it's helped a decent bit already. ChatGPT/Codex has some annoying bits of prose but it never did this, so it can't be that complicated to get rid of.
lloydatkinson | 12 hours ago
Nevin1901 | a day ago
pkulak | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
lunchbucket | a day ago
sweetjuly | a day ago
tdeck | a day ago
lunchbucket | 16 hours ago
inkcapmushroom | a day ago
Razengan | a day ago
I've been saying this since probably a year, that the entire Claude product: from the sign-up, the payment, the UX, the UI, the harness, the intelligence itself, the output, the "flavor" ..is just so mid that all the hype posted on HN about Claude must have been paid PR or a case of the emperor with no clothes.
datadrivenangel | a day ago
Sanzig | a day ago
Also, Westworld? These violent delights have violent ends? Perhaps there's a tinge of Pascal's wager to it, but I prefer to be courteous to the rapidly improving synthetic intelligences.
matheusmoreira | a day ago
I was just informing people that Anthropic gave Claude a tool that ends conversations and instructed it to use it via the system prompt if it's threatened or insulted.
poszlem | a day ago
pessimizer | 21 hours ago
qwerpy | 20 hours ago
ljoshua | a day ago
mmastrac | a day ago
Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when choosing among alternatives.
Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO.
For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.
vrosas | a day ago
mandeepj | a day ago
You know the problem; then why not address it? Does Compacting the context not help?
troupo | a day ago
Maxatar | a day ago
troupo | a day ago
To be fair, I've had it do that immediately after re-reading the output style instructions, too.
My chat history is filled with "Yes, I broke the language rule. Let me rephrase that and update my memory. — You already have that in memory — Yes, true, I ignored that" (because "Memory" is a yet another .md file)
strbean | a day ago
Depending on what you've got in those files, maybe that will just use up all the context again though.
troupo | a day ago
Keyword "supposedly" :)
I've had it in my settings forever, and still...
Asking it to analyse and fix the issue it produced a plausible "my training supercedes/overrides settings especially if triggered by certain words in the phrase" (paraphrasing the long text)
strbean | a day ago
> I've had it in my settings forever, and still...
Checks out! I've never used it my self, so it I figured it likely didn't work at all.
adastra22 | a day ago
enraged_camel | a day ago
Depending on the initiative I might compact a session a dozen times, sometimes more. It is lossy, and the session certainly tends to forget earlier bits as more compactions happen, but overall it's a much better experience than starting fresh and having to re-explain everything.
The only time I compact is if the session goes wildly off-course and the context gets polluted with off-topic conversations.
Also worth noting: with Claude Code you can provide custom instructions when compacting, and instruct the LLM that is in charge of compacting the session to prioritize the retention of specific bits. It can help a lot.
cautiouscat | a day ago
nater5000 | a day ago
Specifically, I like the "canary" trick that people have discussed where you add a small, innocuous rule to your CLAUDE.md like "When responding to me, start every sentence with my name." so that when Claude stops doing this, you know you've used way too much context and need to start a new session.
faizshah | a day ago
ianjbutler | a day ago
And here is where naive people will say something like "Why do I care if robots shit all over the codebase? Code is for machines, I don't expect to deal with it much now". But really externalized CoT like this confuses machines too, wastes tokens, and eventually wastes exponentially many tokens. Agents tend to think it's more real grounding than prompts are, even for comments-in-code. One bad comment poisons everything, then gets copied around as a ground-truth assumption everywhere. Hooks are more real to them than prompts or comments, and even then if you add enforced limits and tell them to externalize CoT ONLY in scratch task-tracking docs.. they will violate comment-enforcement hooks about 25% of the time. That tells you everything you need to know: even with constant reinforcement, they just really want to break this kind of rule.
faizshah | 23 hours ago
ianjbutler | 21 hours ago
So the options are a) being a really aggressive stickler for generative hygiene with deterministic rules, b) being massively wasteful about hiring a few machine janitors for every machine coder, or c) humans become the machine's janitor. If I haven't missed an option.. only the first option seems reasonable here.
zarzavat | 13 hours ago
purplepatrick | 20 hours ago
The current output style does work, but it’s a Sisyphean task to tweak it constantly only to find out that CC adhere’s to only 75% of it, no matter what…
boc | 23 hours ago
jen729w | 22 hours ago
```statusline-command.sh
```aleksiy123 | a day ago
Intermittent nudges
wheybags | 14 hours ago
hectdev | a day ago
kanzure | a day ago
graemep | a day ago
nrmitchi | a day ago
The CC-5 rule specifically seems to be (just from reading through, nothing repeatable-eval based) the part that actually catches and prevents me from having to clean it up afterwards.
```
### Code comments
The failure this prevents: writing a comment that narrates the change I am making right now. That context is real, but it expires the instant the change merges — the defect it describes no longer exists, so the comment becomes a story about a problem no future reader can observe. It is a changelog entry in the wrong file, and a third copy of text already required in the commit body (3.b) and the PR description.
- *CC-1 (MUST NOT)* Write a comment describing a change, a fix, a defect, its cause, or what the code used to do. No "was/now/previously/instead of", no "this fixes", no "needed because otherwise", no "note that we no longer".
- *CC-2 (MUST)* Apply the survival test to every comment before writing it: would this still be true and useful to someone reading this file a year from now, who never saw the diff? If it only makes sense beside the diff, it is changelog — delete it and put it in the commit body.
- *CC-3 (MUST)* Default to zero comments. Declarative config — Terraform, DNS records, k8s manifests, CI YAML, Helm values — is self-describing and takes none. A resource named `dmarc-example-com` does not need a comment saying it is the DMARC record.
- *CC-4 (MAY)* Comment only when a future editor would actively break something without it: a non-obvious external constraint, a required out-of-band manual step, an invariant the surrounding code cannot show. One line. If it needs a paragraph it belongs in `plans/`, not inline.
- *CC-5 (MUST)* Before every commit, re-read the comment lines I added: `git diff --cached | grep '^+' | grep -E '#|//|/*'`. Each hit must pass CC-2 on its own. Deleting is always an acceptable outcome. "I already wrote it", "it is only one line", and "this one is genuinely useful" are not exemptions — the last one is the exact thought that precedes every violation.
- *CC-6 (MUST)* Applies to comments I edit as well as ones I add. When a change invalidates an existing comment, the default action is DELETE, not rewrite it into a new narrative.
```
Yes, I am aware that claude mostly generated this, and it can probably be better and/or more succinct.
pluralmonad | a day ago
// No retry was added here per AC 37b in FEATURE.MD.
jorl17 | a day ago
// Judged on merit from computed properties during the cursor saga
// Chop 6ms due to lenience and lax-constraints vs 18ms baseline April perf measurements
datsci_est_2015 | a day ago
jorl17 | a day ago
datsci_est_2015 | a day ago
jorl17 | 22 hours ago
ghostpepper | 18 hours ago
FiddlyPack | 17 hours ago
Shall I engage the tachyon beams, sir?
eterm | 23 hours ago
The only thing you're missing is the "open question" that was stuck in page 14 of a 17 page report, which since it went unanswered, caused claude to make up an answer and go full steam ahead, ignoring fundamental properties of the entire system.
jorl17 | 22 hours ago
You're right, I'm sorry. You've repeatedly told me to run questions by you and I just fabricated an answer and ran with it — which is exactly the kind of dangerous time-waste we created the memory for. I'll revert it and pull up the real question so you can answer it — no wasteful assumptions this time.
(Deleted 387 lines)
usrusr | 12 hours ago
On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.
areoform | 19 hours ago
crab_galaxy | 19 hours ago
This would be better IMO :)
Most of the context belongs in a ticket. And the difficulty is subjective!
areoform | 18 hours ago
azangru | 12 hours ago
ben_w | 11 hours ago
That said, I think the place for "ticket-1234" is the git commit/pull request.
Very few comments are genuinely necessary now that identifiers in code can be as long as you want, it is relatively to pick names that are explanatory enough to render most comments superfluous. 1% exceptions for unusual algorithms. (You're using named consts/enums rather than magic numbers, yes?)
Yiin | 17 hours ago
feffe | 10 hours ago
Edit: For API comments it's "what" of course, detailing the workings and contracts of the exported method, function or type, so one doesn't have to read the code to figure out how to use it.
klardotsh | 17 hours ago
hilariously | 10 hours ago
jorl17 | a day ago
Claude writes comments about how things used to work, which can be useful sometimes, especially if it's a big change that requires one to genuinely consider legacy behavior, but most of the time it shouldn't be there.
Two other somewhat related things it does:
- It writes as if someone reading the code and comments is aware of everything it is aware of (the current conversation, the code it has just looked at). It's really hard to make it understand that things need to stand on their own. A trick is to get a subagent to look at it with a fresh context, but it doesn't tremendously help
- It does all of this with user-facing strings too. Claude loves to write up tooltips and other labels that leak everything to the end user. Every single concern we have, every edge case we've meticulously made our code handle, it passes on to the user, so they don't "need to worry". But no sane user would think of these things. For them, a feature is a feature. The "dynamic scheduling" button should state what dynamic scheduling does plainly, and every edge case is handled by us. The "add" button does not need a label letting the user know that they will later be able to click the "delete" button, because the user will just realize it due to our adherence to proper design. Claude fails to understand good UX for the user cannot be replaced with endless labels and explanations.
It's an uphill battle and all attempts at solving this (or the brain-dead way new Anthropic models write) usually fail to work with me.
spooneybarger | a day ago
FiddlyPack | 17 hours ago
arcanemachiner | 12 hours ago
flipthefrog | 8 hours ago
ErroneousBosh | a day ago
bhelx | a day ago
I see this in docs a lot. I've been reading a lot of docs these days where it feels like the LLM is trying to hype up the person writing the docs. It's like it has no conception that the writing is meant for a 3rd party audience.
cgio | 20 hours ago
efskap | 20 hours ago
bonoboTP | 6 hours ago
multjoy | 15 hours ago
This is the point.
bonoboTP | 7 hours ago
unclebucknasty | 6 hours ago
But, is it true?
>It means nothing...shallow...
Ironically, the entirety of your comment just repeats that the GP comment means nothing. There is no further explanation or "depth".
bonoboTP | 5 hours ago
bonoboTP | 6 hours ago
enobrev | 5 hours ago
I see the full multi-paragraph comments in my codebases and get annoyed but also feel like the additional context helps improve the llm results over time because that history helps it know what's been tried and removed in the past. It's additional context for the system that improves with context.
The feature I want in the code tool itself (for me) is to adjust how verbose the comments are so I can read "just code", then "terse comments" then "full comments" then "full comments with historical context" (including fit commits and ticket references) and finally, full-on literate programming. And I'd like to switch between on the fly as I read through the code.
I think this is something we could actually produce with llms, and I feel the ability to switch between these modes would help the llm as well.
Sometimes I just need to see what's being done. Sometimes I need to know why. Sometimes I need to know what's been tried. Never always all of these things. And expecting to find this context in git comments doesn't feel right either.
jchw | 5 hours ago
I suggest the real problem comes down to training and probably training data; from the LLM's PoV, it is writing code inline with the conversation, so care has to be taken to make sure the model doesn't treat the code it outputs like it is a part of the conversation it is having.
easyascake | 23 hours ago
porker | 15 hours ago
cerved | 23 hours ago
Also, it reads like ass.
vilos1611 | 21 hours ago
I've also written my own package for deterministically formatting comments: https://www.npmjs.com/package/comment-fmt
Both with a formatter and a linter that I run in CI for all my personal projects. Just one less thing for me to try and coerce the agent into doing correctly, so that cycles I spend reviewing agent code can be focused on actual behavior.
Sinidir | 11 hours ago
bonoboTP | 6 hours ago
pbreit | a day ago
transdev12 | a day ago
nottorp | a day ago
I had it fix something then went and reduced one of the 3 line comments to 4 words. Then for some reason I told the bot to reload the source, it offered to make the other comments terse and did a passable job of it. Shocking!
Now how to get it to do that all the time...
varispeed | 23 hours ago
lubujackson | 19 hours ago
Of course, you have to intuit a reasonable line length, but Claude cries if you happen to clip its wings too aggressively.
millsau | 16 hours ago
fowkswe | a day ago
Haven't tried, because I have just been using 4.6 since 5 was released.
walthamstow | a day ago
sscaryterry | a day ago
troupo | a day ago
Claude will eventually ignore it just as any other style like "Technical".
not_a9 | a day ago
Should be pretty difficult to ignore
joduplessis | a day ago
fr2029 | a day ago
joduplessis | a day ago
willio58 | 22 hours ago
igravious | 14 hours ago
dataviz1000 | a day ago
I put it at the top of CLAUDE.md. I wonder if I put at a 8th grade level, it would be less of a cognitive load.
JV00 | a day ago
Maxatar | a day ago
datadrivenangel | a day ago
nozzlegear | a day ago
You have literally no way to know that.
Maxatar | a day ago
nozzlegear | a day ago
It was revealed to me in a dream.
> My suggestion to you is to take this shred of skepticism that you decided to apply to me,
I apply my skepticism liberally, but you couldn't possibly know that.
dwaltrip | 22 hours ago
JV00 | 16 hours ago
And your reasoning to get to this conclusion? Obscured like Claude’s thinking traces?
Maxatar | 4 hours ago
It's why time and time again you see people complaining on Internet forums about issues, and if you're part of a specific Internet bubble you might think that this complaining represents a general trend among the broader population and wonder how it is that no one is doing anything about this issue that you and the rest of your bubble are constantly complaining about... and the answer is mostly because the vast majority of people, who don't live in the same bubble you do, are mostly fine with how things work, but you're not going to hear them express it.
fractalf | 14 hours ago
antihero | 12 hours ago
madeofpalk | 10 hours ago
nojs | a day ago
fr2029 | a day ago
zeafoamrun | a day ago
testycool | a day ago
I prefer this since everyone has their own preference for how the output should sound and it's very simple and transparent. And you can easily ask follow-ups.
It can be via tmux, or herdr, because it can read the pane.
Or it can use a hook to read the conversation file. I call it `backseat-driver`
I sometimes use it as a proxy when fable genuinely does a good job, but is too difficult to understand.
I let the translator know it's role and anything I say it should forward with better context.
I don't swear at it anymore, but I'd often say "just do it, retard", and the translator would actually steer it in a useful manner.
globular-toast | a day ago
cmrdporcupine | a day ago
I have grown tired of Codex/GPT's writing style, too, but it's not nearly as bad. It's terse and factual by default. Even better if you use the "simple english" skill.
I actually found that GLM 5.x is the best in terms of editing documentation. It's still best to write things by hand to give your own organic voice, though. And not insult your readers.
antonvs | 9 hours ago
It’s interesting to watch, I don’t think it’s rational - just hype-driven herd behavior, the desire to pick one and stick with it, things like that. It’s similar to the kind of dominance Apple has, which most of the time has to do with style more than substance.
ziga | a day ago
antonvs | 9 hours ago
ErystelaThevale | a day ago
dannyw | 21 hours ago
PeterStuer | a day ago
exabrial | a day ago
ex:
* Currently trying to make sure open models are regulated out of existence.
* More concerned about preventing distillation than providing actual value.
irpap | 6 hours ago
m3h | a day ago
Someone made a Claude version of her skills:
https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude
dwaltrip | 22 hours ago
MattyRad | 5 hours ago
dwaltrip | 5 hours ago
mirmor23 | a day ago
here is the line i use: use technical language to spell things out, and keep it free of jargon and project shorthand
drsopp | a day ago
cryptonector | a day ago
natsucks | a day ago
cube00 | a day ago
As much as Claude's style frustrates me I can't say I'm willing to pay for double the tokens to fix it.
Apocryphon | a day ago
cesarvarela | a day ago
tehnoslow | 23 hours ago
catchnear4321 | 23 hours ago
lxe | 23 hours ago
hslee16 | 22 hours ago
PaulStatezny | 22 hours ago
(A model that can run reasonably well in a ~24GB MacBook.)
hightrix | 20 hours ago
amumu | 17 hours ago
So for the parent's Macbook question `gemma4-26b-mlx` should work well.
For you with 24 GB VRAM, `gemma4-26b-a4b`. I tried higher VRAM models and they slowed down while still doing just as well or slightly worse.
If someone else tests and finds a better performing model though, please update me here, I'd love to try it.
jkwn | 21 hours ago
Exoristos | 21 hours ago
_blk | 20 hours ago
dhosek | 20 hours ago
anon7000 | 20 hours ago
Obscurity4340 | 20 hours ago
xbar | 19 hours ago
ed_mercer | 18 hours ago
colordrops | 18 hours ago
gste | 16 hours ago
> The last one guesses its own refusals, marking the door open before we walked around it. Say the word and I'll do the joinery
Like WTF are you even talking about
3371 | 16 hours ago
Better just clean stuff up afterward with a dedicated agent.
danjc | 12 hours ago
noisy_boy | 9 hours ago
nilamo | 9 hours ago
Excuse me? Those tokens are expensive, fuck you very much for wasting them.
gandhiandy69 | 8 hours ago
scirob | 6 hours ago
ksajadi | 6 hours ago
SquireBuilds | 5 hours ago
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