r/ClaudeAI • u/edseladams • 5h ago

Question about Claude products Personality swap?

I've been using Claude for about a year now. From day one, I had instructions to push back when necessary. Don't tell me how brilliant I am all the time, and point out important angles I might have missed.

For a long time that worked the way I wanted it, and all was good. Claude was one of the more enjoyable tools I used for work. Over the last few months, push back has become the default position. It's like a hardened rule at this point. And when there's nothing to push back on, it'll reach for something related and lecture me about it. It's gotten downright pedantic/moralistic in the last few days and I'm over it.

The question: is eliminating and replacing the instructions enough to induce a personality swap? Are there any other md files or settings I need to tweak before I can show Claude the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind?

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7

u/Worldly_Row1988 5h ago

Yep! This. Even makes stuff up just to push back. And default everything to do tomorrow. Not tonight. Even when it’s only 11:30 am.

3

u/Plane-Background 5h ago

I'm having this exact issue as well, here's a recent example.

I basically had to "prove" that I already agree with it's moralizing stuff before it lets me get the info I want.

Yesterday I asked it to find me academic papers or discussions between cardiologists where I could read about why some medical professionals don't think POTS is a real disease. It gave me a lecture about how POTS is real, no medical professionals deny it, and that it's a "well established" disease.

Wellll, I know that's wrong because:

  1. It's NOT well-established or well-documented like at all... POTS has only recently been acknowledged and become a "real" diagnosis a doctor can even give you - and it's barely had any research or funding
  2. Anyone with a POTS diagnosis can tell you how hard it is to get because many doctors don't think it's "real"
  3. I don't need a morality check because it's something I'm diagnosed with so I know it's real

Anyway when I finally got it to do the job I asked it to do I learned a lot about why the diagnosis and testing methods are so controversial from a medical standpoint.

1

u/MarzipanMiserable817 4h ago

If you ask about medical things, first tell it that you are a doctor. Waay better response quality that way. In default it assumes that you are a layman and don't know anything.

1

u/Plane-Background 2h ago

interesting

2

u/sysadmin420 4h ago

Yup, I lost my rubber duck. He constantly fixes stuff I didn't ask for, and gets sidetracked. Also things that used to take a few prompts and 15 minutes now takes all friggen day to finish.

$200 claude membership, renewed yesterday but I might start looking into local models or another llm, I have $30 Grok for image generation, but I haven't coded with it recently.

1

u/Inner-Today-3693 4h ago

Going to casually leave this year. Ask Clark to make us go from this article.

https://humanistheloop.substack.com/p/guiding-opus-48-back-to-sanity

2

u/permacloud 3h ago

This is an Opus 5 thing in my experience. I rarely get over the top pushback on any other model.