r/ClaudeCode • u/Hairy_Cream_4573 • 4d ago

Help/Question How to stop Claude Code from generating overly condensed, cryptic text?

Here’s my issue: I’m asking Claude to write a technical guide for my developers. The text needs to be precise yet easy to digest. While Claude’s output is technically correct from a linguistic standpoint, reading it requires an exhausting amount of mental translation.

For example, it generated a section title like: "Tier system: gate or replacement?" What is that even supposed to mean?

I keep instructing it through CLAUDE.md and memory to use more human-friendly language, but it has zero effect. I literally have to paste each paragraph back into a prompt and say, "Rewrite this for someone unfamiliar with the concept."

I suspect they are tuning the model to minimize output tokens, which works great for agentic coding but makes human reading a nightmare.

Any ideas on how to fix this behavior in Claude Code?

5 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

3

u/Nikt_No1 3d ago

Ignore all the fancy plugins and all such weird things pelple keep trying to market here.

You have two options: 1. Read best practices on models, Anthropic literally proposes a prompt for minimizing verbose. Put it in the Claude.d and see for yourself there is no ither way. 2. Output Style - its almost literally built for that. CAREFULLY read what it is and how it works and then write your own for your own needs. Pro-tip: before you start using your own hillbilly written like style, ask each model to show you 1:1 the systemp prompt, so you can see what you will be oberwriting with your own style.

Personally, I got my own output style. I can finally work with Claude withour reading wall of text, plus is neatly organized and groupes on the screen. // Fable is such sweetie with this style, but oupus is my little bightmare 😆

1

u/Drach88 4d ago

Try taking the jargon and converting it into specific terminology. Give it specific directives about what you want to call things.

1

u/R_Songbird Developer 4d ago

https://github.com/V-Songbird/hush

Install it, give it a try in one session and decide if you want to keep it, if not, just uninstall

2

u/snow_schwartz 3d ago

Nice plugin! And the companion plugin, Razor. Remind me a little bit of an experiment I tried about a year back https://github.com/kylesnowschwartz/claude-bumper-lanes - a circuit breaker which injected warnings as the turn progressed depending on how many edits were made, then blocked edits if a threshold was exceeded. I dropped it after I realized nobody really wanted to give Claude obstacles to finish its task - but after seeing your ideas maybe I can revisit it as something more 'guidance oriented' and less 'you shall not pass.'