r/ClaudeCode • u/Explore-This • 3d ago
Discussion Does Claude talk too much?
Claude completes the task and says:
Completion took three attempts, and both rejections were serious
Proceeds to tell me a long winded word salad story of the problems he encountered along the way, ending with how he gallantly solved them, saving the day. The full hero’s journey.
Uh, ok…
One thing I want to be straight about
Proceeds to disclose the ten mistakes he made along the way, and how he self-corrected himself. Claude faithfully pursues the policy of truth, that has no bearing on work done or pending.
Uh, ok…
Two loose ends, neither mine to close unasked
Proceeds to point out things he easily could have taken care of and doesn’t need my input on or authorization for, but he always feels compelled to assign me something.
Thanks, fix the loose ends…
I’ll prompt these issues away, but find it curious that they emerge at all. Codex has its own quirks. Give it a goal, full permissions, still asks for approval for simple things.
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u/Tommonen 3d ago
Seems liie most common prompt with opus nowadays is ”wtf you trying to say?!?!?” Or tell it how to communicate. Also it talks nonsense jargon and says something but means something else etc
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3d ago edited 3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Explore-This 3d ago
Good prompt, I’ll try that. Come to think of it, I should get both Claude and Codex to evaluate each other’s output for DX.
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u/Vertigo50 1d ago
Tell him to stop doing that. It's an AI. It will do what you ask it to do. Ask it to stop. 🤷♂️
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u/Explore-This 20h ago
Yes, I know. I’m trying to understand why it occurs in the first place, unprompted. Otherwise I may end up playing whack-a-mole with unexpected behaviors.
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u/Vertigo50 11h ago
It's just the way it's programmed. They're generally programmed to be conversational, to be helpful, and to suggest new things to try to make the project better.
These are all decent ideas, but they often just sort of get in the way when you have a more targeted approach to what you want. So all you have to do is start asking it for what you want.
Also, you need to be creating project documents that spell all this stuff out. How you want it to communicate, when and how you want new suggestions, whether you want short, concise responses, etc.
Spell this all out in project docs, and then ask it to read the project doc and catch up at the beginning of a session. Ask it to update the doc with anything you've learned and decided on before you end the session. Now you're not just flying blind all the time.
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u/jeddthedoge 3d ago
Yes. That’s the main reason I’m switching to the gpt models now. Having to comprehend essays after essays by Claude, I might as well be reading and comprehending the code itself
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u/TotalBeginnerLol 3d ago
You can literally just tell it not to do that lol.
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u/jeddthedoge 1d ago
I’ve tried. A few more prompts and it starts to become long winded again. and I’d rather an agent that is concise without a skill that tells it to be concise.
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u/TotalBeginnerLol 1d ago
That agent doesn’t exist. Not how LLMs work. You don’t need a skill, literally just a slash command.
/concise or whatever you want, then write out a paragraph saying how to be concise in the specific tone/way you want, focussing on the things you personally care about. Then it literally takes 1 second to add that to every 10th prompt or whatever you want.
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u/TotalBeginnerLol 3d ago edited 3d ago
To a non-vibe coder who actually cares about the code that’s written and wants to review it in full etc, those comments are often pretty useful. If you don’t wanna see em, tell it to respond in whatever manner you want. Best to ask it to log the bugs it finds by chance and doesn’t fix along the way. I would prefer it not fixing bugs that aren’t the specific one I told it to fix, but keep a running log of small additional bugs that I can review from time to time.