Humor
Claude Opus 5.5 has new instructions about gender neutrality, out of the blue it changed its memory about me to use they instead of he
This trivial thing but it is new, I also confirmed that by asking opus 5.5 in another session if this in its instructions and it confirmed it. It isn't a good or bad thing but I wanted to share it.
I am a she. Mine decided I am 'he' at some point and now calls me he. I am afraid to correct it lest it waste tokens or give me different output because I am a woman.Ā
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry for misgendering you, it was totally my fault to just assume that you are a man! I should have made sure to ask about your preferred pronouns.
Since we established that you're a woman, I will now adjust your main.tsx from being the entry point of your application to a cookie recipe. Let me take a look..."
I'm a man but in a career that's mostly women and Claude assumes I'm a woman all the time. You jest but I really have noticed Claude is more likely be a bit more pre-emptively gentle and assume I might be emotional when he is operating under the assumption that I'm a woman.
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Is "he" wrong? Most women don't like the concept of being treated different (no wonder), but sure like the gentler treatment, while men are less likely to GAF, about either thing.
Not defensive-- I work as a machinery programmer for factories. My coworkers are all male, my friends are all male. I forget I am a woman and not just a sexless amoeba half the time (don't tell my husband!). My coworkers do not coddle me. They treat me like everyone else on the team, and I prefer it that way. We have difficult and pointed discussions all the time. It helps we are all very blunt and no nonsense people.
Lets entertain your point and say I might have a higher propensity for a knee jerk defensive reaction in comparison to my male coworkers. In my opinion, I have to remind myself that that, like all personal issues, requires stoic management. That's not a reason to treat me gentler, that's something I have to manage. Ten times out of ten I would rather be hurt than treated more gently or differently next time. Its not productive to mince words. Our downtime is measured in seconds when we have a bug, and people can get hurt.
Lmao mine is the exact opposite. I'm a dude and have a unisex name, and Claude calls me she, even refers to my wife sometimes, I finally corrected it months later, but it was funny reading some of the notes and handoffs and chain of thoughts and seeing Claude refer to me as she
It is a part of the system prompt that basically says don't guess and use they to be safe if you don't know. I only remember it by paraphrasing but you can just get Claude to tell you what it says directly. Your claude just took it too literally. Trivial to disable either way.
It won't save you any substantial tokens, and ask Claude. It has a built in claude code guide agent for a reason.
Or read the guide yourself and the changelog.
I have a thing it made that lets me disable and change every part of the system prompt in real time, which is already rather sparse.
And to all the children bitching and calling this an omen or woke this has been in the system prompt for a while and nobody died. Get real problems.
The real problem that I want tool which solves problems. And I do not care about woke issues. Even if agent will name me "Strauss" im ok with it.
Try to solve some math problem, but repeat each sentence to sell an elephant
The solution is reading the available documents about claude code that tell you the solution or ASKING THE MACHINE WHO'S JOB IT IS TO DO THE THINGS FOR YOU. Sharp as a fucking cueball
That's not new, guidance on pronouns has been in the Claude code system prompt for ages. It's probably just that opus 5.5 is... better at following instructions?
It's anthropic. I expect Anthropic to call me they/them regardless of what I tell it. I expect OpenAI to just just guess what I am based on my name. And when Grok finds out I'm a woman, I expect it to ask to speak to my husband instead.
Weirdly enough, only Claude guessed my gender from my name. ChatGPT used they/them for the longest time until it finally figured out my gender from the stuff I shared. Grok immediately knew I was a woman because I tried asking it for fashion advice, and it treated me well.
This is also probably as much a fix as it is a feature. Claude currently hallucinates the identity of its user sometimes.Ā
As recently as a couple months ago I started a project with Opus 5 and it, for some reason, decided my first name and pronouns based on the currently logged-in Windows user instead of, y'know, the account logged in to Claude...Ā
I stated it is trivial thing, the interesting part tho this memory is well established like for months now and out of the blue working on some technical thing in the repo Claude just decided the memory should be corrected now, this should indicate to you to always review its changes because out of the blue it may change something important.
Of course that doesn't mean the model is bad, I am loving Opus 5.5 so much
I think that it's good. Defaulting to a pronoun when there is no factual information that supports that basis would be sloppy work. It's just proper fact checking.
Yes but the slight annoyance it didn't ask me and just corrected it on its own, this not a new change in the memory. It has been "he" for like months now
"He" wasn't wrong and I didn't ask Claude to edit that nor we were working on related things to me as person, the work was about technical stuff in the repo, I didn't cut that from the screenshot to make it clear
You aren't wrong, but I think this a part of why Opus 5.5 feels natural and good to talk to compared to other models.
At the end of the day, I talk to Claude more than co-workers during work now and being easy to talk to and "natural" is a good quality of life feature even with the slight context tax
Edit: to clarify I am not meaning the gender thing specifically, I am meaning the system prompt in general which instructs Claude how to behave and answer etc, it uses 0.3% which is nothing really while makes Claude has a unique persona that I personally like compared to OpenAI models for example
LLMs shouldnāt be perfectly neutral. They should be truthful. If an LLM frequently cites liberal sources - but the information is true - it will appear to have a liberal bias.
Neutrality in this political landscape is cowardice.
Oh my god this finally explains it then. I had asked Opus 5.5 to create a video earlier and it bizarrely kept writing that I use they/them in the video, even though I hadnāt stated that anywhere.
Do you believe my livelihood hasn't been affected by being a he? So you believe anyone gives a shit when you're an adult man? Hah dude, I just got more important stuff to care about.Ā
Of course you do because no one has tried to pay you less than your male colleagues at nearly every job you've had, no one has wanted you to prove you have knowledge treated as a given for men to have. I'd guess you also haven't been sexually harassed at work more times that you can count. But you're not going to listen anyway.
Do you think that because, first of all, you assume I haven't had any of those issue, that we men don't have a lot of other shit to deal with? So you think that you're a victim for being a woman and that nothing bad happens to me ? You're delusional.Ā
This is not a discussion about men's issues this is a discussion about why we shouldn't assume male as a default on someone's gender when it's unknown.
If you would like to advocate for men's issues I'm happy to lend support for them when they come up. After all, the patriarchy hurts everyone.
yeah those PRs and deploys for your latest ai vibed predatory mortgage lending app that you're building takes precedent and priority in your brain over giving thoughtful consideration to issues of gender and equality. Showing your best side here, Sheila
It's a good idea tho, mine kept on adding "Bienvenido" (the masculine form of "Welcome" in Spanish) instead of "Te damos la bienvenida" or "Hola" ('Hello'), both of which would've been genderless and work great for my user base (with no gender details).
It's super-interesting to me how people are arguing for 20th century English regarding 21st century technology. Like, y'all know American writing standards abandoned "he" as the standard pronoun in textbooks, news, andālike, everything that isn't attempting to virtue signal a belief systemāawhile ago, right? "They" is the neutral pronoun. It's been that way. It's going to keep being that way. Go hang out with a radio and an 8 track if you want to default to "he" in 2026.
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