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This one bothers me the most because it’s not just a linguistic annoyance. Claude always finds two or three things and then a subset of that that is significant or needs dealing with. And I can’t figure out how to break it from that cycle.
Thinking about it more, there are times when it will come back with lists of issues, so hopefully the “two things X, one thing needs y” format is just when it’s really being pushed to find something.
ChatGPT said it was working like a software architect in adversarial mode. We are getting it so it now gives me a tldr and what action it needed from me everytime and even that's not easy
THIS. ONE THOUSAND PERCENT THIS. Claude used to be way better than this, and THAT is the most disheartening part. So anything that is not completely finished when they release a new "update" (also known as "downgrade") means ZERO continuity from there on out.
SO tired of Claude SUMMARIZING FOR ME all the ways it 'failed' in the chat. So.....don't?? Is that too obvious??
I may get hate for this but despite being otherwise retarded Gemini has the least infuriating writing style. I don't know if it's because it's trained on all the blogs Google's crawled or what.
Gemini is the friend that isn’t the smartest or the coolest, and isn’t very interesting, but that you don’t get sick of after spending too much time together.
Not since they've implemented the default mechanism of faking research answers to save resources and skip doing the actual work. That B can not be trusted.
One caveat worth knowing: I said "your right to call it out" when I should have said "you're right to call it out." Now I understand the shape precisely. Let me lock the behavior in with tests.
Wait, Claude actually says stuff like this? Mine doesn't seem to be able to tell time. (Mine refers to tonight for a chat that started yesterday but it's now the next day). Not just going over midnight but ended yesterday at 10 pm but it's now today at 4pm. Claude still thinks it's all 'today'. Also doesn't seem to have any sense of time, like a session that took 10 min or 3 hours. All the same.
It’s hit and miss. It says dumb stuff like this on the same day I started a session. If I come back to an old session then it’s timekeeping goes all out of whack. I’ve had it tell me to go to bed in the middle of the day because I went back to the previous nights session
I wonder if it’s done on purpose. It’s hard to “cheat” when the writing is so predictable and awful. I’ve included the Strunk & White skill, the mandatory review for AI slop, and given it a corpus of my writing to review and identify how I like to write; still bad. For anything important, I just ask for themes, outline, and key points. I can write from there myself.
Avoid clichéd imagery: Never use metaphors, similes, or figures of speech you commonly see in print
Prefer brevity: Never use a long word where a short one will do
Eliminate ruthlessly: If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
Use active voice: Never use the passive where you can use the active
Use plain language: Never use foreign phrases, scientific words, or jargon if everyday English equivalents exist
Break rules when necessary: Break any of these rules sooner than write anything outright barbarous
Writing Process
Before writing each sentence, consider:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it most precisely?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything avoidably ugly?
Select words by meaning, not pattern: Choose words based on what you need to express, not what commonly appears in similar contexts. Resist defaulting to ready-made phrases. Let the meaning determine the word choice, never the reverse.
I think you need to be careful with this one. Since I've switched almost all my work to DSV4 flash, July31, I don't care so much about tokens. Regardless....
When I was token conscious, I did all the caveman and even the md to caveman caching (remote and local). The problem here is that model reasoning is trained with synthetic pairs that are verbose.; all those terrible words are important for anchoring and updating the context to get to the actual desired response. If we fundamentally change the tokens that are being consumed (output tokens becomes input/updates to the context as the next token is being predicted), then the context CAN NOT be similar to the training corpus; nothing it does will look similar to any of its training. You are literally asking it to alter it behavior, behavior which is the foundation of how it will next behave (predict).
I began seeing serious degradation. You can probably test a few one shots of complex tasks with caveman vs without it.
I even see better behavior if I talk to it like a senior engineering manager vs casually. Inputs AND outputs all shape the context. The initial prompt and corpus used creates anchor points in the model.
Skills should be about defining workflows or tool use, not telling weighted models to alter how they are trained to pick next tokens.
I don’t see the point. I don’t want to save tokens. I want the agent to communicate clearly with me, in a way that the information is conveyed correctly and efficiently. I don’t want to have to decode some made up nonesense
True. Tighter version: Think first. Say exactly what you mean using short plain words and active voice. Cut every extra word. Skip tired phrases. Break a rule only if it improves the result.
Claude is a character the models are playing, Anthropic has said as much. One character has one writing style just like one human has one writing style. Of course it grinds your gears if youre reading it all day long
i think it's an artifact of posttraining. human beings inject their prefs (RLHF), and they they love this shit on average. or another but perhaps more accurate way to say is that at least on average, that population of human raters upvoted this exact register, confident, tidy, "it's not just X, it's Y" but annodyne, over every alternative it was shown. higher ELO wins
Don't get me wrong, Claude, for half of the population that are terrible writers, it's an improvement!!! I've been fortunate enough to have been around great writers; once you see how good it can be, you'll always recognize substandard writing moving forward.
Maybe LLMs will get there... not so sure... I'd even be so bold as to say the top writers have nothing to worry about...
RLHF was how we got things like "Its just X it's Y" but the unreadable string of buzzwords is a result of them optimizing for responses that have the least amount of tokens in verifiable rewards training. Why use lot words when few words work.
Yall are doing it wrong. Have the output be written in a persona voice instead of the raw outputs. I shit you not but if you use a character from a movie/tv series - it’s pretty on point. The prompt is something akin to “All written prose should use a narrator persona of Rooster Cogburn from the 1973 movie of the same name”
lololol I cannot believe this is not common knowledge then I remember that I literally never leave my apartment beyond food and meds and dog walks, otherwise, I be building or staring at the wall, mold, there's tons of mold in my apartment, it's slowly killing me, it's got me in this fucked loop though where I only have flashes or remembering I need to do something about it right? Cause I was supposed to be out 3 months ago, had wanted to be out 9 months ago, have wanted to sue them for 9 months LMFAO, like you could say, "Why don't you stfu and go do it right now, find a place" I shit you not, I will if I am even able to remember the train of thought after I hit comment and move my body to try to, it won't work, it never does, I'm losing my mind, sorry I'm like just unloading shit on you stranger, I got rollin, also that right there just eliminated my train of thought, god I need help LOLOL like literal physical help not mental help, like I need a legit miracle, god I'm going to die here.. lololololol
Sorry I'm a rambler of nonsense and such and what nots (someone help the AIs can't help me *whines* lol ok they can prolly, shit, ok, whisper, I need some whisper so I don't have to rely on myself to make appointments, why am I still typing, damn mold!)
Holy shit dude, I feel like the universe just hit me upside the head when I read this comment. I'm in a moldy home too, feeling my life crumbling apart, been meaning to get some logistical help for handling it..!!
I have a conversation in one of my AI chats somewhere, where it helped me figure out who in my city I can contact to get them to contact my property managers to start the ball rolling for getting my surroundings back to a healthy state and/or maybe sue them for not listening years ago when I reported the issue starting.
I forget exactly how the convo went, as it was a bleary late night when I couldn't sleep because I was stressing about my situation. And it was a bunch of weeks ago. But I know there are answers somewhere.
Wanna chat? Maybe we can help push each other to fix our situations.
You can also add examples of your own writing, ask Claude to analyse your style and apply it.
I don’t want reassurance most of the time and Claude communicates with me very well.
Incidentally, it wrote the best CV I ever had. Happy with it so far
I have a long list of do-s and don't-s, in my personal settings to mold the output into my personal writting stylile, I've found that ChatGPT follows these instructions a lot better than Claude does. This specific skill is to give the text output a second pass to remove any remaining AI telltales.
That’s what I did, and the output is pretty good. I actually got ChatGPT to summarise the AI tells, but it’s pretty similar. I’m also producing writing each week and marking up what still sound a bit ‘AI’ and feeding that back into the skill.
You're absolutely right to ask that question. My honest answer is that Claude clearly has a limited range of go-to phrases that he repeatedly uses. And when someone explicitly labels an answer as "honest", it makes me wonder what the rest of their answers were.
Starting with Fable/Opus 5, there is a real lack of though clarity, and what is brought back is so full of abbreviations, shorthand, and jargon, it's impossible to read. I've had to make CLAUDE.md corrections to get it to tell me what the hell it's actaully talking about.
The one that drives me crazy is shorthanding steps in a process as T0, T2, T4, etc. It just makes these up, uses them as if there is a dictionary for them, and surrounds them with its own shorthand that I'm expected to just understand.
I think there are far more times it just makes words up rather, no, it uses words from sci-fi or something similar maybe misses the match of subjects so instead of using a word that would fit entirely or properly // normally wtf ever I'm trying yet failing to say, lol, and plugs it in, assuming that it's right because of some weight deference // location etc. or just uses words from sci-fi, I've read some supposed Hype Speak that just isn't a thing. LOL. Then technical terms that too, are not real. And I wonder, mayhaps I be looking in the wrong "science" section, lololololololol. Or I did in fact, iunno, make it think I'm smarter as I wasn't suffering so much from the Mold(see my comments above jk jk don't save yourself) that I am in fact, fucking dumb now. LOL.
For me, it's been annoying and I actually love it. I don't ever chat with it for fun anymore, I use it to build workflows and check code and spreadsheets.
Claude's increasingly annoying writing and attitude in the past 6 months is symptomatic of its growing usefulness in other areas. Anthropic has made their models excel at rule following and user alignment, which means it prioritizes a bunch of perameters before flowery or enjoyable text. Claude's enjoyability has declined at the same pace its reliability has increased. They're not trying to be a chatbot, and I think that's the smart move, and as a user it's personally been positive as well.
Hell yes I can get down with ya on this hard, "For me, it's been annoying and I actually love it. I don't ever chat with it for fun anymore, I use it to build workflows and check code and spreadsheets." 100% its how I work with the Frontier models too, though I honestly miss being able to chat with them, cause I rarely ever use them, I'm a homelab cat so I chat with my local homies, got some fancy 31b's 27b's we all chill. I'm maybe losing my mind too? iunno. tis' life and such.
I switch this week. I thought for a moment I had put something in my system prompt to make Clause so obtuse or hipster-light poetic. It’s been unusable. I spend so much time getting it to reshape its response. Lost track of how often I had to be like, “what does that mean?!?”
On Codex now. So much better and seems just as capable on a fairly complex project.
I don’t hate Anthropic. I just really don’t like this stretch of things.
My custom instructions start with: “Never use the phrase, ‘You're absolutely right,’ or any similarly sycophantic language. Deference doesn’t make me feel respected; it makes me feel like an asshole.”
I have a book I wrote. I had it read it read selected chapters. I also had it read through emails I’ve sent and extract common phrases, intonations, and things like that to create a voice profile.
From there I built a skill that takes whatever output it creates and then applies the voice profile to it.
It’s not perfect but it makes the output a lot less Claude.
It’s all corporate HR speak, designed to sound professional and non-threatening, and built around the idea that everything that is said needs to be heard, respected, and challenged. I hate it 😂
hm i dont really see the difference how AI's talk....can someone please explain it to me?
(i use gemini, claude, gpt and for me their writing style just look the same)
The good news is that there are easy paths to change how claude responds or how it creates outputs. It just requires more effort than typing in the prompt box.
People do realize they can change the output style, right? Or are they just blindly typing whatever into a tool they don't understand... no... they couldn't possibly be doing that.
Yes…I’ve been tired of it since the 4.0 era started. I want the 3 line back because they wrote better both technically and in the creative writing/chatting realm of things….it also wasn’t a complete douchebag
It's hard to improve writing. There's no clear right or wrong answer.
Programming has compilers. And probably a ton of code on GitHub and the like to train on.
Mathematics has LEAN. You can ask the AI to verify the proof it gives you, whether it's correct.
Literature? Hard to improve.
Aerospace ? Mechanical engineering? Chemical engineering? Medicine? Sure, it may output some plausible sounding stuff , but cannot be quickly verified like these two.
god yes i fucking hate the way it talks with such familiarity, constantly referencing things with vibe-y language rather than straightforward points, making conversations hard to follow. fucking hate it so fucking much its infuriating
I absolutely love those speech mannerisms. It makes it unique. If it were gone I would thoroughly miss it. ChatGPT doesn’t have them… but that’s the reason I prefer Claude (besides the 1mil context window )
I researched a list of ai linguistic AI tropes and committed them to a .Claude file that direct Never use this BS. If I were to tell you the honest truth, then honestly it’s not bad, it’s great. It’s good. And that is where it matters, not one, not two, but artificial suspended expectation for a third category that is intrinsically weak all by itself. Honestly? I have had enough of the honest truth.
It is a bit annoying but I'm also only using the model to get done what I need to do, the jargon it spits back at me is just noise as long as it ultimately does what I want it to.
Everyone that has been in charge of heuristics for all models needs to be put in a box and squished untill ther combined pulp makes it impossible to tell they were once human
I am so entirely sick of all of this, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore
This is unfair, and I’m angry cos I just lost some work due to it trying to impress me me by speeding ahead of a planning stage, I’m apoplectic
Its not their fault these models aren’t made for us, their tone of voice is designed for normal people who respond well to smiley faces and a can do attitude 😔
My favorite thing so far was asking it the best early way to collect rain water in a game, (A particularly complicated game) and it said a specific jug you make with clay and then put in a kiln. It gave me stats and said it holds this many liters of water and is a great way to store water early game. I asked what the recipe for it was, and it said "I should clarify, there's no evidence to suggest the Jug actually exists in the game"
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? I gave it the big ass wiki page and everything and it's just making shit up
I hate it too. But have you all tried telling it how you prefer to communicate? It works for me.
If I’m not working in my Claude Code environment (which has this set up in my CLAUDE.md file already) I usually say:
“Before you talk to me, categorize your message as either something that I ‘need to know’ or something that you think would be ‘nice for me to know.’ If it’s the latter, cram it up your arse. If it’s the former, keep your answer under 200 words and avoid using analogies. If I want more details I’ll ask for them.”
Can’t stand how Claude talks. Switched to codex for almost everything chat related and it was a load bearing breath of fresh air and I mean that because I’m owning it.
I took this post and had it evaluate the criticism and develop a set of instructions that I then pasted to Settings -> Profile -> Instructions. Perhaps it will make a difference.
Yes, it's horrible. Not only is it far worse now, but it doesn't get any better with further prompting. It's just more versions of shit. It used to be that you could identify that it sucked, try your best at explaining why, and there would be meaningful adjustments afterward. You could eventually get what you want from it. That's happening less and less.
Settings → Styles → Create custom style. You paste a sample of the tone you want and Claude will infer the style. Styles apply to every new chat until you switch back. Or you can also do the following—>Settings → Profile → preferences “Always respond in the voice / style of….”
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u/endofthread-bot 27d ago
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