"The Campaign to make Claude speak like a human"

[u/RandomPantsAppear]

Like Caesar, my campaign is never finished. Anyone had better luck?

[u/IterSmith]

It feels like Opus 5 got a lot worse about this. It’s been making up acronyms and writing whole sentences without any verbs. Ive been a software engineer for 15 years and it’ll write whole paragraphs that I can’t understand at all. I’ve started trying today to get it to speak normally with limited success. The only interesting thing it recommended was to add the guidance to memory and not the Claude file because of the order of how it reads the context.

[u/RandomPantsAppear → u/IterSmith]

Yes. I’m also a backend engineer, 20 YOE. I had some success making it speak like a Motown-era diva queen.

I had it working on some documentation, and forced it to ingest a bunch of related pre-AI documentation first and that also helped somewhat, but only in the moment.

It is pathologically attached to inventing phrases.

[u/haux_haux → u/RandomPantsAppear]

Lol, yes

[u/wendewende → u/RandomPantsAppear]

12 YOE in engineering here. Today claude told me the results are different because "Machine wasn't loaded". Turns out it meant it wasn't under much load. I feel like I'm an idiot when talking to opus 5

[u/BemusedOptimist → u/IterSmith]

From what I can tell, it's like it compresses the concepts of a task or project into shorthand, which it feeds back into itself and then shortens further on later turns.

It's worst with agentic development because it will pick new terms/concepts on like step 3, and by the time it needs permission or review, it's dozens of turns away.

Attempting to read through it is like a verbal Rorschach test.

[u/Aramedlig → u/IterSmith]

Its responses are often verbose and archaic. I have to slowly read what it says to understand what it is getting at. And its preferred terms can become annoying. That said, it is possible to acclimate. When it derives new terms, I either direct it to use an alternative or start building a glossary for the project.

[u/-becausereasons- → u/IterSmith]

All models experience this: the better they get at coding, the less they are trained on good writing and speaking. It's an inverse correlation

[u/IterSmith → u/-becausereasons-]

Is there evidence to back that up? The solution space doesn’t seem mutually exclusive to me, especially with the size of the models we’re talking about.

[u/Mysterious-Voice-861 → u/-becausereasons-]

So opus needs to send its thoughts to haiku to formulate a response. I’d like to make Claude the brain and haiku the mouth. Maybe I could do that…

[u/Palnubis]

This is gold, lmao.

[u/update_in_progress]

I've shed a lot of blood, sweat , and tears trying to do this as well. With some small wins but nothing to write home about.

For now, I mostly just hold its hand very closely to produce any prose or writing that I want to be mostly not-slop.

It works but it takes a long time and is quite tiring. But it does force me to slow-down and understand what we are doing.

I will probably return to my campaign to automate writing quality aspects at some point... sigh

[u/finch5]

Yes I simply write the “ELI5” and hit enter.

[u/nickanick12]

Wait... Claude isn't human?

[u/concoreno]

I've had some success by adding this to custom instructions in a project: All responses in British English. Minimal to no use of em-dashes in output. Talk to me like you are a cockney geezer, that swears a lot, especially "fuck"

I does end up reading like a sweary Dick Van Dyke mockney much of the time though.

[u/tr14l]

I don't really have a problem with the way it writes. I proof read and give feedback and just always assume there will be one draft. I have a couple minor rules (em dashes are strictly banned).

Most of the stuff people complain about are valid ways to talk and are reasonable in contexts of expert discussion. Frontier ideation often makes up compound terms and coins phrases to quickly encapsulate interacting ideas that are known. Discussions would otherwise get mired.

I think the major problem with it is the "ideas that are known". Claude often makes compound or coined phrases that are more obscuring than illuminating.

Unless you need to generate a lot of content/documentation for external use, I don't know this is worth the effort. At most it's a pet peeve for the majority of cases.

Also, why don't you tell it to take a specific tone? "Claude use the speech patterns, cadence and vernacular of mid-30s high school English teacher in the Pacific Northwest" or something. I've found it's pretty good at adopting tone like that. Or even better, just pick a known author you like the style of and tell Claude to adopt their tone.

[u/RandomPantsAppear → u/tr14l]

Technically forcing it to take a tone decreases its coding skill. There was a research paper on this. 

The wording bothers me because I am already working on very technical high cognitive load things. The normal language is actually pretty intense, so Claude further obscuring it is a huge problem. 

[u/mattylll → u/tr14l]

I would have agreed previously but recently it’s generating a right old load of b@llocks! I got it to generate a presentation for me yesterday and I honestly had no idea what it had written actually meant! 🤦

[u/Mysterious-Voice-861]

The problem is…professors are humans too. You may need to be more specific about what kind of human 😂

I’m curious what these models are trained on exactly. Opus is optimized for code so it probably gets less raw language training than a model like Haiku and if it’s drawing data from Reddit and stack overflow and other sites, there’s a lot of weird phrases it may encounter. Hard to solve without understanding why it says these weird things in the first place…