Comment by mechazawa
1 day ago
I'll give that a try. Hopefully it reduces the text vomit Claude tends to do.
Right now all I have is
> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.
I recently asked Claude (Opus 5) to give me guidance on how to instruct it to be less verbose in a way that it will _actually follow_. Its response was something to the effect of (and I'm heavily paraphrasing here) "'Succinct' and 'short' aren't objective measurements. Try providing a strict word budget instead."
Given that guidance, I tried specifying "Unless I ask you to elaborate, respond with no more than one paragraph, using sentences of 20 words or fewer." It works...ish. I still see it violate this rule regularly, but it's less bad IME.
FWIW, I think this is good guidance since it does match Anthropic's documentation. They say that every rule should have a non-subjective way to determine pass/fail.
(I said "good guidance" but it might be more correct to say that it's the best guidance we have, it's what Anthropic says about their own model.)
Don't bother, no incantation can fix it.