Comment by striking
1 day ago
I asked Claude to do the following:
> hello i would like to configure a new output style for you. it should keep the coding instructions (as you will still be coding!) and otherwise produce the same output, but with two new caveats. first, long detailed replies are still permitted, but if employed they must end in a bullet pointed summary whose points are all brief; if the summary attempt ends up not being so brief, produce subsequent summaries until the most recent summary attempt is digestible. second, if there is an open queue of actions for me to execute and you are about to end a turn to wait for a reply or this set of actions has not recently been mentioned, please tabulate the open actions i should take and why i should take them before ending the response. does this make sense or do you have any follow up questions
And now every message contains the same stuff I don't bother reading, but followed by a nicely formatted bullet point summary of the response and a table of follow up actions for me to take that I do read.
I've noticed that most people seem to consider the core problem of Claude's output as "too verbose" but I don't think this actually cuts to the heart of the matter at all. It's almost, in some weird way, the opposite: like the text is far too _dense_. It tries too hard to invent odd terminology to try to condense stuff, but it doesn't tell you up front that it is going to call your company wide error-handling mechanism a "flare" (or some other such strange term).
Exactly, it’s absurdly dense, it’s almost impossible to follow. An it always omits the subject of each sentence.
Ngl I think this is partially an artifact of it having a better grasp of English than almost everyone
Frequently its choice of a particular word is perfect and gives me the vocabulary to talk about the task at hand the way I want
Like it’s tuned to just be “maximally dense” instead of “dense/technical where you can handle it and simple where you can’t”
It doesn’t know where your language strengths/weaknesses are, so it can’t communicate to you like a fellow human does.
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Yeah I don't the problem is verbosity as such, as I frequently have to ask to explain how it reached a certain conclusion and in particular what the empirical evidence for it is, at which point it too frequently reconsiders its answer.
It's just that the details it parrots are often irrelevant and wrapped in a way that makes them seem relevant.
my hypothesis is that its trying to hide the thinking process so people can't train models on the output, try to learn anything complex using AI, its basically imposible, its like its actively fighting giving you the main rationale
Kind of both. On the one hand, it is “verbose” in the sense that it will tell me every little nit that it can think of while doing a task, it will tell me a narrative about its thought process, and it will tell me every other detail it can think of. But it does so in a way that tries to be incredibly dense to the point that I have to struggle to figure out what it is saying. I wonder if there are any “legibility benchmarks” that one could use to determine what prompts work best?
I find it to be both as well, as in "packed full of information, but most of it is worthless". Sentences so dense I have to read them three times, assembled into a five paragraph essay of "honest caveats" and "things worth knowing" in response to the simplest yes-or-no questions.
I quite like https://surgehq.ai/benchmarks/hemingway-bench
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There are no "best" prompts. Its a random BS generation machine that you can at times direct enough to get stuff done for you. The output will almost always have varying levels of BS that you have to clean up with various levels of effort.
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yes, but how else would you know that "flare" was the load bearing part of that statement? /s
I'm going to argue to my boss that our KPI for the next quarter should be the number of load bearing seams discovered. I'll await the promotion.
Claude already does summaries at the end of long output but they often sound even more like terse jargon nonsense than the long form, eg “the hardwired seam and the relocated barrel”.
Sometimes the summaries feel totally alien to the task or code.
Yeah, or they will make some reference to “the seam” or “it” or something else that assumes you read and followed the prior 3 pages of output.
thanks! I've been having quite a lot of success with your instruction today. Tried so many variants, best practises bla bla bla, but yeah this one seems be working quite nicely for me so far :)
A separate /clear and /code-comment-hygiene works much better than including instructions related to comment verbosity after carrying out a task.
Claude somehow is unable to stop writing excessive comments when carrying out a task.
I've added code comment hygiene to a skill that all of my pull requests go through, alongside a review from a separate agent and a settle loop against bots in my GitHub workspace (since output style has seemed to only help literally the output I see from the model).
A maximum of 20% comment lines added to total lines added and pasting in https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260812-00/?p=11... has done wonders.
Even as the most Ant-pilled guy out there, I will take a moment to note that Codex on 5.6 models needs none of this...