Comment by zahlman
12 hours ago
> They're packing lots of signal into fewer words
There's a huge difference between the kind of prose you see in final output vs CoT windows. The final output is very much not what I'd call "packing lots of signal into fewer words" (aside perhaps from "Claude-isms" being easy enough to scan for if for some reason you actually wanted to scan for them, which other agents might want to for all I know); and if agents are writing for each other then presumably they could stick to CoT-speak (unless it's a distillation risk?).
I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?
I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting
> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.
It's both dense and vacuous. Dense because it's full of jargon its made up, and vacuous because even with all that it's not actually saying much. All that paragraph says is that four documents say something about a console freeze, whatever that is.
It's like a dialect of corporatese. The kind of droning non-speak you can sit in a 90 minute meeting listening intently to and come away wondering whether anyone actually said anything.
This! So much this. After Opus 4.8 I could barely comprehend anything it was attempting to communicate.
Drag handle = most likely literally a drag event (javascript) handler/callback. Dead, perhaps because it’s an empty function, or it gets overwritten, or for some other reason is never called?
Most of what it said about the facts was intelligible actually. But I still couldn’t understand the connection or its significance. We may be staring at the future of AI - a form of intelligence that is alien to us.
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Your example rewritten in intelligent English (I was curious):
> Note: the potential for a console freeze was previously noted but ignored. handoff-4.3-done.html stated, "could not break console, but [will need fixed later if I'm wrong]."
One could imagine that a perfect writer might also append: "It could be worth looking into what caused that wrong assumption, to prevent similar cases in the future," at most.
Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).
> Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).
One of the things actual science fiction got wrong: to the extent that the thing AI does can be called "understanding", emotion is not unusually difficult for them to understand.
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[will need to be fixed later if I'm wrong]
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Such a great example. These phrases are going to become memes of this era, like the irc stars password (hunter2).
"Dead drag handle" "Booked half day you don't get back"
Prompting it often to use simplified technical english generally stops this kind of horrid prose.
Yes, people working at anthropic: please, please, please tell me this is fixed. Or do you all speak like this now. Help!
Today I plan to ask Claude to read a bunch of Feynman lectures, compare them to my last Claude session transcript, and come with a list of rules to be more like Feynman.
It'll go in CLAUDE.md
and when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?
Wow, that's a perfect example.
One thing about it I really hate, and haven't seen a lot of people mentioning, is how it navigates multiple abstraction levels in a single sentence. E.g.
> Worth stating because four documents now assert it.
Meta commentary on the task?
> a dead drag handle
Drag handle seems to be referring to some UI element. What does it mean for it to be dead?
So far no big deal
> during a booked half-day you do not get back
Do you not get the drag handle back? Or the half day?
Was the drag handle dead during the booked period? (Now I assume this is a calendar UI) And why does it matter (for this sentence) if you get it back or not.
> handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording
Treats verbatim filenames as subjects
> 4.4's review page
Probably referring to a file? I'm guessing handoff-4.4-review.html? No cohesion. And now it's actually the object of the sentence?
> downside of being wrong is that half day
Wait what's the downside? Who's being wrong?
> Checked, not recalled.
Then it jumps back to a meta commentary on the methodology for asserting the above. Why does this belong to the text?
I see this appearing in the comments of code sent to me for review every day. People have told me I'm too picky/pedantic because I ask What does this mean? Apparently the author and other reviewers are way smarter and understand it, or they don't care. I've given up battling code slop, but can't see myself ever tolerating comment slop like this.
In my "instructions for Claude," I have the following:
"I'm not a programmer or software engineer. Don't talk to me like I am. Avoid coder jargon and vernacular. Explain things to me in a clear way, emphasizing a conceptual view that even an inexperienced person can understand. If helpful, use analogies and examples to illustrate and help you communicate."
It just ignores it and spits out drivel that sounds exactly like what you're getting.
This. A thousand times this. It's as if Opus can only communicate in a glib, software engineering vernacular that presumes domain-specific knowledge and uses jargon accordingly.
Claude reminds me of Terry Pratchett's "Auditors of Reality" and their awkward attempts at faking humans. A thing as simple as a smile can go _horribly_ wrong...
Oh that? That's just Claude being the sassy asshole it is. It loves to write in a way with maximal self-inflating impact.
I think this occurs due to the prompt. LLMs are actually text completion/translation focused in architecture. We just give them a prompt along the lines of “the context is that you’re a world leading expert now complete the response”.
They need the prompt to encourage expert outputs but unfortunately we also get ‘pretending to be an expert’ outputs since there’s a large amount of polluted training data for this.
Oh God, that "a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back" got me. I saw this pattern in Claude's 'explanations' so many times. It's trying to say that it did something significant, and that you'd only have found out much later, at higher cost (or something). That annoys me to no end.
Reminds me of a Cylon hybrid.
Half of the reason their writing is like that is because current LLMs are not trained to go back to previous tokens to edit/delete them.
If I recall, previous attempts to do so made them get stuck in edit loops.
Just FYI - 4 places are now documenting a console bug freeze that happens with a drag handle appearing over a half day.
Source: I'm half brain dead from decoding a lot of Claude speak from it directly and colleagues' new way of communicating with me.
for me it's not just exhausting, at this point it's demotivating and it makes me dread interacting with this shit
like imagine this being our future, I don't know what we're even doing anymore
Try Sol. It’s much better at getting to the point. I tend to use 5.6-xhigh or max.
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> Worth stating because four documents now assert
I got one too many chunks of this nonsense and told Claude to knock it off, forever. It acknowledged and wrote out some instructions to its memory about it.
And what a breath of fresh air. Its responses are maybe 20% longer but I read them at least twice as fast. Should have done it a long time ago.
I feel like mine is mocking me. I added an instruction in Claude.md that says "under no circumstances use the phrase found the smoking gun, say I found the problem instead"
What does it do? It says "found the smoking gun! Ooops I wasn't meant to say that - I found the problem!"
any specifics on what you did?
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I've found that adding the words - "tell me in simple words" manages to improve the output. But, i have to keep repeating that
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It has always seemed to me that they're hacking for dopamine response in moderately interested data labelers.
Interesting! My impression was that this was an artifact of RLVR where this slightly preferred writing style got amplified to the nth degree. It's probably some mix.
Even when I add multiple prompts into the claude.md file not to be so sycophant sounding and just be blunt, it's responses are full of "the reason it lands...", "that's not X, it's Y" "Your understanding of X — it's better than most people's" or "you already own the right question...".
I don't like that I like it.
The most helpful instructions I've found that curb this: "Do not use superlatives. Do not use persuasive writing style."
I have other more specific ones to avoid talking about things that it's not doing, but those two sentences have covered a lot of ground for me when working w/ Opus models.
I have had success in rooting these out by using the correct linguistic terminology for each. Negative parallelisms, tricolons/polycolons, etc. I haven't come up with the proper terminology for all of them.
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Yes! The Claudisms do seem to have this slightly uncanny clickbaity feel to them.
You’re more right than you probably realize!
I always thought it could be because volume-wise, most English prose is probably marketing copy and actual clickbait; so when you train on the entire Internet, you get a troll adept at writing ads. Then people ask AdBot2000 to write a novel and are upset it reads like the next iPhone launch site.
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It's more likely that this is from the training data if they're being trained on reams of Internet stuff.
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It's not clickbait, it's automated empathy!
/s
Given how frequently this kind of punchy-but-vacuous slop gets voted onto the hn front page, the hacking seems to be working.
I assumed they just raw dogged the internet and if you do that, you see way more of that garbage than anything else. It's just that most of us have visually/mentally ignored all of that either via spam filters or just, you know, scrolled passed it.
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Spot on wrt CoT. I have thinkingSummaries enabled and I find it eminently readable compared to the prose in Claude's replies.
In fact, whenever Claude disobeys me, I usually first skim the CoT to figure out if my original instruction was ambigous given the context. I usually come away with a better understanding of how to frame my prompt to be less ambiguous or just force myself to be more explicit when prompting.
Regarding diosbedience, usually this is either due to a blanket instruction from me during an earlier turn in the same session, an explicit instruction in its system prompt or it being just eager to bring a task to completion.
As said elsewhere:
Chain of thought does not exist in the output of Claude, they disabled true thinking due to distillation risk. What you see when thinking summaries are enabled are just that, summaries of thinking into Claude-isms, therefore you cannot make any inferences on what the model is doing unless you literally work at Anthropic and can see the true thinking traces.
Of course you can make inferences what the model is doing. The summaries are usually sufficient. They're summaries, not random noise.
I remember enjoying watching Fable think during the original limited preview. It was full CoT for sure. They must have removed that feature recently.
I use open models for non work stuff and sometimes I cancel the output because the CoT is all I needed to read.
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I find that Claude Code writes very long comments, longer than even a human trying to be helpful would write.
I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.
``` /* 2026-06-01 Dear diary, today I increased GLOBAL_WINDOW_PADDING from 8 to 16 because the user (who hurt my feelings with his crude language!) said that the app felt too crowded. */ const GLOBAL_WINDOW_PADDING = 8; ```
This drives me mad.
I like the part where the value is actually still 8
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A colleague of mine has started to use Claude and he now does the longest commit messages I’ve ever read.
He doesn’t. Claude does.
> I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.
That sounds like a great thing to do even if you are a human writing code for other humans. Most codebases out there are terrible for newcomers because of how little they explain why they are doing what they are doing, both in the code and in the often non-existent design notes.
In principle, I would agree, however, the types of comments Claude writes are sometimes absurd. It will leave a 25 line comment above a variable talking about how in a debug session, it turned out that this value was too low, so it was increased on the current date to account for whatever. It will also leave giant comments like, reference security review from 2026-05-21. Even when that document is not committed
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these comments are not helpful and in fact hurt readability. i just delete them and would love to automatically do that honestly. cuz claude still drops long winded comments on every method even if i ask it not to
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I'd much rather have it in the commit log than the code, though.
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> That sounds like a great thing to do
I agree it _sounds like a great thing to do_ but the comments Claude creates make me want to never read code again. They're so obtuse and often completely pointless.
as others have pointed out, the reality is not this. id go further and say almost all comments are evil.
Excuse me if I am harsh, read the damn code. If you do not understand the language, that is a skill issue. If the code is confusing, then the code is bad and no amount of comments will ever change that. Professional engineering isnt an intro to databases class.
I am excusing language conventions which may have comments as part of its idiosyncratic nature.
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I think the specific issue with Opus 5 is that its writing style is just trying to cheat at RL. It makes everything hypey yet self deprecating and constantly brings up "honest caveats" because the scoring rubrics look for those.
The specific issue with Opus 5 is that it sucks all around.
It was causing so many issues with coding (even Opus 4.8 was better) that I did agent handoffs to Sol. One of the Sols stated the handoff was "incoherent", which I couldn't have said better myself.
Yes, I pretty much took August off waiting for the next version.
I've been cleaning up AI generated system/software design and architecture docs for an agentically engineered application, to translate that dense AI-speak into a clear human-readable form, cross checking it all against the actual codebase.
When I read the translated version, I felt a flush of relief, because I finally could confirm that it built the right thing and properly implemented the requirements.
I then asked in a fresh session which version was better for it as a reference for future work. It unequivocally voted for the human readable form, and gave it's reasoning with specific examples why.
So, I have a hunch that this "packing of lots of signals into fewer words" isn't really better. The incomprehensible prose just makes us think it knows what it's doing, like some mysterious magic that is only smoke and mirrors.
Pay no attention to the bot behind the comments. ;)
Chain of thought does not exist in the output of Claude, they disabled true thinking due to distillation risk. What you see when thinking summaries are enabled are just that, summaries of thinking into Claude-isms, therefore you cannot make any inferences on what the model is doing unless you literally work at Anthropic and can see the true thinking traces.
It's all about conducting users into using their plans/tokens in accordance to a certain cadence
sometimes by increasing human cognitive load during reviews, sometimes by expanding the number of gated decisions, sometimes by penalizing those using their accounts on other harnesses
Yeah, if anything the problem is that the output uses too many words for too little signal, and incorrectly uses confidence based on insufficient information to the degree it’s clearly bullshitting.
I don't know, I just pulled up the status for an active session and here's what it said:
It's not exactly plain language.
My trick is to pass opus and fable's word salad into a haiku agent, then have it check if what haiku makes of it is still correct, then pass it to me. Whatever haiku outputs is often way more readable
Oh, I can read the output, but that Haiku agent is a good trick. Where I want something less dense I just ask for "plain language" and characterize the reading audience and that term seems to trigger very readable output.
This sounds like a Dianetics chapter by L Ron Hubbard.
Sounds like I have some reading to do.
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