← Back to context

Comment by peab

11 hours ago

I just can't stand how often Claude says something like "And the honest part? It's..."

Like, were the other parts not honest? I don't understand how Anthropic let it get like this, it's been such a clear regression

Sometimes Opus 5 (high/xhigh) feels like I'm dealing with the programmer equivalent of Zeno of Elea.

Every time, without fail, it would get me 90% of the way there and then leave a small note, exception, or deferral. When instructed to address that, Opus would somehow take nearly the same amount of time as the first 90%. And then it would finish with yet another deferral. Repeat ad infinitum.

You can sometimes get around it using the `goal` directive provided you are not subject to the constraints of mortality.

  • They got that from Anime seasons. Every prompt has yet another cliffhanger to keep you hooked. But the Season II story arc where Claude-chan fights the NsPasteboard boss battle on the journey to the UIViewMainController, I thought that was pretty intense. I guess I just gotta keep watching my terminal to see what happens to the main character input - rooting for him to survive the next season, but you know they always kill off the good input characters early.

  • Yes and the last bit is always mysterious and inscrutable. I have to think way too hard to figure out what the actual problem is. I’ve noticed it does a lot of explaining the mechanics of the problem it found, but almost never explains why it’s important until I ask.

    And the worst part is that this little problem will keep sneaking into the context of future sessions, unless you spend the time to fix it. Even if it isn’t important, I’ll sometimes have Claude fix it so it will shut the F up about it going forward.

i think they took a huge bet that speaking like a ted talk was going to be a vast popular differentiator in their offering, i don't think they anticipated that people were going to make fun of it, that it could become a meme..that it could get in the way of getting stuff done and result in cancellations.

it's downright exhausting to read claude, the language style was a regression imo.

If you ask it why it uses the term honest so much it'll tell you it was actually trained not to. lol

  • It can't truthfully answer "why" questions, only infer them in a way that aligns with its training for conversational engagement.

Me too. And it does it so often, that I've added a stop hook that detects "honest*" in its response and forces it to regenerate without the banned word.

I wonder if I can make a tool for it to write messages back to me, say that it can only speak to the user through tool use, and then put a hook on that tool to prevent any of the Claude-isms