Comment by niccl
10 hours ago
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.
What is a half day? Is this referencing wasted time in a hang? I’ve seen it in agent output from time to time and it’s not clear if it’s referring to a hang or a code name it’s given some meaning to.
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If this kind of "AI-speak" becomes ubiquitous and humans reading it becomes the norm (whether to guide AI or other reasons), I'd imagine future generations (of humans) who grow up with it will be able to understand and work with it much better than we do. Future humans' brains will probably be wired a bit differently, similar to multilingual speakers of today. We may even see "AI language" classes become a common part of school curriculums. Although, I think AI will probably advance enough that most people will never even need to communicate on "its level", but it's probably a good idea to keep humans in the loop either way, and in which case, understanding the more advanced "AI vocabulary" might be useful.
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It's not a general trend. It's only Opus 5.
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No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)
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Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes it generates grammatically correct nonsense.
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.
I think this was the biggest shock of the original ChatGPT for me. Just how completely unrobotic its voice was compared to everything we'd ever imagined in sci fi. Even that early version was also way more adept at understanding things like implication and sarcasm than any movie AI.
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[will need to be fixed later if I'm wrong]
Or "will need fixing", right?
Appalachian dialect
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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"
Yes, people working at anthropic: please, please, please tell me this is fixed. Or do you all speak like this now. Help!
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?
and when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?
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.
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
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Prompting it often to use simplified technical english generally stops this kind of horrid prose.
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.
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.
It helps to feed ot back saying "no human can understand this, rewrite in STE", byt it gets exhausting
Without context you have no idea what it means.
Perhaps it signifies nothing?
Reminds me of a Cylon hybrid.
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.
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.
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.
Seconded, and also using Sol to clean up Opus logorrhea.
> 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!"
It's pretty wild how "reasoning" models now generate like 10 thousand hidden chain of thought tokens in response to a "increase opacity of the logo by 20%" prompt before writing the actual message and yet they still manage to do this.
Reminds me of how I asked Gemini (paid plan) to translate some labels on a chart from Russian to English the other day, and it spat out the image, then did a "wait, several labels are still Russian somehow", spat out another image with the same issue, then a paragraph of babble about how desperately it wanted to fix the issue to complete the task successfully, spat out the same image a third time and was like "welp I may be brain damaged... sorry, user :("
It was hard to tell if the parser was leaking reasoning since Gemini does that occasionally with nested tags and stuff but either way seeing the load-bearing psychosis in its normal generative loop was somewhat unnerving. Helps understand why the big labs are so intent on hiding it from the user.
any specifics on what you did?
Not the person you're asking, but I did that by explaining to Fable my problem with Opus's gobbledygook and having it write a Claude skill for producing clear explanations in its reports to me. I also had it add notes about the need for clearer writing to CLAUDE.md and other project documentation. Opus's subsequent reports to me have been much clearer.
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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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