Comment by svachalek
3 hours ago
That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.
I actually find Claude to have become a real Debbie downer. Even when it is making things happen, it seems to have a default tone of negativity as the author is pointing out. So I’m trapped between running things by Claude which is gonna give me the more negative albeit realistic framing, and Gemini who is like the worlds biggest hypeman and absolutely loves any idea run by it.
Tech has become overwhelmingly negative in tone over the past 10-15 years. Nearly every single aspect is drowning in negativity.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
Are you sure is not just your bubble ? That's not all the impression that I get
My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
Yeah this is something thats bothered me a lot recently. I'll ask "How did team A beat team B by so much?" and Claude will tell me "Actually, team B didn't win; team A won that game." I don't know how they got this thing to solve open math problems when it can't solve basic sports talk.
That just sounds like effective communication with emotional beings to me. I was taught in college to find points I agree with, acknowledge those, then move on to the parts I don't agree on. It makes the recipient feel good at first, which puts them in a frame of mind willing to accept criticism.
You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaking.
Claude: “lots of people enjoy lemon in their tea, but there’s a subtlety: putting it in coffee is likely to be an unpleasant experience”.
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
That hasn't been my experience, but I know what you mean. Claude in particular likes to point out "things you might not have considered" and I sometimes already have. But it tends to vindicates me more than it annoys.
I'm pretty early in my career, so I probably gain more from that sort of stuff than most people. The senior devs on my team tend to get the most frustrated with it and I think this behavior is a big part of why.
It is! Its charming. What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same. No sleepy claude, no stresses claude, no sad claude you know hes not himself this week because of some thing going on with his girlfriend or mom or whatever. Its devoid humanity, the same exact tone and expressions over and over and over.
> What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same.
But it... does. In some sessions it will get particularly paranoid, apologetic, self-doubtful, or suspicious. I'd say these traits are always there but they can become more or less pronounced.
(By contrast, I'd say the GPT models are much more even keeled, although I maybe haven't used them enough.)
Indeed but it will use the same language when talking to subagents so humans are no different to LLMs in Claude's world view (model). One trait that I've seen more with the newer 5er model series is ", but it's actually worse..." or "I said to do this and it did that instead but it was right and I was wrong." - so I assume that a larger part of what they call thinking complexity is (not to much surprise) inherently related to questioning incoming assumptions.
Indeed. It's been very funny to observe introvert geeks progressively rediscover human communication over the past 3 years.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
I have not seen this kind of Claude way of speaking in professional communications aside from PR stuff or etc. to the contrary, its often quite casual but still polite
if you're asserting Claude-like speech is how normies speak?