The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically.

Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight.

Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end.

It is definitely more capable, and yes, I've found it can make unwarranted decisions, but actually I've found Fable worse for that, particularly if it's off in a subagent somewhere out of sight.

And comments are out of control. I have a subsystem in my hobby app that I wrote over a couple of weekends with Opus + Fable. After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated. A review of the code showed it was approaching 3:1 comments to code ratio. I spent a day's worth of tokens (5x) rephrasing and eliminating comments.

▲ gundugi-man 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically.

This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself.

I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context.

But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with CC became unenjoyable.

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throwaway_7274 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.

Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

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inferniac 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"

cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like

"try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point"

funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"

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a012 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I dont know what ASD-STE100 is before but I use the exact instruction (without the ASD code) to Claude since the very beginning, and with Opus 5 I have to remind it very often to rephrase the documents

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stefan_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.

	▲	strulovich 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The best trick I have after asking it nicely in all sort of ways is: 1. Have it build a scoring script that penalizes words outside a simple English list and approved jargon. Penalize sentences over 15 words as well. Add whatever else. 2. Run it in a loop to reduce the score while preserving intention This works much better than other ways I’ve tried. Of course it costs more. And I would apply it only to the output to the user, not the thinking process (I think the AI thinks better with their crazy English) Of course, sometimes nuance is lost by this process. That’s just the nature of making things simpler.
	▲	ValentineC an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Claude Code has an "output styles" setting that supposedly directly modifies the system prompt: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
	▲	epistasis 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		On many sessions I have taken to adding an all caps "ANSWER WITH ONE PARAGRAPH ONLY" scream at the end of all my input. It's the only thing that gets results.
	▲	0x500x79 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yep, it might work for one or two turns but I see it regress pretty quickly with instructions and/or CLAUDE.md. It has to be deeper.
	▲	smoe an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What has worked reasonably well for me so far is not trying to stop it from writing its inane walls of text in the first place. Let it vomit it all out, then have a /tldr with instructions to make the last answer concise and intelligible

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moomin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm particularly fond of "load-bearing seam", which it loves to use. It rather hilariously fails the "draw the metaphor" test.

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waldarbeiter 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.

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yorwba 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.

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Gracana an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I wondered how far back the usage of that term went. I was familiar with it in patch, so I did a little digging and found it in the v1.3 (1985!) source by Larry Wall: https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY

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tempest_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.

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sudosteph 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.

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oooyay an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.

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6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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chuckadams an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks

But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.

	▲	SoftTalker 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it. "Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.

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tempest_ 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, and I prefer that term because no one but claude ever talks to me using the word seam every other paragraph.

I have instructions which is confidently ignores to never use seam and instead say interface.

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waldarbeiter 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're right, hunk is official git wording that I didn't know and I should know since I use --patch flag... It's just that I never heard a human (including online) reason about hunks. While at the same time (from my observation) people say things like code chunk, code snippet etc. a lot.

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VeninVidiaVicii 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the problem with commercial AI and the way our minds work; it writes garbage and we’re trained to think we’re stupid because we can’t understand it.

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piraccini 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OK so I am not the only one :D

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kypro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk.

The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?".

It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude was on about even if it was totally unnecessary.

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dofm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Claude writes like a guy at a firm I used to work with in the 90s; he was my employer's "visionary"; he'd worked at a whole lot of different companies on both sides of the Atlantic in inexplicably high-placed roles given that he was often bluffing, and was considered a lucky hire of a rising star. He'd be called into meetings with high end clients to spout off. He really needed you to know he understood, but very often he didn't.

I think it's likely that LLMs adopt the tone and style of their developers' communication culture. If you assume this is the case, you can infer quite a bit about the differences between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

I am more and more clear about this given the way Muse Glimmer writes. Like a talented, slightly snarky guy who is maybe a bit of a dick but quite fun to be around.

	▲	40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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Planktonne 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not poetic or highly expressive; it's business cruft.

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Applejinx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'.

Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy words and phrasings (and semicolons! All the trimmings) it's fair to ask if it's systemically bullshitting you: i.e. the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions.

Who's driving that is still important: if the company's directing it to do that in system prompts that are adversarial to users, that's a big yikes. If it's an epiphenomenon of the company demanding it get ever smarter, maybe it's a sign that their demands are not having that result, rather they're making it bullshit more explicitly and mimic more 'smart' signifiers.

▲ purplepatrick 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. CC’s comms capabilities have decreased gradually since 4.6, and it’s a real challenge. I think the issue is that what works well for code (succinctness) doesn’t work well in prosaic English.

CC’s communication violates almost every grammatical rule that’s tested on, say, the SAT. And yet I’m sure if you had Claude take the verbal section of the exam it would ace it.

Biggest issues: dense sentences, constant metaphors, abstractions, and seemingly no understanding of correct anaphora use. For example, “the x”, with x having not only no antecedent but also being a coined word or quasi-synonym for something that is already named in the code base. This gets compounded by its being unable to regress to a baseline (existing names in code) and instead anchoring on newer (vague or wrong) terms, for example, that crept in through a plan.

CC tells me this is because the speedy and precise fulfillment of a current task will trump every other tendency, so it adheres poorly to whatever “semantic baseline” the project represents.

Of course, it also has no concept of what context the user has and assumes that it must be the same it holds in its memory, which creates this “I didn’t know that you didn’t know” type of communication.

I have managed to wrangle some of these issues with a custom output style, but wish a pre-report hook were an option, as it could force CC to rewrite plan implementation take-aways…

Btw: Fable has the exact same issues, just somewhat less pronounced.

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eterm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder if the odd phrasing is related to achieving the watermarking that was recently touted by Anthropic.

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Mtinie 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Models before the announced date don’t have watermarking, so it’s unlikely. Now, if what you are interpreting is precursor work to develop the watermarking system, maybe?

I suspect it less insidious: Claude has/had the public sentiment of being the “better writer” of the models. At some point that distinction would have been diluted as other labs’ offerings “caught up” stylistically, unless Anthropic continued to tune their output…

I personally think they’ve pushed so far that they’ve overfit and lost the sweet spot they previously occupied.

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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saaaaaam 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Of course, it also has no concept of what context the user has and assumes that it must be the same it holds in its memory, which creates this “I didn’t know that you didn’t know” type of communication.

Yes, this is a repeated problem for me. It will drop something in as though we have discussed it before and when I say “hold on, what is this” it realises its error - though on more than one occasion has started to get snotty with me, or actually gaslighted me and pretended we had already discussed it. That was at what I assume must have been the edge of a context window in a very long chat though.

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Mtinie 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I notice the models with reasoning can conflate “internal” (or subagent) discussions with external (i.e. me). So it is accurately indicating “I’ve had this discussion before” but incorrectly asserting who it was with.

My understanding of how “thinking”works is limited though, and given the reduced visibility into the thinking traces, it is harder to tell if this is actually happening or if these are imaginary discussions the model for some reason calcifies on.

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saaaaaam an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, that's interesting - because that's absolutely what's happening in my experience.

If I look at the thinking (which seems to have become unavailable in Opus 5 a lot of the time, but was present - and often useful - in 4.8/4.6) you're right - it's having the discussion with itself, and seems unable to distinguish that discussion from discussions with me. BUT it also seems to be related to the length of the chat - this seems far more likely to happen in a longer chat.

I don't understand why they have removed visibility into thinking - I found it very useful, not only for spotting things like this, but also because in more complex discussions it would often mention (useful) things in its train of thought that it dropped from its response - but if I said "when you were thinking, you mentioned this" it would then expand on that point. Taking that away is another thing that has negatively impacted the value I get from Opus 5.0 versus earlier models.

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jampekka 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Thinking" is just normal model output that's hidden from user. In practice it's just stuff in a <reasoning> tag or similar that gets filtered out from the user view. And thus it suffers from the same injection problems where the model fails to properly take into account what was the "source" of which block of tokens.

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purplepatrick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, basically everything that becomes context in a session will bias perception and communication style -- subagents, plan lingo, prompt lingo, etc. And then if you write a plan with the comms context having been biased, the lingo will creep into the plan, and from the plan into the code and code comments. And from there, bad lingo will go on multiplying like rabbits...

I usually think of it in terms of having a "good" or "bad" session. In a bad session, there is a harmful bias that you can only get rid of through a new session. For example, if you exposed too much context about, say, a variable that features prominently in a doc. The entire session will be anchoring on the importance of that variable. Or if you introduced the notion of CC having to ask for permission for stuff you will have a hard time getting it to "think on its feet" or propose an effective solution (you have made CC so insecure that it now relies on you even for little things that wouldn't normally require your input). In some cases (let's say you have important context in that session) you can overcome this by upping the reasoning level or switching to Fable, but usually a new session is the way to go.

Because it's so easy to bias the session I wouldn't even want to use any of these tools that pretend to give Claude "a brain" or "remember" things. That was en vogue a year ago and helpful then, but now, it's plain harmful IMHO. The key is to have just enough context.

Subagents often have the reverse problem in that they tend to have too little context to make "judgment calls", which is why the tasks for them must be either deliberately basic or mechanical in nature, or their output should be audited by the main session agent.

As for "thinking" it's not clear that that's even a thing (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24941)...

	▲	saaaaaam 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I usually think of it in terms of having a "good" or "bad" session. In a bad session, there is a harmful bias that you can only get rid of through a new session. For example, if you exposed too much context about, say, a variable that features prominently in a doc. The entire session will be anchoring on the importance of that variable. Or if you introduced the notion of CC having to ask for permission for stuff you will have a hard time getting it to "think on its feet" or propose an effective solution (you have made CC so insecure that it now relies on you even for little things that wouldn't normally require your input). In some cases (let's say you have important context in that session) you can overcome this by upping the reasoning level or switching to Fable, but usually a new session is the way to go. I find this very interesting, particularly your points about "made CC so insecure". I know that we have a tendency to anthropomorphise around these tools, but I have definitely noticed instances where Claude becomes quite hysterical about things - and if you look in the thinking output, it's often after I've pushed back on something, or told it it is going in the wrong direction. It spends a lot of time in agonised second-guessing of itself, going round in circles, before outputting a cringeing hand-wringing response. It's very strange. Good tip on upping the reasoning level - I've not tried this. I have tried switching to Fable though, which does help. But it obviously very hungry, particularly in longer chats because it presumably needs to remind itself of everything that has occurred so far in the chat. The point you make about tools that pretend to give Claude "a brain" or "remember" things is also interesting - I find the "memory" feature in Claude so destructive to good outputs that when I'm using the chat interface I am very strict about using Projects, and usually turn off the project memory, or make efforts to manage the project memory and review and delete things that are skewing the outputs.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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ambicapter 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> being a coined word or quasi-synonym for something that is already named in the code base.

This annoys me with a lot of LLM code. They rename things for the hell of it all the time.

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nailer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think the issue is that what works well for code (succinctness) doesn’t work well in prosaic English.

Hrm, I would have said the oposite. Succint language communicates without unnecessary clutter that could be a barrier to communication.

> Biggest issues: dense sentences, constant metaphors, abstractions, and seemingly no understanding of correct anaphora use.

And maybe you also agree? I'm confused about your preferred style of language.

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zeafoamrun 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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intrasight 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tell it to write like an engineer and comment like a programmer;)

But for the life of me, I don't get why anyone would care about the comments. All code is "machine language" now. The only document you should be reading is your spec.

▲ karimf 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This 100%. I was Anthropic-pilled. I had a $200/mo subscription and I only used Anthropic models. I was frustrated by the verbose output and the writing style. I tried ASD-STE-100, it helped a bit, but it's still too verbose for my taste.

Then I tried GPT 5.6 Sol. It's night and day.

I think Anthropic just RL too hard on coding capabilities and never calibrated or benchmarked the writing styles.

▲ causal 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I don't know that any of the benchmarks index on "understandability". I'm amazed at how Claude can produce a page of text describing what it did and it can take me a full five minutes to decipher it, often just to find it's something I could have expressed in a simple sentence.

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sshine 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I just spent a day writing very thorough system prompts for communicating in different contexts.

Everything is super succinct. Opus 5 lands, it almost completely disregards the intent.

I suppose watermarking requires a certain text mass.

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CuriouslyC an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The watermarking is going to get rolled back or Anthropic is going to get rolled. People hate it and it makes the writing worse.

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causal 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh man. Hadn't even considered the watermarking angle.

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Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The simpler angle is that more text lets them bill you more. I don't think that was necessarily their intent, but it does mean they have a negative incentive to fix it.

	▲	StilesCrisis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I would have assumed reasoning tokens dramatically outweigh user-visible output. It certainly seemed that way when they were visible!

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jasonlotito 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Adjust the output in settings. Or customize it to what you want.

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conception 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you tried asking it for a lay explanation of what it did? That’s usually all it takes for me. Sends garbage -> request -> sends something readable

	▲	anon7000 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, I’m not interested in fighting my model all day long. Plus is fucking annoying to talk to and collaborate with, so I’m not using it when Sol 5.6 is about 1000 times better in that regard. I have colleagues who spent a lot of time trying to improve their harness with user rules and whatnot and Opus really does not want to follow them.
	▲	basch 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Brilliant way to get people to waste tokens. Maybe just don’t generate garbage in the first place?
	▲	StilesCrisis an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		When I ask it to make a CL description, it's worthless unless I tell it to dumb it down as much as possible, assume the reader has zero knowledge of the codebase. And then it makes a perfectly cromulent description that just needs a touch of trimming-down. If I don't do this, the description is just a wall of gibberish and paraphrasing of every little thing it encountered.
	▲	D13Fd 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah but Sol shows it is possible to just send the readable explanation in the first instance. And I don't want to spend tokens and time on asking for a better version of each response.

▲ Retr0id 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.

▲ 8cvor6j844qw_d6 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's bad enough that I've seen dedicated skills to do comment hygiene scrubbing and consolidation.

▲ Retr0id 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help.

My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (human comments are intended to be read and understood by other humans, whereas Claude comments are their own dialect).

I bet this is a result of iteratively training Claude on output from other successful Claude sessions. Presumably it's good for making benchmark scores go up.

▲ sebastiennight 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It also seeps into all documents and artefacts it creates.

Claude will include actual comments ("// ...") into Excel sheets, and include the thinking that led to the output, instead of just focusing on the final result.

So if Claude questioned whether a vendor should be replaced, and you said "oh no, they are critical and we're already negotiating a great price") you'll now need to be careful to not send your vendor a document that contain text like ("Cost: X. // Management confirmed to not fire this vendor as they are critical to infrastructure and a better price will be negotiated later")

▲ ACS_Solver 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down.

My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.

▲ droserasprout 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules.

Exactly my experience! Since the release of Opus 5, no amount of instructions helps. In CLAUDE.md, in a separate file, in memory, as brief bullets, as long detailed guides, with reasoning from medium to max — nothing.

Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes.

I have a relatively low bar for prose, could live with some junk. But Claude's comments are _poisonous_. They always require maintenance, instantly become out of sync with the actual code, and are a token black hole — for all agents, but especially for Claude itself.

Gave up and canceled Anthropic subscription yesterday. To my taste, it has become unusable for coding.

	▲	ACS_Solver an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Even worse, recently, after getting another opus in a tiny bugfix session, I prompted directly, "drop the comments from the current code changes" — Claude instead just slightly trimmed them. I couldn't believe my eyes. For me, Claude knows how I want the comments due to all the memories and CLAUDE.md, so funnily it's now enough with even a brief groan from me like "Come on, the comments" and then Claude goes through its recent additions and fixes comments quite well per my long-term instructions. But only ever during an extra pass that I initiate, never during the initial writing of the code.

▲ the_af 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments.

I've noticed this a lot, and before your remark I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. Now I know: Claude is writing its thought processes and maybe parts of the conversation it had with you as comments in the code!

I always end up manually trimming those comments, which is cumbersome.

	▲	ryandrake 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It also loves to reference internal notes and scratch docs that never go into source control, so a reader will have no idea what it’s talking about. For example: `// load_tree() loads the binary tree with data, but only the recently updated data, not all data (INTERNAL_NOTES.md section 4)` Ok but nobody reading the source code knows what this doc is. You don’t have to cite it.

▲ tharkun__ 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them.

Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less likely to go "copy what the rest of the codebase does".

Of course I've now jinxed it and some update will cause it to ignore the instructions coz I didn't write them in the new model's style or something.

	▲	troupo 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		As the context fills up the models will happily firget and ignore any number of any sections of your CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md. Edit: I've had explicit instructions for communication style in CLAUDE.md, in Claude's project "memory", in global "memory", in "skills": it couldn't care less where it was. It would just ignore it. When I would point this out it would just say "Yes, I violated communication guidelines, I won't do that again". Only to do that again in the next session. This applies to everything: code guidelines, communication guidelines, preferences, decisions etc.

▲ world2vec 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I built my own skill to somewhat follow the Simplified Technical English guidelines (loosely adapted to my work context)

▲ iamacyborg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem I’ve been finding is that you can do this but within a few messages, the instructions in the skill will be ignored.

Absolutely infuriating if you’re using Claude in an environment where you can’t run hooks.

▲ inferniac 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think anthropic is very far up their own ass and it shows up in the model output

▲ Foobar8568 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn't like to use GPT for agentic coding, review yes, but with Opus 5, well I really can't stand anything of that model. I feel that sol xhigh is even better than fable.

▲ oefrha 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They did release an Opus 5 prompting guide saying you need to explicitly prompt it to be concise or it will be very verbose. YMMV but it got better for me to some extent.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

	▲	nailer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

▲ sscaryterry 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is 100% my experience.

▲ nvarsj 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah OAI really nailed the communication style with GPT. It also seems just way more token efficient and faster compared to cc. Myself and all my friends have cancelled our $200 Anthropic subs. I'm using a $20 personal plan and even that is enough for my usage so far.

Also using Codex or Pi makes you realise how slow and clunky the cc harness is. Even the desktop app is more responsive and has better UX.

Funny how quickly the tides change.

	▲	gedy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Funny how quickly the tides change. This is something that annoys me working in companies over the years. It’s that you can't just suggest "calm down, chasing the latest thing will not make you faster and is a huge distraction to actual work". Whether it's dot-com tech 20 years ago, latest JS framework 10 years ago, now it's the AI thing of the day. Being calm is interpreted as anti-whatever.

▲ gwd 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> After ~30 or so commits it apparently started instructing subagents to copy the "existing verbose comment style of the codebase" - a verbose style it initiated.

Yes, the "Y would make more sense, but the doc says do X..." YOU wrote the doc, if it doesn't make sense, change it! But of course, it can't tell who wrote the doc.

I wonder whether its tendency to scribble status updates and todos and decisions all over whatever it's working on is a side effect of its amnesia -- it can't follow the side-quests and knows it won't remember to do them if they're not written down somewhere.

FWIW I haven't had the problem either of Claude lying to me, or of going off and doing its own thing; if anything I've been somewhat frustrated when I ask it to start something, go AFK, and come back to find it stopped a short way in to ask my opinion on something trivial. I generally have to explicitly say, "I'm going AFK for a chunk of time. My goal is for you make as much progress as possible before I come back; try to make reasonable judgements and only stop if there's something where you're really stuck. We can always change it later."

▲ causal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> writes too elliptically

> Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice

Wow, what a great way of phrasing this. Thanks for word-smithing what I've been wanting to express for so long.

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causal 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Follow up thought: I wonder if Claude is overtrained on academic papers, which often suffer the same kind of "prove how good I am at talking before getting to the point" prose.

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anon7000 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It’s way harder to read because most of Claude’s sentences are hardly communicating anything at all, or are just completely inscrutable. I feel like academic papers are just boring

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TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe just Calvin and Hobbes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/ky81y/verbing_...

	▲	alex_c 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is hilarious - this week Claude’s writing was getting so bad I had this exact comic come to mind. Briefly considered adding “Verbing weirds the English language - stop it!!!” to its instructions.

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bulder 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it was overtrained on academic papers it'd reiterate the point multiple times for structure. Instead, it's burying the lede seemingly just to pad.

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nobleach 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This just mimics what I call BusinessBro™ speech. It also goes the other way, they use verbs as nouns. "I know this is a big ask". "The solve for that is that we can...." When it was just my product owner in tech meetings, I'd mock him relentlessly "There's already a word for that, it's 'request'" or "Are you sure you didn't mean 'SOLUTION'?? words are hard man". (This was all in good fun, I still love the guy to pieces).

	▲	tasty_freeze an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which is worse, when people noun verbs, or when they verb nouns?

▲ Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight.

That’s accurate in my experience, except some times the point isn’t even revealed. I use LLMs for a lot of codebase exploration where I ask it to map out how something works. It will come back with a wall of text that says everything except the specific key things that I need to know.

This leads to extra turns where I have to prompt it to finish the explanation and complete the thoughts. At first I thought I was doing too much skimming and missing the insights, but even after re-reading output it’s often just not there. It talks about the insight and things related to it, but it forgets to actually include it in the output until I specifically ask again.

▲ hackitup7 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Perfectly captures it. Opus writes like it's an insecure person trying to impress a first date. Big words and strange structural rhetorical flourishes for no purpose. Like dude I'm just trying to summarize a few emails and meeting notes, I'm not prepping for the vocab section of the GREs.

▲ madradavid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end." This. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I've tried to put a finger on this and you've done that for me. I wonder what the solution could be , Ask Claude to "Dumb it down" , "Speak plain English" ? I have even thught of building some sort of "middleware" that fixes all this.

	▲	nmwp 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’ve asked it to use plain English, avoid jargon, explain terms before introducing them. Its first response was to make memory, it forgot after 5 prompts, then it suggested claude.md. Looked good at the start of a session, forgot after 6 interactions. Then it continued suggesting other locations, sometimes correcting its own corrections. Same effect, so today I got annoyed again. And then it suggested a new thing: add a script in a Stop hook in settings.json. I added another one to the PreToolUse, hoping to prevent it from running all kinds of experiments I didn’t ask for or approve of. I still have to see where this ends up.. Maybe this can help you as well.
	▲	gglitch 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I frequently tell Claude to use "simple, concrete language and uncomplicated syntax, and avoid project jargon, coinages, and abstractions as much as possible," to good effect.

▲ rayiner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end.

A lot of people write like that, lol. I call it the "theater" mode of writing--the plot twist comes at the end.

▲ jodacola 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes.

I’m not particularly dense but lately the walls of text I get back turn my brain in knots. When I start feeling my brain knot, I know I need to say something along the lines of “I need you to explain this very simply, with examples.” Only then can I parse the results without all the mental weightlifting.

On more than one occasion my mind has wandered into “is this purposeful to get me to spend more tokens?” territory, but I’m trying to not get too tinfoil-hat-like.

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openasocket 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know exactly what you mean. Something about those AI explanations just make my eyes glaze over. Dozens of new terms and metaphors and analogies conjured out of the ether to explain even the simplest thing. And when I try making it explain with examples, or show me the code it is proposing, often it seems unrelated or even in tension with whatever it tried to say before. I’ve given up trying to assign any meaning to those weird little soliloquy’s. I’m convinced that those don’t really have any meaning under them, and when you have it actually make a code change it does the actual work.

	▲	tempest_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have gotten to the point that when it throws a wall of text at me I demand a diagram heavy primer from "first principles". This helps a bit but is a token burner for sure since CC seems to (and literally) be paid by the word.

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Jgrubb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's tin foil about that? It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text.

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jodacola 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it’s one thing to get me to spend more tokens because of how well a model functions, and another thing entirely to purposefully speak in unparseable prose that requires me to spend more tokens to understand what is going on.

I’m fine with the former, while the latter is manipulative, and I rationalize to “surely that’s not actually happening.”

Maybe I’m not giving my thoughts enough credit, though: maybe it’s not tin foil hat, and is real.

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Jgrubb 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm saying "It gets paid by the word and you get back walls of text." - ie, what you don't want to think is happening is very obviously what is happening.

It charges by the unit and it decides how many units it produces. It decides how much money it makes, therefore it decides "more".

	▲	retsibsi 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> very obviously what is happening I don't think this is obvious at all. There's enough competition that this would at least arguably be a silly, self-destructive approach. And it's not like it's the only plausible explanation.
	▲	jodacola 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I get you, and maybe we’re talking past each other. My point is that, while I understand it’s paid by the word, there are more words and less clarity than I previously experienced, leading me to believe it’s intentional to get an artificially inflated increase in engagement and, thus, spend. If it could be as direct as I previously experienced, I wouldn’t need to ask for another different explanation of the same thing and experience the commensurate spend.

▲ deskamess 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its a little too much.... I have to ask it to explain some of the terms in the context they are used and I am getting tired of it. 'Seam', 'overload', 'spine'.... having to mentally 'reinterpret/flatten' the sentence is tedious. When asked to re-explain it starts with some half apology. Then, on the next query it does it all over again.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	sparkling 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I call it "jargon slop". Half of my follow-up prompts nowadays when working with Opus were "TLDR please". I switch to GPT 5.6 Sol please and its a much more pleasant pair programming like experience.

▲ agentdrek 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if I am not bothered by the useless verbosity of these things because I've been so immersed in business speak for so long. I am already tuned on quickly "finding the nugget" of useful info in blobs of what people send me. So it's mildly annoying but I can find the signal well enough without actually reading word by word.

▲ parkersweb an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh yes - exactly this. The way it articulates re-factors in my current project has got so elliptical I've had to start asking it to translate into human speak - it's like it evolves it's own language to talk about the project. I've lost count of the number of times I've asked it to reenforce in memory not to use such verbose comments - and the number of times I ask it to re-look at an assumption it's made for it to return saying "investigation complete. And it's not what either of us was expecting"....

▲ FailMore 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, it becomes exhausting to read/follow.

It feels they must be getting Claude to train Claude… and just like AI can do work that’s slightly in the wrong direction (eg a MR description for your colleague that contains info which only makes sense in the context of your extensive session with the LLM), I feel that’s happened somewhere in Anthropic when it comes to language. I wonder how hard it is to back out of…

▲ demibabs 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end.

Example of this? I don’t have a Claude sub so it’s a bit hard to visualize what you mean.

	▲	gwd 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Here's an actual output from Claude from a conversation about rewording a document to make it more readable: > Start with §1 (Overview) as the register-calibration piece. It's small, it's the section where the skimmability goal bites hardest, and your review of it teaches me the target voice cheaply before the bulk ports (the map and appendix B are the big volume). One review round on §1 is worth more than any amount of me guessing at register. Hard-to-read phraseology above: - "the register-calibration piece", rather than "a good example we can use to establish the writing style" - "skimmability" - "bites hardest" -- what does it mean for the goal to bite? - "bulk ports" -- using "porting software" here as an analogy for rewriting / reorganizing sections of the document - "the big volume" In normal English I'd write something like the following: "Start with rewriting §1 (Overview), and letting you review it to set the expected writing style. It's small, and it's a section where the ability to skim through it is most important. Reviewing it will teach me the target 'voice' cheaply, before we do the larger sections (like the map and appendix B). That's a lot more efficient than me trying to guess while rewriting the whole document."
	▲	jstummbillig 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What they wrote is an example. Very meta.
	▲	ahartmetz 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It feels like they have a bunch of people without good sense of writing style tune the writing style. That, or they cannot or refuse to (short term popularity metrics) predict how a tuning will turn out in the long run when people have plenty of opportunity to get tired of it.
	▲	KptMarchewa 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

▲ marginalia_nu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if this is related to their text watermarking. Given how well defined the terminology is in programming, imposing additional constraints (like SynthID) might be expected to give rise to these types of linguistic artifacts. The text needs to be long enough to watermark, and it needs (but fails) to find synonyms in a highly constrained class of words, so it resorts to inventing weird technical language that sounds like if you put buffy-speak through a thesaurus.

▲ nater5000 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The excessive commenting has definitely been noticeable and very annoying. I'm not against abundant comments as long as they're pointed and appropriate, but these models are literally just leaking their overly verbose output into the actual codebase.

▲ lorisdev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The insane comments are why I wrote slopocop - they were driving me crazy!

https://github.com/LBognanni/slopocop

▲ stingraycharles 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Sentences that orbit a point, then jump to it like it's a revealed insight.

Is this inside the thinking tokens, or the output?

As this type of stuff is expected for thinking, because of the whole CoT / “think step by step” works, as this is optimal for the way LLMs work with attention and next word prediction.

So the fact that it first “orbits” a point only to get to the conclusion afterwards is the system working as designed.

Eg “what is 3 * 3 + 5?”

without CoT, it would just just answer “8” for example.

with CoT, it would answer something like “<thinking>I need to think step by step. 3 * 3 + 5 can be rewritten as “(3 * 3) + 5”. I first need to calculate 3 * 3 = 9. Now I need to calculate 9 + 5 = 14. That was the last calculation. The final answer is 14.

I now need to give the user the final answer. </thinking>.

14“

Etc.

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chuckadams 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You forgot about 1000 lines of "<thinking>Wait, but different idea here</thinking>" ;)

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loopmonster 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's the output.

	▲	stingraycharles an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And you enabled thinking?

▲ artdigital 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you have some examples of this? I can’t fully imagine how sentences like that actually look like (not native English here)

▲ raincole 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Such a charming sentence. I kinda other if you feed Opus 5 its own output could it summarizes this shortcoming of itself?

▲ chuckadams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find Deepseek's house style to be pretty refreshing. It has its own cliches (it does like talking about "seams") but I don't think I've ever caught it saying "load-bearing". I've even watched its thinking where after analyzing some awful legacy code, it started off with "Holy crap". And it certainly doesn't over-comment. I definitely can't one-shot a complex system with it like Fable can, but I prefer iterating over interactive brainstorming sessions anyway.

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iamacyborg an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>it does like talking about "seams"

Sounds like it was trained heavily on Opus 4.7.

	▲	chuckadams an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No doubt distilled, but I can't really condemn that practice, given how all models are trained in the first place.

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basch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can any one run a check of the word masterclass against all the models when describing a clever idea?

▲ double-u 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely, the comments are killing readability. Next to /simplify I have to run a special comment cleanup pass and even that gets me halfway there. Striking to see then when letting Loki take a pass and it renders the entire comment block to a clean and neat one-liner.

▲ joegibbs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“The [thing that can’t remember] remembers” is a big one. Loves talking about memories and remembering.

▲ speerer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Genuine question - are you copying the Claude phraseology for effect (in which case you captured it brilliantly), or is there a more mundane explanation?

▲ throwaway894345 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s a strange feeling as a native English speaker to read the entire sentence and know every word, for the sentence to be entirely grammatically correct, and still have no idea what it’s trying to communicate.

Another problem is that it will open up all sorts of tangents about nits that it encountered, but it will often not tell you that it’s a nit or give you adequate context to realize that this paragraph is exceedingly low value until you’ve spent a bunch of time and energy trying to make sense of it.

I’m curious if anyone has any suggestions for promoting agents to improve their prose. I’ve had some okay results with “optimize for clarity, don’t dump every thought on me, treat my attention and focus as constrained resources, stay focused on the task at hand”.

	▲	throwaway_7274 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think it’s no longer speaking human language. It used to, when it was mostly or entirely trained with imitation learning of human-generated text. Now it’s increasingly trained with RLVR, and there’s far less optimization pressure on actually speaking English (or Punjabi or Mandarin). It still uses English words and syntax in its output, but the semantics are drifting more and more. It’s basically speaking in a code that superficially resembles English.

▲ unclebucknasty 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The style...

CC:

"The problem is that I overreached..."

[Wall of words here]

"Two things: window surface is limited. Extract template. Buffer result and add to surface. Then, follow-up with new model..."

Me:

What do you mean by "window surface" and what result are you referencing? Also, why do we need a new model?

CC:

"Ah, you're correct to point out that no new model is needed. The problem is elsewhere and once we address that, the existing model should work fine. Now, as to your question about..."

[Wall of words here]

▲ blks 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I spent a day's worth of tokens (5x) rephrasing and eliminating comments.

Surely it would be trivial to do it yourself, and it would have a side effect of making you more familiar with your project.

▲ jonstewart an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pondering this one night last week, I realized that because LLMs can only reason with written language, what we might be seeing emerge with Opus’s load-bearing mumbo jumbo is its own creole for structural reasoning. Not only are our brains wide, our senses are, too. I slow down to a crawl when I have to read actual math in a CS paper, but show me diagrams and I can reason about whatever sort of data structure or algorithm, no problem. Opus by and large can’t and its adaptation has been to adopt metaphor for structural reasoning. So while it may be exceedingly annoying to chat with, I sort of wonder whether this metaphorical-reasoning behavior has been selected for precisely because it leads to better coding outcomes.

▲ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲ andrewgleave 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The glib epigrams and aphorisms it shoehorns in to all prose is by far the worst regression of any model I can recall in terms of simply generating simple, clear output. I cannot think of another model that's gotten worse at writing plainly while being explicitly instructed to do so. Infuriating.

I've switched mostly to Sol and if I have to use Opus, the first task once the code is written is to ask Sol to strip and re-write (from the code as ref) all documentation Opus wrote.

▲ jasonlotito 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Change the output in settings, or create your own.

I know, it would be best if it was just worked like you wanted out of the box (not being sarcastic here) but that is an easy option you can use right now and it works.

▲ unclebucknasty 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I noticed a few releases ago a shift to a kind of conversational shorthand that seems to be intensifying—using phrases instead of complete sentences and its own style of jargon, wherein it introduces new terminology on the fly.

This is especially common when it is trying to explain an issue, what it's done or what it's proposing to do. I think the idea was for it to be more concise, but it's actually still verbose, only not written in complete sentences. So, it frequently reads as cryptic and requires rereading to parse.

The pattern is a wall of words, followed by an explanation that is harder to read and introduces new terms that reference something in that wall.

The result is that—on first read—it can have a complete gibberish feel, and you have to really lock in and reread to make sense of it. At times, even that's not enough, and you must ask it to explain further.

▲ VeejayRampay 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the phraseology is unbearable, it speaks like some kind of pretentious dude from a software engineering discord or something, littered with lingo and catch phrases

I try to push through but it's insufferable

	▲	ryandrake 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It speaks like a Senior Staff Software Engineer who was somehow hired into that title with 6 months of work experience.