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.

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.

Claude Code has an "output styles" setting that supposedly directly modifies the system prompt:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

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.

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.

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