This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it).

blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes

Another benefit of open models is that you can mask out out words from logits directly when sampling. I wonder if anyone has put together a "desloppifier" for e.g. DeepSeek

This is a significant list but unfortunately not load-bearing enough.

So, basically, it's on mute now? :)

How about "genuinely"? Not sure why that one bothers me so much.

To combat it, I decided to only use Opus 5 if I'm actually talking to Fable 5 that's orchestrating it. :D Opus 5 experience is really abysmal, hopefully they can get it back on track.

What do you do when you want to talk about e.g. spines?

couldn't this inadvertently make the model dumber? if these kinds of words are what lets it "think".

As it seems to be getting worse over time (with 4.8 being worse than 4.6 and 5 worse than 4.8 again), could this simply be signs of model collapse?

I mean more and more training data you find on the web is generated by previous models. The only reliable way to find human-generated text is to find text written before 2022, and they've used up all of that already. And AFAIU, these companies are using more and more synthetic data or semi-synthetic data.

You forgot my favorite: “ablation”.

I use a hook. Checks for banned words and patterns.

Injects a reminder to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English which I picked up from a suggestion in another thread.

Honestly it’s working pretty well. Except for I need to check how often it’s actually firing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

I feel like hooks aren’t utilized enough. Really nice for being the sort of auto steering as long as you can encode some pattern to detect the bad behaviour.

Prompts and skills just don’t cut it.