I've been grappling with this for weeks, not just in Claude but in Codex as well, which isn't quite as bad but still annoying. AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on. It's incredible to me that there's no good way to reliably change the way an LLM responds to you that a workaround like this would even be necessary. It seems like such a failure to live up to the promises of the product.

The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.

Very well said.

And when you say it like that, I have to wonder how much of this is a natural consequence of RHLF on such a grand scale, when you have millions of people pretty much much skimming chat responses or operating outside their depth and giving unqualified feedback to the models.

Seems like a lot of people may be reinforcing what sounds smart over what is smart.

Also as an aside: funny how much the LLMs continue to mirror the human communication they’re trained on

> especially as the session drags on.

This is because these harnesses are missing a very important feature. Anything like this needs to be included with every turn, otherwise the LLM quickly drifts.

I first noticed it when I wrote a harness for D&D (because it's so damn noticeable there), but now I include this for any harness I write.

> The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work.

This is close to the worst thing one could say of tool for professional use.-

> AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on

That’s really annoying, it feels like it’s improved some. Not sure what the fix is, but you could try using a canary to at least get a signal of when things are going sideways (Mr Tinkleberry for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983698)

Unfortunately this may only start to get worse as the AIs are trained on more and more AI generated content.

That sounds kind of like deception, and a dark pattern not too unlike abuse to me.

Though you know, it's not like the leadership tied to these companies have a history of abuse, deception and theft or anything like that, right?

It's not like our leaders hide behind similar sorts of patterns that the agents/AIs follow (not saying it's not a human thing - but I hold leadership to higher standards than non-leaders). If our world leaders were able to be more accountable to these abuses, I don't think this would be tolerated with our AIs.