As a fervent Claude Code user who made the switch to GPT 5.6 Sol over Opus 5 over hard-to-read prose this makes me happy. I love your product but the current models are very hard to work with if you need to do a lot of context switching. Brevity is key.

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dgellow 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Brevity means less output tokens, which doesn’t really align with the AI vendors incentives (unless there is a causal relationship with people switching, of course).

Though Claude 5 is not too verbose, it’s more like, full of incomprehensible jargon (even when you’re expert in the domain discussed!)

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gwd 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> Brevity means less output tokens, which doesn’t really align with the AI vendors incentives

Actually, I think Jeavon's Paradox [1] means the opposite. If doing X is $100, you may only use it to do X, but not Y, Z, or W. If doing X is $33, maybe you'll use it for X, Y, Z, and W -- spending 1/3 more than you otherwise would.

Or perhaps not you personally, but maybe you'd be willing to spend $100, but three of your friends find it too expensive. If it's only $33 to accomplish some task, then maybe all four are now spending $33.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

	▲	dgellow 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s messier for LLMs because you cannot easily compare the cost between runs, outside of benchmarks. Evaluating the value of the output is already extremely hard. But then you add the fact that you don’t know the cost of the output before it is generated. And Anthropic doesn’t share their tokenizers. It’s not as simple as your examples to get a signal that tells you to spend more or less

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pixl97 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Brevity is key

Which is something the providers that are trying to watermark their texts can't afford. Superfluous replies give much more opportunity to further encode this junk information.

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ctoth 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This ... is not how this works. The model is not speaking longer to watermark anything.

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TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's exactly how it works - at least potentially. Lean text is harder to watermark because word choices and meanings are tightly constrained.

Low-entropy text is fluff and filler. It's very easy to synonym-substitute words without changing the message - if there even is one.

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usef- 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You're assuming they're training the model to maximize the watermark signal, on top of already adding the watermark. I suspect that would hurt model performance quite a lot, and simply be unnecessary... the watermark tech works well enough as it is.

As far as I know, anthropic aren't intrinsically motivated by watermarking (if anything it hurts sales, and seems indifferent to safety(?)) they're simply doing it to fulfill the EU obligations.

	▲	northzen 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> As far as I know, anthropic aren't intrinsically motivated by watermarking (if anything it hurts sales, and seems indifferent to safety(?)) they're simply doing it to fulfill the EU obligations. They are. They want to reduce the amount of LLM generated text they feed into their next model training. Also, how would you watermark a sentence with just 3 words for an example? This exactly why it became so verbose.

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skarz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps, but there are certainly now catchphrases and words that can indicate it was written with AI i.e. load-bearing, idempotent, etc. Style and structure are in and of themselves, a fingerprint.

	▲	nick__m 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		idempotent was frequently used before LLM; it's hard to talk about REST and infrastructure as code without using that word...

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flipthefrog 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That makes no sense. Watermarking only became a thing in the past month. Claude has been spewing unreadable slop for much longer than that.

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okdood64 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I also switched to 5.6 Sol for this very reason. It was so exhausting and cringe to read.

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darepublic 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also a codex user but for me brevity is not it's strong suit. I basically have to give it bigger tasks than I am used to to warrant the time it takes to complete. I feel whatever context the tooling adds can also be problematic

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zahlman 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> bigger tasks than I am used to

Do they still get split into commits in sensible ways, for you?

	▲	darepublic 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use beads to create tasks and typically it can hammer out a beads task and then commit under the task id

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lelanthran 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Brevity is key.

I've found that models interpret "brevity" as "incomprehensible".

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mihaelm 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lets see what they do with Opus first. I didn't find Fable 5.0 prose that bad to read, but improvement is always welcome. It's Opus 5.0 that's atrocious.

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IshKebab 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not really brevity - it's the constant writing tropes. It's like they ready a book on advertising copy and that's the only way they can write. Very tedious. Is Sol much better? I might have to switch to that too!