Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense.

I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's engrams?

I was incredibly surprised how much better was Astra at rephrasing the docs that Fable came up for a project I am about to publish. The instructions are now actually what a human would expect, with clear logic flow diagrams, lists itemized, short paragraphs. It also actually correctly detected the train-of-thought leftovers, as well as stuff that never made it to final version of the project and removed them.

Meanwhile Fable consistently ignores all my requests to write this exact way. I mean, the bare minimum I ask it for it to itemize lists and not write in single long passages using comas, semicolons and 'and's. Still ignores them.

I honestly think it's time to call Astra the SOTA. It may not lead all the benchmarks but it genuinely feels much superior of a model. Not to mention the ¢20 Codex plan with frequent resets (https://codex-resets.com/) gives me roughly as much allowance as the ¢90 Claude plan, especially with recent limit cuts on Anthropic plans.

You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming

After some iteration, this is what I currently shove in every AGENTS.md to make Fable legible:

## Writing guidelines

These apply to documentation, code comments, commit and PR messages, and replies to the user.

- Write precisely in clear, complete sentences; keep text concise and proportional to task complexity.

- Stay focused: avoid filler, repetition, over-the-top detail, and tangents the user did not ask for. Once a fact is stated, do not restate it for effect ("so the commit landed on a branch nobody was going to merge"). Do not editorialise.

- Always prefer ISO 24495-1:2023 conformant plain language over dense technical jargon: short sentences, one idea per sentence, define terms on first use.

- When reporting your own mistake, give the cause and the fix in one sentence each; no apology, no framing ("the mistake was mine"), no post-mortem.

- Never use em dashes or cataphoric teasers such as "Here's the thing" or "But there's a catch".

Claude drives me absolutely crazy for that very reason. It's so obvious when people use it to write anything.

Can we imprint Claude with a little more Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Not just imprinted with the engrams of any one person (however brilliant they might be) — it’s more than that! Like all great writing, it’s more like it’s been imbued with patterns, patterns that are peppered with a potpourri of popular ways of writing in an enthusiastic style while regularly restating things and recapitulating them. Would you like me to explain more?

Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything or do you think maybe this is a stalling tactic to get people to spread out their transactions?

Like how theme parks generally don't do much to keep queues short (or Disney charges you a premium to skip the queue)

The way they use their config filename as free advertising still annoys me. Everyone else is using AGENTS.md.

You think that they communicate? I just assumed they sent each other output of Claude, which is then fed into Claude

I can't take it anymore. I moved to Codex. I refer to "him" as Claude Shakespeare now... I wonder what he'd say if he knew my switch... Et tu, Brute?

I added “ respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories.” to my Claude’s instructions best thing I ever did.

Cynically, I wonder if it's a way to increase token spend from repeated requests to speak like fucking human.

The number of times my response has been "Plain English"...

I started using "debuzz", a skill that runs Claude output through antigravity. Works. But makes everything even slower.

Anthropic needs to get their shit together.

Meanwhile I am just impressed that we have models that write better than most native speakers, at least English and Greek... OTOH I like to write my code and my text myself, so I have no reason to get pissed when LLMs fuck up.

I was wondering why Fable's 5.1 writing in Claude Code became even more unreadable, and found that they added "No em-dashes, no parentheticals, no arrows" to its system prompt.

I have always postulated that it was intentionally bad as to watermark its own output to avoid using it for training the next model.

It was quite insufferable: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...

Long story short, I ended up looking at other providers and models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 and eventually just stuck with OpenAI (more limits, despite smaller context), none of them have such pronounced issues with the tone and writing like Claude does - seems like they were working on it with 5.1 but I'd almost classify it as a form of model collapse.

I wince whenever I catch Claudisms on websites and elsewhere. Same as with that pulsating circle that indicates nothing.

What I find strange is that it uses different prose in different contexts. It's absolutely insufferable in a general claude-code session, but then I got Opus to annotate a non-disclosure agreement and it uses very clear legal language. I was wondering how I could get it to speak like that all the time

They're clearly training on SEO sites that use these strategies to pad out with filler and create space for more ad impressions. They normalize this structure now and the ad copy will be inserted in the future so the frogs won't realize they're already being boiled.

They've corrupted their data set by padding it with generated slop, in the misguided belief that you need 10PB of data to train a brain. Every training round they load more AI slop into it, further amplifying the slop language.

It's fascinating, Sonnet 4 is still available via API and it's so much less moronic than the current model. All of the em-dashes and nonsense are a result of the repeated rounds of reinforcement learning using slop data.

It helps to understand how these tools work. One of the reasons CLAUDE.md doesn't survive longer contexts is it's towards the top of the context. One of the reasons the Claude Code voice survives is it's part of the output style which gets "reminded" to the context at every turn as part of the system context. If you want something truly durable, you should customize your output style. I have zero "load-bearing" issues.

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

It seems they are taking it seriously now - Boris et al have been mentioning they are working on a fix and shipped a temporary band-aid output style to combat Opus 5's horrendous prose.

We'll see if they can do it, I originally got into Claude Code because it, at the time, felt more accessible/conversational than Codex/Gemini. Now it's shifted to say the least

I got my Claude (client, not Code) to behave better by adding “I’d prefer answers to be succinct as possible—bordering on gruff, even. When I want more depth or explanation, I’ll ask.” to its settings literally this morning.

It made it write more like a dev than a marketing agent.

Said it before, I'm almost sure the awful text it generates is part of the fingerprinting feature.

how did they specefically train the model to write answers that way? i think it evolved to be this as a sideeffect of something else.

> I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that.

I noticed the overuse of the word "sharper" or "sharp" in a science paper on ArXiV and my first reaction was "Ewww... AI slop!", but then I checked the date and it was 2020.

It looks like at least some AI-isms stem from the particular style of language commonly used in science papers. Several frontier labs have mentioned heavily weighting those during pre-training because higher quality inputs result in a higher quality model.

Your comment quite badly violates the HN guidelines. You should review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "Let's face it" "terrible writer" "other nonsense" "do Anthropic people actually talk like that" "Dario's engrams"

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.

> I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's engrams?

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.

Don't be curmudgeonly [...] don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

And as to the substance your comment has:

> Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer.

Frontier models (Claude in particular) are better writers than 90% of the population, even at default style. They're not great, but they're better than that of everyone I know who aren't ultra-educated white-collar workers.

Either your assertion that frontier models are "terrible" writers is false, or you're claiming that 90% of people are "terrible" at writing, which is rather condescending and elitist.