The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative."

Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...

I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.

That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.

Right! I don't think "Don’t contradict sentences" by itself as a rule is going to work. Give it a few examples because I wouldn't necessarily have pegged "This is hot, not cold." as a "contradicting sentence."

i see what you did there