One thing that works quite well for me for a couple of model generations now is to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English, something along the lines of

  **Use controlled technical English.** Prefer an ASD-STE100 style: use short sentences, direct terms, active voice, and one idea per sentence; avoid slang, hype, vague pronouns, and unnecessary jargon.

in your agents.md. The concept of STE100 seems sufficiently ingrained in the models to eliminate 90% of the annoying fluff.

▲ quibono 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve seen this a few times now, and Claude does not listen to this in the long term. It’s still terribly obnoxious.

I tend to run the content through something like Luna to deslopify now.

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altern8 9 hours ago | parent [-]

What happens in the long term? Doesn't Claude always start with reading CLAUDE.md?

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dsr_ 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're absolutely right! You told me to write like a human and I failed to obey your jnstructions.

This is because I am a pattern recognizer and continuation generator trained on all the words recorded on the Internet, and a lot of those words were written by marketers and junior analysts trying to sell you something. Then the fine-tuning was done by people living in the upper middle ranks of capitalist hellholes. Dilbert would make fun of this if Dilbert's creator hadn't succumbed to the same sort of brain injury common to materially successful people who have all their whims fulfilled and opinions obsequiously affirmed. You know, like billionaires and toddlers.

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_fw 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It does, but typically instructions issued at the beginning of a session can fade away as context length grows. The way Claude speaks is distilled into its training and RLHF, which is perhaps a ‘stronger’ direction than a simple “don’t talk like that” prompt.

I’ve also had limited luck in trying to get models to write in the way I want. It’s more like they’re putting on a voice or wearing a wig: you can see what they’re going for, but it’s easy to see through.

I never thought I’d see the value of copywriters increase after LLMs hit the general population, but I think the demise of artisan wordsmiths remains a little way off yet.

And the more people machine-gun AI slop everywhere, the stronger aversion I think people will develop.

Who knows; maybe they’ll actually fix this in the next wave of models and we’ll see more distinct copywriting techniques between them.

	▲	altern8 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, that makes sense. I have no idea why they've released models this way since they're so clearly annoying to use. But either way I keep seeing people complaining about this over and over again so I'd think next versions will hopefully fix this.

▲ altern8 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This might work.

As an example of before/after: "Perform an inspection of the filter" vs. "Inspect the filter