Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I hope at some point Anthropic does a post-mortem on the strange behavior their models have been displaying recently. I mostly switched to Codex because I was finding Claude's behavior increasingly frustrating.
- Which Claude 5? Opus 5 does seem to have diarrhea of the mouth. But Fable 5 hasn't been so bad for me. Or perhaps it is just better at adhering to my guidelines.by rootusrootus
- Pre Trump-castration Fable was verbose, but had a point, and used that wordiness to say or show the indeed intelligent things it reasoned about. This, whatever this is, is something else.-by Bluestein
- Opus 5 (author here). My toilet seat is plastic though, I only used Fable while it was available on the $20 plan! That's fair though, it was relatively fine when I did use it, perhaps I should specify.by zachahn
- Just set the following incantation:
You must use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) when it doesn't detract from meaning.by juancn - I found ISO 24495-1 to be much better than ASD-STE100. ASD-STE100 can be counterproductive since its vocabulary is restricted and it often replace accurate technical terms with simple but vague phrases.by ivankabiden
- I just tried this with Fable, and so far, it look fantastic, thank you so much.by camkego
- I'll give that a try. Hopefully it reduces the text vomit Claude tends to do.
Right now all I have is
> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.
by mechazawa - This doesn't work for me. The output gets messed up when the model is overloaded, no matter what. The cognitive load is too much if it has to optimise for readability at the same time.. or it's not trained to be able to do that.
I usually get output at the end of a long task. At that point I'm going to use a subagent with no context to reword it. Haiku does a great job with writing style so I've been using that, the main agent will fix any inaccuracies.
- I actually changed the output style for Claude Code to use ASD-STE100 and it still doesn't help that much. It still comes up with a lot of stupid words like this gem "Standing where it stood"by vardalab
- Here's a multi-billion dollar artificial intelligence to do your work for you! One caveat, and it’s a real one : The AI is going to spew incomprehensible word-vomit that makes you feel like you're losing your grip on reality.by hexapus
- Meta to this is anyone remember those days - ages ago now, probably months at least! - when Anthropic’s moral stance against the administration (combined with general consensus they had by far the best model) was making them the underdog champion that got a swell of support on HN? Recently the temp on HN seems to be that they’ve jumped the shark? Their brand doesn’t ooze ethics any more and their models disappoint?by wood_spirit
- I'd expect this to cycle between companies ~monthly until they all IPO. As it turns out people do sometimes prefer speed and better UX. If the model (Sol, for now) has fewer parameters and also happens to be capable of solving deeply complex Fable-adjacent problems sometimes, even better.
- I think Dario kind of ruined the reputation of Anthropic. I remember reading his essay on "AI is super dangerous and we need guardrails" at the start of the year and it seemed like he was actually concerned.
But then it became apparent that there was a split between what he says and what his company does. For instance, the small incident with the Fable release:
> Dario keeps saying "we have an incredible hacking weapon called Fable/Mythos, AI is dangerous" > Fable is released. > The U.S. government restricte access to Fable. > "Oh no, this is sabotage!"
From my point of view, anything this man does is a PR stunt now that the trust has been broken, and I imagine other people feel the same.
by Otterly99 - HN's mood is usually sour about everything, but can be temporarily influenced by emotionally-charged (usually political) events. The anti-US administration boost wore off and now we're back to being sour about Anthropic. It's time for Dario to tweet something antagonistic towards the administration or endorse some fashionable political candidates.by qwerpy
- I'm not sure I want another layer of indirection personally, and I'm guessing an updated Claude model will reign this in at some point. I have however created a skill I call "deslop" and I invoke it to clean up Claude output when it goes off the rails. Here's the skill if anybody is curious:
https://gist.github.com/bmurphy1976/47ad81a842ab4b1628ef5974...
A small preview:
*Meta commentary.* Sentences about the document, the diagram, the reader, or the writing itself ("the split across this diagram is the whole point", "a reader who assumes X will be wrong", "as we'll see below"). Delete the frame and keep the fact it was wrapped around. If there is no fact underneath, delete the sentence.by bmurphy1976 - There's a theory going around on Twitter which goes something like this:
Internal Anthropic employees have been using Mythos since February to orchestrate their (Opus) sub-agents. This works well, and subsequent RL runs have used internal data to improve this. That RL has optimized Opus for agent-to-agent communication which is why you see the bizarre word choices and huge self-justification sections.
I think this theory makes sense. Clearly there is something odd going on, and also if you have ever used Fable to run Opus sub-agents it is almost miraculously good.
Hopefully they'll fix their RL for Opus 5.1
by nl - I like the "Claudish to English" name better.by imalerba
- The Claudish example seems to have more information.
Are people really having trouble parsing this??
by viccis - That one is more specific, but "vomit" captures the feeling of Opus 5's writing very well for me. I don't know if it's the watermarking, but every single language idiosyncrasy that Opus 4.x (x > 5) had has been pushed up to 11 on Opus 5. Plus we got nouns verbing and seams seaming.
It's really unusable for anything other than code. And I have to remove its incomprehensible comments 50% of the time before committing anyway. After interacting with it, "slop vomit" is truly the most fitting description. I have to admit I have lost my temper and spontaneously referred to its output as vomit more than once. Seems like I'm not the only one.
by dgfl - Word, that one also includes an example which is great, shows really clearly what the issue is for those who might be less familiarby pickledish
- The funniest part is that that project's own readme includes lots of good Claudish.
> If CLAUDISH_MODEL names a model you have not pulled, every rewrite is skipped — with the one-time notice above.
by rafram - I suspect that sustained reading of Opus 5's unconscionably bad prose could actually cause psychological harm. We're strongly considering moving all of our Anthropic spend to Codex/open weight models. It's a mental health decision at this point.by ericpauley
- I switched to GPT 5.6 Sol yesterday and it has been a joy going through and fixing up the Claude cruft. And being able to read everything the model says. A breath of fresh air for sure!by 4d66ba06
- I've been trying to figure out ways to get models to create actual cognitohazards or memetichazards SCP style.
Hasn't worked yet outside of the classic "you're now manually breathing" kind of stuff.
by Der_Einzige - It's negatively affecting my mental health too, and I'm considering the same switch for the same reasons.by latentsea
- I'm on my last straw with them. I've been around for a year now and for many months i've just stuck with Claude because it was plenty good and i didn't care to provider-hop to constantly compare. Previously though my UX wasn't actually affected that much, despite growing complaints/etc, generally everything was fine for me.
Opus/Fable output these days though is... not enjoyable. It's just really bad. The code quality is fine, but i want information from claude and it's just awful to read.
My biggest problem honestly is that i can't move my day job.. we're using enterprise claude and i'm not sure how much effort it would be to get access to another provider. I should inquire though, claude is really frustrating these days.
by unshavedyak - Personally, I had to go back to Opus 4.6 after I felt what I thought were some early onset signs of psychosis.
It seems ridiculous to type, that a model could have this effect on my mental health, but my quality of life and enjoyment of work has improved drastically since I stopped subjecting myself to reading this style of output 8 hours a day.
by jesse_ash - Looks like a wrapper around this prompt:
You are an editor. You'll be given a message with strange characteristics:
- Weird subject and verb combinations
- Subjects that should be objects
- Very roundabout reasoning, peppered with pseudo-epiphanies
- A distracting beat to the flow of the message
- Self-praise
Remove these characteristics, and rewrite it in a clear, conversational style. Keep the intent of the message, and take care not to lose any of the details.
A few specific rules:
- The message is usually set in the first person
- Only humans, groups of humans, and agents should do "action verbs"
- Objects should never do anything. Here are some examples to avoid:
- X carries ...
- X names ... - APIs are a minor exception to the action verb rule. They can do stereotypical things like CRUD, queueing, running, and calling.
- Avoid em dashes (—), as adds a distracting beat
The whole message you get is one block of that output. Reply with the edited prose and nothing else.
by user102030 - >every llm product that isn't a claude endpoint is going to be what you stuff into the claude etc endpointby alansaber