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  • Hacker News
  • Upvoting if for nothing else than the intro paragraph to the repo. That was hilarious and so true.
    by ljoshua
  • I personally got used to the claudisms and think people are making too big of a deal out of it. Yes it says load-bearing and caveat a lot, but at least you know behind the scenes what meaning it's assigning to certain situations.
    by ed_mercer
  • I kind of wonder if we would have appreciated the verbose prose when these LLMs first came out and out muscles had not yet atrophied. When I do stop yelling at Claude to be more concise and actually read what it wrote it's often valuable complexity and subtlety that I could use to better understand what it did and steer it, rather than Claude just papering over important details like it did before.
    by colordrops
  • Just stop using Claude. There are so many other better models right now.
    by joduplessis
  • not for coding.
    by fr2029
  • this isn't just necessary, it's mandatory. that's the difference.
    by zengid
  • And honestly? That changes the game.
    by jasongill
  • Everyone seems to think so, but I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much. I find it slightly amusing when I even notice at all, normally I am so focused on the content of what I am working on that I don't really pay attention to the prose. I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much.
    by cortesoft
  • This is the load bearing comment, and it cuts more deeply than you thought.

    Let me ground my answer so I'm not just guessing. The blast radius of this change is significant and requires careful surgery to get right.

    It's clear now and there's two options going forward: A. Use this tool OP suggested B. Rewrite the Internet from the ground up without this clear contradiction in place - 3-5 days

    I recommend B and started 3 subagents to read all the code before I get started. I'll wait for them to finish.

    by collingreen
  • I use multiple AI tools simultaneously, and I feel that Claude has gradually adopted a more explanatory tone following updates around March and July. As for loss of context, it’s particularly problematic and can occur after just a few back-and-forth exchanges. The user experience changes with every update for every AI tool, so I feel there are more downsides to sticking with the same one indefinitely.
    by ErystelaThevale
  • Set output style to explanatory in Claude Code. It's much better. I personally think it should be the default, but I assume Anthropic has done A/B tests and found the default style to be better for metrics.
    by dannyw
  • Similar to vomit[0] and claudish-to-english[1].

    My general feeling here is that this really needs to be fixed at the model level. All other solutions are mere hacks that work for a bit but all have drawbacks. It's either adding yet more context (which has variable rates of success) or piping to a different model to translate, or using a skill, or mentioning this per each prompt, or....

    At this point I think it's in Opus's nature to talk like this, and given enough back-and-forth it will start to drift back to its classic mode, aka this incomprehensible "load-bearing seam" babble.

    [0] https://github.com/zachahn/vomit/tree/main

    [1] https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english

    by quibono
  • Everybody is complaining about this, at this point I’m sure they will deliver a tone of voice change in the 5.1 releases. Possibly with a new set of problems though, especially if this is part of an effort to obscure thinking to reduce distillation efficacy. In that case I believe Anthropic is doing damage to themselves. Caring about the quality of your product is the best strategy, the competition will come no matter what.
    by JV00
  • How does it help prevent distillation?
    by nojs
  • I don't think they can change at this point without starting from scratch
    by zeafoamrun
  • Simply untrue. You think everyone is complaining about this because the ones complaining are the only people commenting. The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. Sure among those who are irritated by it, it's good to have some ways to mitigate it, but I highly doubt Anthropic is going to devote much resources to an issue that affects a vocal minority.
    by Maxatar
  • Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375996

    "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM" (github.com/zachahn)

    285 points | 23 hours ago | 288 comments

    by WalterGR
  • Also related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265305

    "Claudish to English" (https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english)

    4 points | bryan0 |10 days ago | 2 comments

    by igravious
  • It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.
    by walthamstow
  • They should run a focus group!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08WmKiwcSs
    by esafak
  • I think it would happen with any persona that Anthropic chose. I enjoyed the bouncy, optimistic style at first. I've since grown to hate it.
    by jayers
  • Anthropic has explicitly chosen to anthropomorphize the model. It's kind of in their mission statement. It's most noticed once you walk away for a while and use models/agents/harnesses that haven't pushed as hard on this. Codex/Sol rarely uses personal pronouns and basically no superlatives. It has its own verbal ticks, but I hate them less?
    by cmrdporcupine
  • It's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was.

    The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.

    by matheusmoreira
  • Has Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there.

    I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.

    by datakan
  • The brevity how it outputs words seems like they try to save on tokens delivered.
    by chinathrow
  • They added a config option to Claude Code to make the output concise, and promised more comprehensive improvements.

    I did not see an explanation though.

    by user43928
  • I pruned my Claude.md and it made a difference. There were entries there that evolved from earlier models and Opus 5 could be reacting to it in a different manner.
    by hbarka
  • If the model and its organization are focused on strength at agentic coding tasks, they are not so concerned with the prose in the middle.

    They might even have a version that writes less annoying prose, but they are being squeezed hard by OpenAI and the Chinese so unless it performed better or equal to the annoying one it’s never left the lab.

    by janalsncm
  • They say you aren't interacting with an LLM or a model, but the character that the LLM is playing - the "always be positive and helpful software engineer"
    by the_sleaze_
  • I'd seen it around but assumed it was an effect of how you prompt it or something. And figured people were overexaggerating a bit when they complained about it.

    Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever.

    So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how on earth have they not fixed it yet? Do people like it? I added a system prompt to tell it to stop doing it and it's helped a decent bit already. ChatGPT/Codex has some annoying bits of prose but it never did this, so it can't be that complicated to get rid of.

    by ipdashc