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- Hacker News
- Well, I agree that all of that is annoying, but "Don’t contradict sentences" is not a very good instruction. The construction "A, not B" is not a "contradiction", it's a clarification, a juxtaposition, a contrast. It's self-consistent and non-contradictory.by epgui
- I have this worded in my CLAUDE.md as "avoid counterfactuals". It still does it anyway, of course, but that language combined with a few rounds of review back-and-forth seems to work for meby shawnz
- Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.
This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.
by andrewla - I see this so much with Opus it is infuriating. It usually then seems to devolve into some sort of obsession that makes it almost impossible for me to complete a task. I can start a new session and try to continue to previous work and get something like "I wanted to call out an important distinction between ham and toilet water before we continue. Our current documentation couples the lack of water to its source and that's a gap I'd rather address now than ignore."by dcastonguay
- Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.
Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?
After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.
Seriously though:
Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.
This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.
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My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.
And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.
Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".
The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.
That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.
by Nevermark - I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.by jossdoe
- It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".
It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".
Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.
by ACCount39 - > “Don’t contradict sentences”. I can be damned sure it will sprinkle contradictions everywhere:
> This wonderful feature does this, not that.
As a human native speaker of American English, if you told me to "not contradict sentences" I would have no idea you meant that you don't want me to write in this style.
In fact I would be pretty confused about what it means. Whose sentences can I not contradict? To stretch it a bit, does this mean if someone gets a prison sentence I can't speak against it? It's just a weird phrasing. I don't think it means anything.
by asveikau - I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention.
It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.
- I’m seeing that a lot with Astra. There is a lot of “I withdraw my previous claim” stuff going on now.by dyauspitr
- ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.
With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.
by mikepurvis - Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable.
It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong.
It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.
This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded.
I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.
- Yeah, I also switched back to ChatGPT. It still is a bit too much of a sycophant, but I'll take that over shallow and pedantic.by gs17
- > It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.
I have agents adversarially check each other. When I switched to Opus 4.8 they began arguing EXTENSIVELY with each other. My code began to fill with comments about these arguments. Reviews would fail because the argumentative comments would get stale.
My build system came crashing down with a tsunami of disagreeable text.
by qarl - Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.by knollimar
- Surely, SOMEone at these companies realized training LLMs on the content of the internet (namely the vast amount of comment sections) would result in such outcomes. Or at least that they should weight heavily against that content for purposes of writing voice.by settsu
- Really? I still find it too sycophantic at times.by mcv
- You mean like half the engineers I've worked with in my career? I wonder how we got here :)by shawnwall
- I have absolutely seen this, and love to read out it's quotes to my wife. Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:" and crap like that.
Even if it's correct about that, if it were a human, I'd assume they were 1-upping me on purpose to make themselves look better.
by wccrawford - I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.
I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?
by manmal - You have to use Fable or Opus 4.6 for tolerable language output.
Using Opus 4.7-5 is harmful to your health.
by paulddraper - It's bad enough I stopped paying.by edoceo
- Opus is the worst at it. Fable 5 still does it a little. Fable 5.1 is much improved, at least.by esotericsean
- I tried it for the first time today for stuff I'm well versed in.
It said something along the lines of "remember $USER five runs of Chrome is not enough for high quality benchmarks! What you're doing is called a _trial run_".
To have a useful continuation to the conversation I had to remind it that I was the one that wrote the documentation it was quoting back at me.
It's not actually an intelligent being so I didn't get angry at it but it was a piss poor experience.
by OlivierLi - Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.by beezlewax
- When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
by futhey - It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.by tsunamifury
- >quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently.
How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
by lolakutty - 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...
by bhouston - I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.by siva7