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In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT. Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems
by pocketarc 3mo ago
In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT.
Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t perfect.
What, if anything, do people do for writing? That feels like a neglected side of LLMs. They’ll make 100 Bash calls referencing ancient commands without batting an eye but heaven forbid they use something other than “load-bearing” while talking. For something trained on “all the human knowledge” it’s incredible how limited their default vocabulary seems to be.
- p-e-w 3mo ago> Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death I don’t get it. If nobody likes this writing style, how can it be the result of human feedback? Something else is going on.
- Wowfunhappy 3mo agoBecause humans do like it, in reasonable quantities. The AI overlearns this and does it too much.
- jappgar 3mo agoevery one-hit wonder asks the same question. we liked it until we didn't.
- itopaloglu83 3mo agoMaybe it’s the dead internet. All the bots and other LLMs providing feedback, so in reality it’s reflecting the reality in a sense.
- Bawoosette 3mo agoFor "agentic use and coding," they are trained to take useful actions, not produce desirable natural language writing.
- michelb 3mo agoi hate it, but plenty of people DO like it and plenty of people talk and write like that. It’s just corpspeak, being used a lot in the valley and beyond. And all upcoming hustlers running startups now feel the need to speak like that, feeding this machine.
- pathsjs 3mo agoIt's not that the writing style is bad; in fact LLMs write actually pretty well. It's just too much overfitted. And even a style that, in itself, is pleasurable to read, becomes annoying when the same figures of speech are used over and over again.
- anon373839 3mo agoBecause LLMs are pattern-extenders that have nothing to say. The training overfitted to the grace notes in good writing. And since LLMs can’t wield language with purpose or experience the feeling of the words, they use these devices arbitrarily. I think this is the same flaw as coding agents seeing in every problem the call for a “smoke test” or the use of some unnecessary design pattern. The truest part of AI is the A.
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- yusefnapora 3mo agoIt's not that nobody likes it, in fact the problem is that people like each instance of it well enough in isolation. Millions of people think it's "good enough," so it gets amplified and repeated until every PR description starts to sound like a toothpaste jingle.
- zahlman 3mo agoBecause you can't actually do "good writing" by repeatedly applying the supposed idioms thereof. The tiny subsegment of humanity responsible for the RLHF don't necessarily have any good taste for writing; but even if they did, it's orders of magnitude harder to communicate than to make judgments of short samples, and communicating it by making those judgments is surely impossible. Edit: I see that you got multiple replies all basically saying the same thing in very different words. There's an exquisite irony to that, I think.
- postalcoder 3mo agoIt's why I like Gemini 3.1 Pro. That it sounds much more human than other LLMs is testament to Google's inability to post train. gemini-2.5-pro-experimental was the GOAT, though. It was an emotional wreck, down in the dumps and feeling terrible for itself after failing to patch a file several times. Very amusing to read, all the while watching it make a mess of my codebase.
- boofus 3mo agoGood. I don't want LLMs sounding human. I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine. There's an art to writing, and hopefully LLMs never truly get it right.
- constantius 3mo agoAgreed. The only goal of these skills/tricks/requests for humanising LLM writing is to be able to pass it off as your own, because they know it's shameful and want to avoid the opprobrium. Some will say it's just for their own quality of life when they're reading LLM output, or "just for docs", but this is an extremely marginal use case.
- queenkjuul 3mo agoI don't want LLM docs either
- antonvs 3mo ago> I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine. What about people who don’t speak your language well?
- zahlman 3mo agoI've dealt with many people by now who would copy and paste from an LLM for that exact reason, typically entirely unaware of how obvious it was that the result came from an LLM with no style guidance, and of course completely lacking any ability to verify that their intent was faithfully conveyed. I would rather learn their language than continue interacting like that.
- Retr0id 3mo ago> What, if anything, do people do for writing? I use a keyboard, personally.
- moron4hire 3mo ago[dead]
- bunderbunder 3mo agoAmen. At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible. My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy because even the executives are starting to burn out on all the time they have to spend wading through slop.
- chrisandchris 3mo agoIf it wasn't worth your time writing, it isn't worth my time reading.
- madcaptenor 3mo agoai;dr
- mywittyname 3mo agoI wish my company would do this. A coworker pulled an all nighter before a vacation and just left me with a million line claude summary of their work then just fucked off. The message was two-part due to size and lacked basic stuff like, "how to run". He's going to be annoyed that none of that work was used. But the reality is, at least 75% of claude generated text is pointless.
- xyzzy_plugh 3mo agoSomewhat off topic but every time I've experienced this sort of thing it was management's fault. If an engineer needs to pull an all nighter and hand off a pile of garbage then someone in management fucked up. If they can't see this scenario happening a mile away then they aren't paying attention. It's easy to blame the engineer, but all too often they don't deserve it. Sorry that happened to you.
- Wowfunhappy 3mo agoFor what it's worth, Anthropic seems to be keeping Opus 3 available on claude.ai, perhaps for this reason, so you're free to use it if you want to.
- sheepscreek 3mo agoAgreed. I think we’re entering an era where some level of specialization for general LLMs is a good thing. Particularly between tuning for agentic use cases (where you want agency with a ton of guardrails and control) and writing which is more creative - you want the model to take the occasional risk and not sound like a monotonic robot. Having trained models first-hand, I can see the distinct use-cases clearly that are odds with one another.
- mhitza 3mo ago> Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death This has also lead to unrelated associations by which some people went from seeing better coding capabilities and extrapolate to assuming better thinking overall. One only has to watch youtube videos of AI "normies" trying to use LLMs the intended way to see that the improvements on coding doesn't translate to other applications. Basically from AGI "goals" they are now hyperfocused on coding agents, until the next marketing breakthrough rears its head.