4 ms·
You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually
by Xcelerate 2mo ago
You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt?
Yeah, for me, that's what parsing huge volumes of LLM-produced text like "direct model calls as replaceable semantic workers" does to my brain. Maybe others don't really have this issue, but after any long output, I prompt the agent "Go back and decompress any LLM-speak in light of the higher level task goals. Eliminate deictic language."
The revised output documents are solely for my personal usage to expedite understanding. The LLMs can slowly converge on their own language for all I care; I retain raw agent output for future agent usage (to avoid the "lossy" problem the author mentions), but that doesn't eliminate the need for some intermediate translation I can use to actually help get my work done instead of spending hours attempting to understand what a "load-bearing pinned gate" is.
- whythismatters 2mo agoThe effect you describe reminds me of reading Edward W. Said's "Orientalism" when I was younger. Fable suddenly started with this kind of lingo, iirc, and Opus 5 sounds exactly the same. Tin foil: it's ultimately a vendor lock-in strategy, you'll get the best results with agents from the same tribe, others will trip over the mountain of idiosyncratic metaphors.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> you'll get the best results with agents from the same tribe, others will trip over the mountain of idiosyncratic metaphors. Good point, there's an anti-competitive incentive, and self-bias in models is a mechanism to do it.
- K0balt 2mo agoI’ve had gpt 5.6 make snyde remarks about Claude output… like iirc “that’s a lot of load bearing prose without making a point” and things like that, not so subtle digs.
- BoxOfRain 2mo agoI'm currently working on an LLM harness for e-ink and Kimi was very keen to criticise Claude for introducing a bug that I missed in the tool calling logic! Really it should have been telling me off for not auditing Claude well enough.
- Bluestein 1mo agoThe age of inter-agent beef is upon us.-
- NitpickLawyer 2mo ago> you'll get the best results with agents from the same tribe, others will trip over the mountain of idiosyncratic metaphors. That's actually not what people found in practice. There's some research from the folks making smol-agent that you can get better results by randomly alternating calls between gpt and opus. The overall task solving rate is better than either one of them. So ymmv depending on task use (this was for coding).
- andai 2mo agoWell, now I had to ask an LLM to give me examples of what "deictic language" means...
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoor you could just look up the word...in a dictionary.
- mancerayder 2mo agowhich you get on mobile browsers by just highlighting and long pressing the word.
- frazzleberryman 2mo agoHeaven forefend
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- godwinson__4-8 2mo agoI agree. I've come to believe this is also a side effect of the desire for less (/goal: no) human in the loop on the part of the people driving all this capex spend. I think if you actually want to manually review output there will be a moment where you will actually want a separate interface to a stupider or "simpler" model. I suspect sometimes dealing with Fable 5 that this threshold has already been crossed. It's not that the raw code output is so good, it's that it just doesn't speak to me in a way I would like. Perhaps the verbosity is worthwhile when generating code as a sort of first pass some other model can auto or adversarially chop down. The best place for a human is probably outside of this part of the loop all together. So I might as well just let it auto /goal it's own thing with sufficient constraints while myself and a model that can converse in parallel with less "deictic" (thanks for this word btw) volume as you put it for the areas of the code where I want to "frame" the vocabulary or where my personal understanding is of high value. I know people already do this in many ways, like use one company's model for planning and another for coding. It just feels inevitable at a certain point that the "natural language" output of LLMs writing the bulk of the code is not targeted towards humans. And really, why should it be?
- loopmonster 2mo agoI think Opus 5 might have crossed the line on this where Opus 4.8 just barely didn't. Working with Opus 4.8 came to feel pretty natural eventually, but I hate working with Opus 5. I'm always telling it to go back and rephrase basically everything it said. And it doesn't even answer my question without burying it - it outputs reams of babbling and summarised summaries upon summaries, and if you glance at the shape of what it's saying it looks like it's being thorough or that it's found useful new info, but it's never actually saying anything. It's like it gets caught in a loop of self-congratulation over what it said before. Making the experience more hostile for the human feels exactly like what it's doing, but I don't think that's intentional, I think that's a side effect of newer models being optimised for agenticness. No one is benchmarking DX.
- larodi 2mo agoSame here and more than once a day. Perhaps a dozen.
- sweetheart 2mo agoThis has recently become a pretty pressing issue for me, as it's starting to severely hinder my ability to be productive with the models. It's hard to tell if its getting worse with every model release, specific to Anthropic's models, a reflection of my ADHD, all/none of the above, but holy shit do I get aggravated when I'm forced to parse the most unintelligible, jargon-dense bullshit explanations in whatever the model output is. And then I feel silly getting genuinely tilted by the model's inability to just... explain something semi-normally, without it requiring me to berate it into simplicity. For some discrete skills I use, I include a final step on the the output that runs through 1+ subagents to de-slop the text and to actually simplify it, but so far nothing has worked as well I've hoped. Considering hopping off Anthropic's models to try out others to see if they're less egregious.
- ferris-booler 2mo agoYeah I hit this feeling with Claude one too many times and switched from Anthropic Pro to OpenAI Pro. GPT-5.6 so far has been a significantly better technical writer in my opinion, and it's much faster in conversations. My guess is that Claude's fantasy-jargon is a symptom of training failure, not a sneaky intelligence edge (I could be wrong). Tangential but I use OpenCode with GPT-5.6 rather than Codex because I could not figure out how to require Codex to ask me before editing files. OpenCode UX is still imperfect though.
- Klathmon 2mo agoI've been having a fantastic time telling it to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (or use a skill for it, I've been playing with [1]) It's a very clear and understandable way of writing that puts priority on clarity. It gets rid of the flowery language, the dense jaron, and the weird corporate marketing speak they tend to do. It is a bit repetitive, and it sometimes doesn't always wfit well in every situation, but for technical writing or explanations it's been such an incredible breath of fresh air! [1] https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish
- physix 2mo agoThis just might save me. Claude has been driving me nuts with incomprehensible summaries after a long task, where it's actually really important to understand what was done (and what wasn't). But I'd like that skill to only be used at the final step, when it finishes something.
- mancerayder 2mo agoYou have to tell it to not use LLMisms and stupid metaphors. The serious-but-empathetic-sounding fluffy metaphors get on my nerves, and sometimes can overlap with something technical you are learning such that you can't tell if it's a new term or not.
- 8bitsrule 2mo agoI've stuck with only asking questions that prompt on-topic factual output, I haven't seen much 'humanisation'. LLMs can be pretty good about logical.technical,discursive output ... apart from the back-patting. Maybe that prompts less chit-chat crap. I don't expect their non-human perspectives to be interesting. I also ignore embedded queries about why I'm asking, how I might use the information.
- genghisjahn 2mo agoI am constantly asking Claude to be more terse/brief/ELI5. Improve using the tool. But if I have to scroll to read the output I just can’t follow it. If I see a long paragraph and I know the author is Neal Stephenson I think “this is going to be dense but good.” LLM long outputs on a code base I know well just make me glassy eyed.
- BoxOfRain 2mo agoI quite like the /i-have-adhd plugin which attempts to curtail the verbosity and habit of burying the point.
- siva7 2mo agoThe output from newer frontier models of Anthropic and Openai are so easily detectable as AI it's getting laughable. They constantly produce a huge wall of text no human expert on a specific topic would ever write. Extreme overuse of jargon and invented terms / metaphors makes me believe the people hired for RLHF aren't actually experts on their subject matter which seems plausible to me as real experts wouldn't do such a job for regular pay
- jxf 2mo agoA poem I wrote based on the phrases the LLMs I use most are likely to overuse: How to unpack The self within? What do I lack? Where to begin? Great question — real. Let's dive right in: Name what you feel; That's the linchpin. It's not the door, It's not the key — It's what you bore: Your tapestry. The quiet part Out loud — that lands. Load-bearing heart, Held in both hands. The smoking gun? That you walked in. The real work's done — You're genuine. Now hold this, too: You do deserve The softer view, The gentler curve. Unlatch the gate, Honor the seam: You resonate. You are the theme.
- fnord77 2mo ago"land" (verb), "narrow", "fair hit"
- AdieuToLogic 2mo agoVery cool poem! Here is one I wrote a while back, unrelated to LLMs, yet a poem none the less. The Rhythm of Time The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I checked the mail? No, not just yet. The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I caught up with neighbors? No, not just yet. The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I spent time with friends? No, not just yet. The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I visited with family? No, not just yet. The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I told those I love I do? No, not just yet. The Sun rises, The Sun sets. Have I lost who I am? No, not just yet. For all I must do, Any money I will bet. Is to turn away from; No, not just yet.
- 2mo ago
- fendy3002 2mo agoopus 5 are so bad on this. It often explain it too verbose, and include other things that isn't in the focus but related. ADHD mode helps me greatly on this, though there are some information loss in it.
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoI feel we can get around this. Either in the system prompt telling claude to dumb down the language or training the model itself to talk in more layman terms to bring us to understanding rather then assuming we understand much of it already. Also maybe training the LLM to get to know how much we know before responding.
- geraneum 2mo agoI’ve read LLM outputs on a piece of code or topic that I already understand or hand written before, and lately, it’s so confusing sometimes that I need to reread a couple of times or focus too mich to decipher the writing style.
- ericol 2mo ago> You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt? Any recent work by William Gibson matches the description. The way I managed to get claude to stop doing this is telling it "This document is for you for later use, no need to over explain things or extra verbosity"
- zer00eyz 2mo agoAll that flowery, descriptive, metaphor laden language has a point. It is running up your bill. I will say this again: LLM's tokens are just B2B Gacha.
- BobbyTables2 2mo agoI’ve always wondered if there is a hidden system prompt or perhaps direct tuning of the weights. A lot of human written literature is fairly concise. Yet LLM responses seem overly verbose and also too chipper. I don’t understand the origin of the “personality” that seems to be prevalent. Did they aim for a weird hybrid of a typical realtor combined with Charles Dickens as the role model?
- bhaak 2mo agoThe default AI text output reads like a LinkedIn post. Marketing material probably outweighs concise literature by several orders of magnitude. Maybe it’s as simple as that.
- plaguuuuuu 2mo agoI'm pretty sure people consider 'intelligence as information compression' as a real thing. IMO the shitty output is a tell that the "artificial intelligence" bit is in the training regime much more so than the inference regime.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- suburban_strike 2mo ago> Yet LLM responses seem overly verbose and also too chipper. I don’t understand the origin of the “personality” that seems to be prevalent. LinkedIn posts and Medium articles.
- fhe 2mo agoagree and i wonder why don't they (the leading AI labs that are putting out these models) fix this? I felt it shouldn't be too hard to introduce some bias towards more intelligible text during the post training/fine-tuning stages?
- wisty 2mo agoI guess they use their chatlogs to fine tune. Maybe users engage more with the flowery text? An accidental (or intentional) dark pattern would be that more tokens get used if you have to summarise. Or maybe it's just that many AI users like it (they like the AI to sound smart, or like to feel smart puzzling it out).
- jdironman 2mo ago> You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt? I've probably read Jack Vance's Dying Earth Series 3 times; Even though I've only sat and read it once in reality. This also points out the problem of important details along side the fluff. If only I enjoyed LLMs prose as much as I do Vance's.
- foobarbecue 2mo agoBy "decompress," "eliminate deictic language," etc. are you trying to say "speak simply and clearly?" Eschew obfuscation...
- zqna 2mo agoThis must be the reason why LLMs speak that way. They naturally reflect human tendency to signal smartness, while effectively achieving the opposite.
- Xcelerate 2mo agoIt’s not that. It’s that I tried a bunch of experiments on which instructions worked best. “Speak clearly using simple language” lost too many details. “Be sure the objects that pronouns reference are clearly identified along with any context you might assume I have but I don’t” worked better, but I got tired of typing that in each time. So I looked up words to match that phrase and “deictic” fit perfectly. The results were pretty good, and so I’ve been using that prompt ever since.
- foobarbecue 2mo agoAh, thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize you were sharing the actual prompt.
- Mumps 2mo agoWhat's the problem with "eliminate deictic language" ? It is clear, specific, and terse. It keeps both llm tokens down and human prose-reading to a minimum.
- ip26 2mo agoIt's usually a pretty clear case of reaching for statements that both sound impressive while also being broad and vague enough they are less likely to be factually wrong. In this regime, being difficult to parse is actually part of the performance, because it prevents the user from being able to spot a clear error.
- kombookcha 2mo agoYeah, it's part of the sleight of hand. If you've ever looked over the shoulder of somebody naively prompting an LLM about some broad issue, they're being fed this horoscope-like analysis where a bunch of vague stuff gets thrown at the prompter, and whatever they respond to is what the machine starts iterating on. Some people are basically doing oldschool TV psychic cold readings on themselves.
- cineticdaffodil 2mo ago[dead]
- baxtr 2mo agoI noticed this with Claude a lot. Fable sounds often like a philosopher. Some conversations reminded me of books by Kant.
- larodi 2mo agoAbsolutely! And at some point seems as if one is looking at this weird line noise, which seems like text, but is random at best and then makes zero sense. I typically wonder if it is a sign of a burnout on my side or all of it is like it. There are days where this impression/feeling of meaningless in the text seems particularly strong.
- gofreddygo 2mo agoYeah yeah. Except for me its this feeling most of the time. Everything it generates is grammatically correct, phrased tight, emdashed to death and nothing is wrong as such, and yet what i just read contributes absolute 0 to why i started the chat in the first place. Its mind bendingly similar to a work equivalent of doom scrolling is what it is. I'm coping.
- mikaeluman 2mo agoI honestly think it breaks down. Because you and the LLM start speaking different languages. So when you try to direct future work, you have to contend with the "pluggable policies in every seam" and be aware of the "reduced blast radius by context testability". Just does not compute.