4 ms·

What's wild (imo) is pretty much everyone I talk to/read from (anecdata) HATES the way claude writes. I see it in the comments on Hacker News, hear about it in

by wpasc 2mo ago

What's wild (imo) is pretty much everyone I talk to/read from (anecdata) HATES the way claude writes. I see it in the comments on Hacker News, hear about it in discussions with my colleagues, and talk about it with my non tech family. it's over the top bad. now it seems like these quirks will now be enforced in some weird way to meet the watermarking rules?

throwatdem12311 2mo ago
I hate the way Claude writes so much I’m at a breaking point ready ti crash out and try to convince my boss to switch to literally anything else. It drives me up the fucking wall. The worst part is I can prompt Claude with “this is gobbledegook, simplify” and it will reword its previous answer perfectly but no amount of hooks or system prompt hacking will fix it otherwise.
- nomel 2mo ago
  The tech bro speak gets so insane that, if I paste it to another claude session, it's so unintelligible that new claude session doesn't even know what the other was trying to say. It'll be interesting to see if all this causes a subtle shift in vernacular.
  - throwatdem12311 2mo ago
    Copy/pasting Claude output to itself in another session is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate model collapse. It’s also why I’m not a fan of using subagents for code review like Claude Code started doing by default recently. It’s getting output from another LLM, then summarizing it for me so by the time I see it it’s already been blended up once.
    - saaaaaam 2mo ago
      Can you explain what “one of the easiest ways to demonstrate model collapse” means, please? I think you mean “if it can’t understand its own output this demonstrates model collapse” but I’m not entirely sure what “model collapse” means in this context.
- slaymaker1907 2mo ago
  Try using a subagent loop where you have one agent generate text and another critique the text according to some guidelines/goal.
padolsey 2mo ago
Agreed. Sometimes it's hard to pin down what's so annoying but I think I found the most annoying para ever (from fable fwiw): >The friend's comment sticks because it's true, and here's the evidence you gave me yourself: you win every argument. Of course you do — you're writing both parts. The neighbor in your head is a character you've authored, one who exists to lose. That's not deliberation; it's rehearsal. And people who are actually calm don't rehearse. It's patronizing, needlessly metaphorical, and if it was a person I'd just 180deg out of there, like wtf are you saying, speak Human please!
- Eisenstein 2mo ago
  Translation "Your friend made a comment you can't get over because they noticed something you don't like about yourself and said it out loud. You have been constructing a character for your neighbor instead of accepting them as a person and have imagined what they are they thinking and then argued against that so that you could win. You do do not engage with them as they present themselves and you don't want to, because by playing things over and over in your head you have left no room for discussion." No idea if it is accurate without the rest of the context, but that's my reading.
  - nonethewiser 2mo ago
    Wow that is crazy. Thats very plausible and is actually a coherent thought. I didn’t see that at all. Has claude always been this bad? I feel like its getting pretty fucked lately. Coding is still good.
    - saaaaaam 2mo ago
      I feel like it’s got significantly worse since opus 4.6 - to the point that it’s almost unusable now for a lot of what I do, which is predominantly textual analysis of documents (“explain this clause and its intersection with this other clause” for example) or summarisation of transcripts. It comes out with such incoherent garbage no matter what rules I ask it to follow.
nonethewiser 2mo ago
Its quite bad. I use it for code all the time and then recently used it for writing and its so bad. Went back tk ChatGPT for the first time in a long time.
jdc-pub 2mo ago
Do we know that Claude’s quirks are related to watermarking? The article said Gemini’s web console is apparently watermarked, and it has different quirks / a different sound.
- seanhunter 2mo ago
  It stands to reason that a different vendor might watermark in a different way, doesn’t it?
webninja 2mo ago
> “pretty much everyone I talk to/read from (anecdata) HATES the way claude writes” No, only Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5. Claude opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 are the best Claude writers, especially for chat related uses. They’re what made Claude so popular. Claude opus 4.8 is a good middle ground if you need higher resolution image viewing. I’ve downgraded from the 5.x’s to give my eyes a rest from the waterfall of words.
mgraczyk 2mo ago
no, this is false. watermarking will not enforce anything like this

by wpasc 2mo ago

throwatdem12311 2mo ago

I hate the way Claude writes so much I’m at a breaking point ready ti crash out and try to convince my boss to switch to literally anything else. It drives me up the fucking wall. The worst part is I can prompt Claude with “this is gobbledegook, simplify” and it will reword its previous answer perfectly but no amount of hooks or system prompt hacking will fix it otherwise.

nomel 2mo ago
The tech bro speak gets so insane that, if I paste it to another claude session, it's so unintelligible that new claude session doesn't even know what the other was trying to say. It'll be interesting to see if all this causes a subtle shift in vernacular.
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
  Copy/pasting Claude output to itself in another session is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate model collapse. It’s also why I’m not a fan of using subagents for code review like Claude Code started doing by default recently. It’s getting output from another LLM, then summarizing it for me so by the time I see it it’s already been blended up once.
  - saaaaaam 2mo ago
    Can you explain what “one of the easiest ways to demonstrate model collapse” means, please? I think you mean “if it can’t understand its own output this demonstrates model collapse” but I’m not entirely sure what “model collapse” means in this context.
slaymaker1907 2mo ago
Try using a subagent loop where you have one agent generate text and another critique the text according to some guidelines/goal.

padolsey 2mo ago

Agreed. Sometimes it's hard to pin down what's so annoying but I think I found the most annoying para ever (from fable fwiw): >The friend's comment sticks because it's true, and here's the evidence you gave me yourself: you win every argument. Of course you do — you're writing both parts. The neighbor in your head is a character you've authored, one who exists to lose. That's not deliberation; it's rehearsal. And people who are actually calm don't rehearse. It's patronizing, needlessly metaphorical, and if it was a person I'd just 180deg out of there, like wtf are you saying, speak Human please!

Eisenstein 2mo ago
Translation "Your friend made a comment you can't get over because they noticed something you don't like about yourself and said it out loud. You have been constructing a character for your neighbor instead of accepting them as a person and have imagined what they are they thinking and then argued against that so that you could win. You do do not engage with them as they present themselves and you don't want to, because by playing things over and over in your head you have left no room for discussion." No idea if it is accurate without the rest of the context, but that's my reading.
- nonethewiser 2mo ago
  Wow that is crazy. Thats very plausible and is actually a coherent thought. I didn’t see that at all. Has claude always been this bad? I feel like its getting pretty fucked lately. Coding is still good.
  - saaaaaam 2mo ago
    I feel like it’s got significantly worse since opus 4.6 - to the point that it’s almost unusable now for a lot of what I do, which is predominantly textual analysis of documents (“explain this clause and its intersection with this other clause” for example) or summarisation of transcripts. It comes out with such incoherent garbage no matter what rules I ask it to follow.

nonethewiser 2mo ago

Its quite bad. I use it for code all the time and then recently used it for writing and its so bad. Went back tk ChatGPT for the first time in a long time.

jdc-pub 2mo ago

Do we know that Claude’s quirks are related to watermarking? The article said Gemini’s web console is apparently watermarked, and it has different quirks / a different sound.

seanhunter 2mo ago
It stands to reason that a different vendor might watermark in a different way, doesn’t it?

webninja 2mo ago

> “pretty much everyone I talk to/read from (anecdata) HATES the way claude writes” No, only Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5. Claude opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 are the best Claude writers, especially for chat related uses. They’re what made Claude so popular. Claude opus 4.8 is a good middle ground if you need higher resolution image viewing. I’ve downgraded from the 5.x’s to give my eyes a rest from the waterfall of words.

mgraczyk 2mo ago

no, this is false. watermarking will not enforce anything like this