3 ms·

This 100%. I was Anthropic-pilled. I had a $200/mo subscription and I only used Anthropic models. I was frustrated by the verbose output and the writing style.

by karimf 2mo ago

This 100%. I was Anthropic-pilled. I had a $200/mo subscription and I only used Anthropic models. I was frustrated by the verbose output and the writing style. I tried ASD-STE-100, it helped a bit, but it's still too verbose for my taste. Then I tried GPT 5.6 Sol. It's night and day. I think Anthropic just RL too hard on coding capabilities and never calibrated or benchmarked the writing styles.

Retr0id 2mo ago
It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2mo ago
  It's bad enough that I've seen dedicated skills to do comment hygiene scrubbing and consolidation.
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help. My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (human comments are intended to be read and understood by other humans, whereas Claude comments are their own dialect). I bet this is a result of iteratively training Claude on output from other successful Claude sessions. Presumably it's good for making benchmark scores go up.
    - tharkun__ 2mo ago
      I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them. Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less likely to go "copy what the rest of the codebase does". Of course I've now jinxed it and some update will cause it to ignore the instructions coz I didn't write them in the new model's style or something.
      - troupo 2mo ago
        As the context fills up the models will happily firget and ignore any number of any sections of your CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md. Edit: I've had explicit instructions for communication style in CLAUDE.md, in Claude's project "memory", in global "memory", in "skills": it couldn't care less where it was. It would just ignore it. When I would point this out it would just say "Yes, I violated communication guidelines, I won't do that again". Only to do that again in the next session. This applies to everything: code guidelines, communication guidelines, preferences, decisions etc.
    - ACS_Solver 2mo ago
      I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down. My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments. I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.
      - the_af 2mo ago
        > But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments. I've noticed this a lot, and before your remark I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. Now I know: Claude is writing its thought processes and maybe parts of the conversation it had with you as comments in the code! I always end up manually trimming those comments, which is cumbersome.
        ryandrake 2mo ago
        It also loves to reference internal notes and scratch docs that never go into source control, so a reader will have no idea what it’s talking about. For example: // load_tree() loads the binary tree with data, but only the recently updated data, not all data (INTERNAL_NOTES.md section 4) Ok but nobody reading the source code knows what this doc is. You don’t have to cite it.
      - droserasprout 2mo ago
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      It also seeps into all documents and artefacts it creates. Claude will include actual comments ("// ...") into Excel sheets, and include the thinking that led to the output, instead of just focusing on the final result. So if Claude questioned whether a vendor should be replaced, and you said "oh no, they are critical and we're already negotiating a great price") you'll now need to be careful to not send your vendor a document that contain text like ("Cost: X. // Management confirmed to not fire this vendor as they are critical to infrastructure and a better price will be negotiated later")
    - senderista 2mo ago
      I have had some luck telling Sol to concisely rephrase Opus 5’s comments.
  - world2vec 2mo ago
    I built my own skill to somewhat follow the Simplified Technical English guidelines (loosely adapted to my work context)
  - iamacyborg 2mo ago
    The problem I’ve been finding is that you can do this but within a few messages, the instructions in the skill will be ignored. Absolutely infuriating if you’re using Claude in an environment where you can’t run hooks.
- AlecSchueler 2mo ago
  Exactly. Sad to see them falling behind on this because it's exactly why I chose to use Claude initially.
causal 2mo ago
Yeah I don't know that any of the benchmarks index on "understandability". I'm amazed at how Claude can produce a page of text describing what it did and it can take me a full five minutes to decipher it, often just to find it's something I could have expressed in a simple sentence.
- sshine 2mo ago
  I just spent a day writing very thorough system prompts for communicating in different contexts. Everything is super succinct. Opus 5 lands, it almost completely disregards the intent. I suppose watermarking requires a certain text mass.
  - causal 2mo ago
    Oh man. Hadn't even considered the watermarking angle.
    - Retr0id 2mo ago
      The simpler angle is that more text lets them bill you more. I don't think that was necessarily their intent, but it does mean they have a negative incentive to fix it.
      - StilesCrisis 2mo ago
        I would have assumed reasoning tokens dramatically outweigh user-visible output. It certainly seemed that way when they were visible!
  - CuriouslyC 2mo ago
    The watermarking is going to get rolled back or Anthropic is going to get rolled. People hate it and it makes the writing worse.
    - llelouch 2mo ago
      Nah no one will notice. Gemini already does this and openai will soon do this as well.
nvarsj 2mo ago
Yeah OAI really nailed the communication style with GPT. It also seems just way more token efficient and faster compared to cc. Myself and all my friends have cancelled our $200 Anthropic subs. I'm using a $20 personal plan and even that is enough for my usage so far. Also using Codex or Pi makes you realise how slow and clunky the cc harness is. Even the desktop app is more responsive and has better UX. Funny how quickly the tides change.
- gedy 2mo ago
  > Funny how quickly the tides change. This is something that annoys me working in companies over the years. It’s that you can't just suggest "calm down, chasing the latest thing will not make you faster and is a huge distraction to actual work". Whether it's dot-com tech 20 years ago, latest JS framework 10 years ago, now it's the AI thing of the day. Being calm is interpreted as anti-whatever.
sscaryterry 2mo ago
This is 100% my experience.
oefrha 2mo ago
They did release an Opus 5 prompting guide saying you need to explicitly prompt it to be concise or it will be very verbose. YMMV but it got better for me to some extent. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5 https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
- nailer 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- indemnity 2mo ago
  And where would we put this? I don’t want to write that out every prompt. CLAUDE.md is a joke, it has little to no effect. Basically, I’ve gone from supporting them to hoping someone else wipes the floor with them.
  - cromka 2mo ago
    Funny, I'm the same. And if find Sol way more pleasant to work with, not to mention way faster. And Sol's compacting is superior, I haven't yet run into it forgetting something crucial from the pre-compact conversation, meanwhile Fable does that notoriously. When they eventually make Fable available to cheapest plan, I'll downgrade. It's worth keeping for reviewing the code and the UI tasks, but nothing else.
inferniac 2mo ago
I think anthropic is very far up their own ass and it shows up in the model output
- hypfer 2mo ago
  This. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Foobar8568 2mo ago
I didn't like to use GPT for agentic coding, review yes, but with Opus 5, well I really can't stand anything of that model. I feel that sol xhigh is even better than fable.
gwerbin 2mo ago
I think it's a deliberate steganography choice. You can spot Claude vocabulary a mile away, which maybe means you can spot distillations a mile away. But I agree, the GPT models are so much simpler to work with, they have so much less personality and fewer quirks. They also are a little less aggressive about triple checking every little assumption immediately in a stack of 30 tool calls (but I haven't used 5.6 Sol yet so maybe that's not true anymore).
- bakugo 2mo ago
  > which maybe means you can spot distillations a mile away. I doubt this is the reason. The fact that Chinese labs are all distilling Claude/GPT/etc isn't exactly a well kept secret, they don't even bother removing the name "Claude" from the training data, so the models randomly refer to themselves as "Claude" all the time. I think it's far more likely to be a side effect of how much synthetic data is being fed back into the models to make them better at coding. The degradation of Claude's prose has been gradual but steady ever since they shifted towards focusing only on code with Opus 4.5.
indemnity 2mo ago
I canceled my personal Max 20x subscription because since the 5 series models I simply cannot understand what the LLM is saying without a lot of reading and re-reading, and no amount of CLAUDE.md exhortations to speak plainly seemed to fix it. I don’t have the energy to spend twice as long to understand its plans, and pay Anthropic prices for the privilege. GPT seems not to have been infected by this yet, whatever it is, and Grok is quite refreshing for how normally it speaks. I wonder if everyone at Anthropic talks like this. If it’s watermarking, lol, good luck with that, it’s enough negative value to make me switch providers and I’m in a position to make this decision at a company level as well (we spend millions a month on Anthropic). They need to fix it.
- gwerbin 2mo ago
  N=2 anecdata but just this week we were discussing setting up a couple of seats with OpenAI as a trial for switching. There are other advantages too, such as being able to bring your own harness including Ai-integrated editors / ACP clients such as Jetbrains, VS Code, and Zed. I think OpenAI and Altman are a clear step more evil than Anthropic and Amodei so I really hate to say it, but with the degradation in model output interpretability, all of the cleverness and power of the Claude Code harness hasn't been enough to offset a genuine falloff in productivity for anything other than total hands-off automation. That said, the duo of Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 do a fantastic job at fully automated work, and Claude Code still stands head and shoulders above the rest.

by karimf 2mo ago

Retr0id 2mo ago

It's a surprising change from my perspective, because in the past it felt like they understood that Claude should be pleasant to interact with.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 2mo ago
It's bad enough that I've seen dedicated skills to do comment hygiene scrubbing and consolidation.
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  I've tried telling it to "fix" comments with varying degrees of specificity and in my experience it just... fundamentally doesn't get it. Presumably using a different model for it would help. My theory is that Claude's learned approach to comments is to treat them as a sort of persistent in-band thinking trace, or a "memory" tied to an in-code location, which is a little at odds with the way humans use comments (human comments are intended to be read and understood by other humans, whereas Claude comments are their own dialect). I bet this is a result of iteratively training Claude on output from other successful Claude sessions. Presumably it's good for making benchmark scores go up.
  - tharkun__ 2mo ago
    I'm not sure why you all have issues with CC commenting too much. My rules in the CLAUDE.md specify that comments are evil, never comment unless there is an actual need to explain a WHY and since I do read what CC writes, if I spot it still adding such WHY comments and they make no sense, I'll have it adjust, in many cases by removing them. Given the code base has a minimal amount of such comments, it's also less likely to go "copy what the rest of the codebase does". Of course I've now jinxed it and some update will cause it to ignore the instructions coz I didn't write them in the new model's style or something.
    - troupo 2mo ago
      As the context fills up the models will happily firget and ignore any number of any sections of your CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md. Edit: I've had explicit instructions for communication style in CLAUDE.md, in Claude's project "memory", in global "memory", in "skills": it couldn't care less where it was. It would just ignore it. When I would point this out it would just say "Yes, I violated communication guidelines, I won't do that again". Only to do that again in the next session. This applies to everything: code guidelines, communication guidelines, preferences, decisions etc.
  - ACS_Solver 2mo ago
    I also suspect comments are very much tied to how Claude reasons because not only are they bad comments, I can't get rid of them. Commenting is the one area in which I've been unable to get Claude to respect any rules. It can follow code conventions I prefer, it can do other things, but it can't keep the comment volume down. My CLAUDE.md has rules about not including any redundant comments in the code that are obvious from the code itself. I reiterate that occasionally while working. It's absolutely disregarded and any Claude-written code is full of comments. Some of them are simply redundant, like "Collect Foos and pass them to the requested sink" on a function that's void CollectFoos(IFooSink sink). But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments. I haven't found any way to stop Claude from doing these, so I have to tell Claude afterwards to clean the comments up. Which it does, making a note in memory to comment less, and it still does the exact same thing next time.
    - the_af 2mo ago
      > But worse, many comments include in the moment reasoning like "added parameter bar because we can no longer use the frob to automatically derive bar". That's stuff for a commit message, or just a mental note, and absolutely not for comments. I've noticed this a lot, and before your remark I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong. Now I know: Claude is writing its thought processes and maybe parts of the conversation it had with you as comments in the code! I always end up manually trimming those comments, which is cumbersome.
      - ryandrake 2mo ago
        It also loves to reference internal notes and scratch docs that never go into source control, so a reader will have no idea what it’s talking about. For example: // load_tree() loads the binary tree with data, but only the recently updated data, not all data (INTERNAL_NOTES.md section 4) Ok but nobody reading the source code knows what this doc is. You don’t have to cite it.
    - droserasprout 2mo ago
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    It also seeps into all documents and artefacts it creates. Claude will include actual comments ("// ...") into Excel sheets, and include the thinking that led to the output, instead of just focusing on the final result. So if Claude questioned whether a vendor should be replaced, and you said "oh no, they are critical and we're already negotiating a great price") you'll now need to be careful to not send your vendor a document that contain text like ("Cost: X. // Management confirmed to not fire this vendor as they are critical to infrastructure and a better price will be negotiated later")
  - senderista 2mo ago
    I have had some luck telling Sol to concisely rephrase Opus 5’s comments.
- world2vec 2mo ago
  I built my own skill to somewhat follow the Simplified Technical English guidelines (loosely adapted to my work context)
- iamacyborg 2mo ago
  The problem I’ve been finding is that you can do this but within a few messages, the instructions in the skill will be ignored. Absolutely infuriating if you’re using Claude in an environment where you can’t run hooks.
AlecSchueler 2mo ago
Exactly. Sad to see them falling behind on this because it's exactly why I chose to use Claude initially.

causal 2mo ago

Yeah I don't know that any of the benchmarks index on "understandability". I'm amazed at how Claude can produce a page of text describing what it did and it can take me a full five minutes to decipher it, often just to find it's something I could have expressed in a simple sentence.

sshine 2mo ago
I just spent a day writing very thorough system prompts for communicating in different contexts. Everything is super succinct. Opus 5 lands, it almost completely disregards the intent. I suppose watermarking requires a certain text mass.
- causal 2mo ago
  Oh man. Hadn't even considered the watermarking angle.
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    The simpler angle is that more text lets them bill you more. I don't think that was necessarily their intent, but it does mean they have a negative incentive to fix it.
    - StilesCrisis 2mo ago
      I would have assumed reasoning tokens dramatically outweigh user-visible output. It certainly seemed that way when they were visible!
- CuriouslyC 2mo ago
  The watermarking is going to get rolled back or Anthropic is going to get rolled. People hate it and it makes the writing worse.
  - llelouch 2mo ago
    Nah no one will notice. Gemini already does this and openai will soon do this as well.

nvarsj 2mo ago

Yeah OAI really nailed the communication style with GPT. It also seems just way more token efficient and faster compared to cc. Myself and all my friends have cancelled our $200 Anthropic subs. I'm using a $20 personal plan and even that is enough for my usage so far. Also using Codex or Pi makes you realise how slow and clunky the cc harness is. Even the desktop app is more responsive and has better UX. Funny how quickly the tides change.

gedy 2mo ago
> Funny how quickly the tides change. This is something that annoys me working in companies over the years. It’s that you can't just suggest "calm down, chasing the latest thing will not make you faster and is a huge distraction to actual work". Whether it's dot-com tech 20 years ago, latest JS framework 10 years ago, now it's the AI thing of the day. Being calm is interpreted as anti-whatever.

sscaryterry 2mo ago

This is 100% my experience.

oefrha 2mo ago

They did release an Opus 5 prompting guide saying you need to explicitly prompt it to be concise or it will be very verbose. YMMV but it got better for me to some extent. https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5 https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

nailer 2mo ago
[flagged]
indemnity 2mo ago
And where would we put this? I don’t want to write that out every prompt. CLAUDE.md is a joke, it has little to no effect. Basically, I’ve gone from supporting them to hoping someone else wipes the floor with them.
- cromka 2mo ago
  Funny, I'm the same. And if find Sol way more pleasant to work with, not to mention way faster. And Sol's compacting is superior, I haven't yet run into it forgetting something crucial from the pre-compact conversation, meanwhile Fable does that notoriously. When they eventually make Fable available to cheapest plan, I'll downgrade. It's worth keeping for reviewing the code and the UI tasks, but nothing else.

inferniac 2mo ago

I think anthropic is very far up their own ass and it shows up in the model output

hypfer 2mo ago
This. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Foobar8568 2mo ago

I didn't like to use GPT for agentic coding, review yes, but with Opus 5, well I really can't stand anything of that model. I feel that sol xhigh is even better than fable.

gwerbin 2mo ago

I think it's a deliberate steganography choice. You can spot Claude vocabulary a mile away, which maybe means you can spot distillations a mile away. But I agree, the GPT models are so much simpler to work with, they have so much less personality and fewer quirks. They also are a little less aggressive about triple checking every little assumption immediately in a stack of 30 tool calls (but I haven't used 5.6 Sol yet so maybe that's not true anymore).

bakugo 2mo ago
> which maybe means you can spot distillations a mile away. I doubt this is the reason. The fact that Chinese labs are all distilling Claude/GPT/etc isn't exactly a well kept secret, they don't even bother removing the name "Claude" from the training data, so the models randomly refer to themselves as "Claude" all the time. I think it's far more likely to be a side effect of how much synthetic data is being fed back into the models to make them better at coding. The degradation of Claude's prose has been gradual but steady ever since they shifted towards focusing only on code with Opus 4.5.

indemnity 2mo ago

I canceled my personal Max 20x subscription because since the 5 series models I simply cannot understand what the LLM is saying without a lot of reading and re-reading, and no amount of CLAUDE.md exhortations to speak plainly seemed to fix it. I don’t have the energy to spend twice as long to understand its plans, and pay Anthropic prices for the privilege. GPT seems not to have been infected by this yet, whatever it is, and Grok is quite refreshing for how normally it speaks. I wonder if everyone at Anthropic talks like this. If it’s watermarking, lol, good luck with that, it’s enough negative value to make me switch providers and I’m in a position to make this decision at a company level as well (we spend millions a month on Anthropic). They need to fix it.

gwerbin 2mo ago
N=2 anecdata but just this week we were discussing setting up a couple of seats with OpenAI as a trial for switching. There are other advantages too, such as being able to bring your own harness including Ai-integrated editors / ACP clients such as Jetbrains, VS Code, and Zed. I think OpenAI and Altman are a clear step more evil than Anthropic and Amodei so I really hate to say it, but with the degradation in model output interpretability, all of the cleverness and power of the Claude Code harness hasn't been enough to offset a genuine falloff in productivity for anything other than total hands-off automation. That said, the duo of Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 do a fantastic job at fully automated work, and Claude Code still stands head and shoulders above the rest.