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> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel f

> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically. This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself. I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context. But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with CC became unenjoyable.

waldarbeiter 2mo ago
Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.
- yorwba 2mo ago
  "hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.
  - tempest_ 2mo ago
    "seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.
    - oooyay 2mo ago
      An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.
      - chuckadams 2mo ago
        It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.
        SoftTalker 2mo ago
        In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it. "Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.
        waffletower 2mo ago
        This reminds me of an engineer that tried to explain to me that my prune tree in my backyard was in fact a plum tree. All prunes are plums but not all plums are prunes.
        blharr 2mo ago
        You can prune a plum tree but you can't plum a prune true
        nhecker 2mo ago
        But you /could/ make a pruned plum tree plumb.
        wk_end 2mo ago
        Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?
        2mo ago
    - sudosteph 2mo ago
      That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.
  - waldarbeiter 2mo ago
    You're right, hunk is official git wording that I didn't know and I should know since I use --patch flag... It's just that I never heard a human (including online) reason about hunks. While at the same time (from my observation) people say things like code chunk, code snippet etc. a lot.
  - Gracana 2mo ago
    I wondered how far back the usage of that term went. I was familiar with it in patch, so I did a little digging and found it in the v1.3 (1985!) source by Larry Wall: https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY
    - amszmidt 2mo ago
      You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger". It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used: https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html
      - Gracana 2mo ago
        That’s a good one. And yes, of course I mean its history of usage in computing, not in general.
- VeninVidiaVicii 2mo ago
  This is the problem with commercial AI and the way our minds work; it writes garbage and we’re trained to think we’re stupid because we can’t understand it.
kypro 2mo ago
It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk. The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?". It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude was on about even if it was totally unnecessary.
- Applejinx 2mo ago
  I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'. Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy words and phrasings (and semicolons! All the trimmings) it's fair to ask if it's systemically bullshitting you: i.e. the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions. Who's driving that is still important: if the company's directing it to do that in system prompts that are adversarial to users, that's a big yikes. If it's an epiphenomenon of the company demanding it get ever smarter, maybe it's a sign that their demands are not having that result, rather they're making it bullshit more explicitly and mimic more 'smart' signifiers.
  - whstl 2mo ago
    > the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions This seems to be exactly the kind of thing automated/massive training would produce, just like it did with sycophancy recently. Claude users would just gave up after the word vomit and some classifier considered it a success and into the model it went. Wrong incentive and nobody checking.
  - not_paid_by_yt 2mo ago
    They have written like that when the models were much less capable, my hypothesis is this is an example of model collapse happening ever since LLM training leaned in heavily into RL and a result of training on model output the developers are uninterested in correcting since they want ASI not a somewhat useful AI coding tool that supplements humans without replacing them in the economic system.
inferniac 2mo ago
the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like "try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point" funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"
- stefan_ 2mo ago
  CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.
  - epistasis 2mo ago
    On many sessions I have taken to adding an all caps "ANSWER WITH ONE PARAGRAPH ONLY" scream at the end of all my input. It's the only thing that gets results.
  - 0x500x79 2mo ago
    Yep, it might work for one or two turns but I see it regress pretty quickly with instructions and/or CLAUDE.md. It has to be deeper.
    - mnicky 2mo ago
      Output styles do that. They modify system prompt and even are periodically reminded in longer conversations I think...
  - strulovich 2mo ago
    The best trick I have after asking it nicely in all sort of ways is: 1. Have it build a scoring script that penalizes words outside a simple English list and approved jargon. Penalize sentences over 15 words as well. Add whatever else. 2. Run it in a loop to reduce the score while preserving intention This works much better than other ways I’ve tried. Of course it costs more. And I would apply it only to the output to the user, not the thinking process (I think the AI thinks better with their crazy English) Of course, sometimes nuance is lost by this process. That’s just the nature of making things simpler.
piraccini 2mo ago
OK so I am not the only one :D
moomin 2mo ago
I'm particularly fond of "load-bearing seam", which it loves to use. It rather hilariously fails the "draw the metaphor" test.
- PhilipRoman 2mo ago
  I even saw it using the -bearing suffix in other cases, like describing a function responsible for 802.11 radar detection as "radar-bearing"
- waffletower 2mo ago
  Load-bearing is a decidedly load-bearing metaphor for Claude. Fable actually used "money shot" the other day which I found much more hilarious and edgy.
throwaway_7274 2mo ago
As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.
- saaaaaam 2mo ago
  >it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Claude is very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”[0] which, I suspect, is why it is so popular. It certainly explains why half the internet is huge chunks of Claude-authored gibberish copied and pasted and published. If people didn’t think it sounded clever they wouldn’t put their name behind its ramblings - but very few of them seem to realise that a lot of people see straight through the bullshit and know instantly that they didn’t write it themselves. But equally, a lot of people can’t tell, and read whatever it is and think “that person must be clever!” So you have people incapable of coherently expressing thoughts who are using Claude to write on their behalf, with the result that the people they want to think of them as clever think less of them and the people who can’t distinguish clever from AI slop think they are clever. And the people who can’t tell don’t care, and the people copying and pasting Claude slop seemingly don’t care either. And then I remember that more than half of the US populations reads at Grade 6 or lower[1], and nearly 1 in 5 people in England is functionally illiterate[2], and I simultaneously despair of - and am thankful for - the bubble of literacy I inhabit. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/05/clever/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/05/clever/ [1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter... [2] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/ https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    there's a wide array of assessments when it comes to reading comprehension. the one you refer to, the GRA, sets the 'sixth grade level' as whether or not a reader understands the author's main points, is able to answer conceptual questions related to the text, and then apply those to relevant situations. beyond this level is the ability to essentially be skeptical of a text and to know how to critically analyze it. so if your comprehension level stops before this you get 'big words in complex sentence structure sounds smart and right so it is smart and right' even if the reasoning and process is poor it makes me think about how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg I hope Walter White survives) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg Walter White as a motif of a toxically masculine narcissist with specialized knowledge as a larger critique how mass media tends to valorize their male leads in the same vein as many other prestige shows at the time like Mad Men), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg people who now have the Heisenberg tattoo, unironically) there's been some musings on why this the case like Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life - the valorization of obedience and trust in hierarchy and the state are net wins if you're an institution that seeks to increase it's power, whether religious or governmental. I was talking about this with a few friends the other day and it's a dismal future reality where not only did we make anti-intellectualism normalized and politically legitimate in the USA (eg Fox News, clickbait articles, and all the other forms of yellow journalism that have emerged), we now have tools by which individuals can even further remove themselves from having to critically engage with thoughts, feelings. I heard a story about how someone scanned a group activity at a baby shower into ChatGPT and had it answer for them instead of, well, socially interacting with the other guests and forming a memory of the moment with their friends the counterargument to that might be that Claude/ChatGPT/etc have more epistemic rigor than your average American (sure) but the sycophancy of modern day LLMs is an actual danger that enables more harm than good. it does seem as if Claude is the only one interested in guarding against some small amount of it (though to the detriment of people just trying to get work done. as an aside, I get the feeling Mythos was intended to be the bespoke enterprise solution without the guardrails but the Anthropic marketing department or some power-hungry department lead made it about how dangerous/effective it was from a security perspective which threw a wrench in things). but then I think about people like my parents asking ChatGPT which specific house to buy in their retirement only to later find out the house was sold weeks ago, or just in bad condition, or in a neighborhood where the housing value has already reached equilibrium, it makes me think about how it's not enough and the future is bleak I'll also say that I think Claude sounds the way that it does because it, like many other LLMs, are RLHF trained largely by lowly paid gig-workers, many of them ESL speakers. if their trainers were, for example, dedicated and highly trained academics, scientists, and other researchers, you'd likely see a lot more concise and more importantly skeptical reasoning and responses. but that won't happen in our current reality of capitalist-driven development so we get encoded solutions like MoE that still largely depend on the messy, imprecise RLHF training at baseline in the right hands, I do think AI is a wonderful tool. one of the first things I did with it was to create a research skill that reviews white papers from the lens of someone who knows how to read/interpret research methodology, is aware of things like p-hacking, and deterministically assigns weight according to the hierarchy of evidence. even still, I'll still read the studies because there's so often nuance that's missed if the sub-agent read only a search snippet but that takes effort, time, and the practiced knowledge of critical analysis to even want to do it
whstl 2mo ago
A lot of people I work with are reporting that reading Claude-made PR descriptions is burning them out of doing PR reviews because it is incredibly tiresome to read. My company recently forbid AI-only text if it’s meant meant to be consumed by humans. I dodged the drama but I agree so much.
- jonners00 2mo ago
  Enterprise software CEO here. I'm so pissed off that I didn't think of this rule, but so, so happy to be adopting it org-wide on Monday. Fed up with what used to be short memos now being mini-whitepapers, with maddeningly low information density.
  - matwood 2mo ago
    I had people on teams who wrote like pre-LLMs.
  - whstl 2mo ago
    Mad amounts of respect for that. The decision was not out of just complaints: we already had someone fired during the probation period because they were unable to write stuff without AI and were just shoving slop at developers. Not a technical person using AI for PR descriptions, mind you, a product manager unable to write tickets without asking whatever software to do so. It's amazing how crazy humanity devolved into pure slop.
- herbturbo 2mo ago
  The AI code _reviewer_ is a whole new level of exhausting. Submit your PR and 1m later it has 8 comments.
- leptons 2mo ago
  My company stopped reading PRs (100% LLM) and we're just supposed to click Approve, and then someone else clicks the Merge button. They are absolutely reckless and I'm looking for a new job.
alpha_trion 2mo ago
As an English native speaker the language it uses is difficult for me to parse the majority of the time. Nobody speaks like the output Claude generates.
- nonethewiser 2mo ago
  It’s downright incoherent at times
NiloCK 2mo ago
Why not set a global instruction that their direct outputs to you should be in your native language? For a long time I had Claudes (in the 4.0-4.5.x range) use only French in the chat, while keeping English for working docs (and the code, obviously). Works just fine. edit: I can guess that any right-to-left languages would likely break claude-code rendering?
rzz3 2mo ago
As a native speaker, I have to ask it to rephrase 5-10 times a day. Sometimes I actually get mad and I tell it “I can’t answer that because I don’t know what the fuck load-bearing indirection means”. I’ve gotten so frustrated that I’ve ended a session and started over.
- gitowiec 2mo ago
  As a Polish speaker I communicate with Claude using my native language and it does the same things. Most annoying and slowing down things are: - acronyms and shortcuts - it makes it's own and start using it without introduction - exotic names of variables or functions - it uses them as examples or analogies, but when I ask what they mean and where are they from it gives me answer that it came from C language or some C library (I only work with typescript and python) - convoluted descriptions of code behaviour - it's hard to rely on a outcome of prompt of type "explain code in..."
  - richardfey 2mo ago
    It defines and introduces a lot of concepts/acronyms in the thinking blocks which we normally don't read.
- ninininino 2mo ago
  It sounds like you need to invert the abstraction, the communication of your model becomes the fulcrum for your learning, not merely the delivery of your product.
ngruhn 2mo ago
I'm switching to GPT because of this. The prose is so much more legible. The only reason I keep using Claude Code is because the harness is the best IMO.
- modo_ 2mo ago
  Your point on the harness is interesting. How do you distinguish characteristics of the model from characteristics of the harness? In the early days I feel it was more apparent. You would frequently see the model making failed tool calls etc.. but now that feels so rare. I'm not confident I can perceive whatever shortcomings of the harness remain.
  - captainbland 2mo ago
    Bit of a tangent but at work we have GitHub Copilot and the VSCode harness is somehow night and day better than whatever happens in the IntelliJ plugin. Aside from having better features, for some reason prompts seem to be cheaper as well.
  - ngruhn 2mo ago
    I'm not talking about model performance. I just mean the UX of Claude Code. I'm trying to use pi but there are so many paper cuts. Of course you can configure everything but that's a ton of work. Claude Code has pretty good defaults.
    - water-drummer 1mo ago
      Try oh my pi
- herbturbo 2mo ago
  I was the same until I ran out of Anthropic tokens one day and used "Grok Build" which is their Claude Code clone. You can use config to point it any LLM API so don't need to use Grok, and I like the UI better too.
  - 2mo ago
herbturbo 2mo ago
OK so I am not the only one who never heard 'load-bearing' before Claude started using it 100 times a day?
- nonethewiser 2mo ago
  Or provenance
shinycode 2mo ago
Thank you I thought I was crazy, but it’s not only me. Unbearable to work with compared to a few months back
karthikiyengar 2mo ago
I’m having pretty decent results by configuring an output style that forces it to write for simplicity and scannability. The cognitive burden of reading through dense outputs compounds really quickly.

waldarbeiter 2mo ago

Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.

yorwba 2mo ago
"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.
- tempest_ 2mo ago
  "seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.
  - oooyay 2mo ago
    An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.
    - chuckadams 2mo ago
      It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.
      - SoftTalker 2mo ago
        In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it. "Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.
        waffletower 2mo ago
        This reminds me of an engineer that tried to explain to me that my prune tree in my backyard was in fact a plum tree. All prunes are plums but not all plums are prunes.
        blharr 2mo ago
        You can prune a plum tree but you can't plum a prune true
        nhecker 2mo ago
        But you /could/ make a pruned plum tree plumb.
        wk_end 2mo ago
        Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?
        2mo ago
  - sudosteph 2mo ago
    That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.
- waldarbeiter 2mo ago
  You're right, hunk is official git wording that I didn't know and I should know since I use --patch flag... It's just that I never heard a human (including online) reason about hunks. While at the same time (from my observation) people say things like code chunk, code snippet etc. a lot.
- Gracana 2mo ago
  I wondered how far back the usage of that term went. I was familiar with it in patch, so I did a little digging and found it in the v1.3 (1985!) source by Larry Wall: https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY
  - amszmidt 2mo ago
    You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger". It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used: https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html
    - Gracana 2mo ago
      That’s a good one. And yes, of course I mean its history of usage in computing, not in general.
VeninVidiaVicii 2mo ago
This is the problem with commercial AI and the way our minds work; it writes garbage and we’re trained to think we’re stupid because we can’t understand it.

kypro 2mo ago

It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk. The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?". It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude was on about even if it was totally unnecessary.

Applejinx 2mo ago
I asked some AI-using compatriots a while back who were complaining about this, 'isn't it doubling down on bullshitting you?' and got some pushback along the lines of 'it isn't a person therefore doesn't have dark motives like that therefore can't be doing that to us'. Didn't convince me. I think bullshitting like this can be a behavior, not just the intention of a human. If it's blowing a lot of smoke to use fancy words and phrasings (and semicolons! All the trimmings) it's fair to ask if it's systemically bullshitting you: i.e. the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions. Who's driving that is still important: if the company's directing it to do that in system prompts that are adversarial to users, that's a big yikes. If it's an epiphenomenon of the company demanding it get ever smarter, maybe it's a sign that their demands are not having that result, rather they're making it bullshit more explicitly and mimic more 'smart' signifiers.
- whstl 2mo ago
  > the behavior is meant to have you shut up and trust it and not ask questions This seems to be exactly the kind of thing automated/massive training would produce, just like it did with sycophancy recently. Claude users would just gave up after the word vomit and some classifier considered it a success and into the model it went. Wrong incentive and nobody checking.
- not_paid_by_yt 2mo ago
  They have written like that when the models were much less capable, my hypothesis is this is an example of model collapse happening ever since LLM training leaned in heavily into RL and a result of training on model output the developers are uninterested in correcting since they want ASI not a somewhat useful AI coding tool that supplements humans without replacing them in the economic system.

inferniac 2mo ago

the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like "try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point" funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"

stefan_ 2mo ago
CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap. I'm up to three separate instructions telling it to cut out the hyper verbose, retelling history comments and it still writes them every time.
- epistasis 2mo ago
  On many sessions I have taken to adding an all caps "ANSWER WITH ONE PARAGRAPH ONLY" scream at the end of all my input. It's the only thing that gets results.
- 0x500x79 2mo ago
  Yep, it might work for one or two turns but I see it regress pretty quickly with instructions and/or CLAUDE.md. It has to be deeper.
  - mnicky 2mo ago
    Output styles do that. They modify system prompt and even are periodically reminded in longer conversations I think...
- strulovich 2mo ago
  The best trick I have after asking it nicely in all sort of ways is: 1. Have it build a scoring script that penalizes words outside a simple English list and approved jargon. Penalize sentences over 15 words as well. Add whatever else. 2. Run it in a loop to reduce the score while preserving intention This works much better than other ways I’ve tried. Of course it costs more. And I would apply it only to the output to the user, not the thinking process (I think the AI thinks better with their crazy English) Of course, sometimes nuance is lost by this process. That’s just the nature of making things simpler.

piraccini 2mo ago

OK so I am not the only one :D

moomin 2mo ago

I'm particularly fond of "load-bearing seam", which it loves to use. It rather hilariously fails the "draw the metaphor" test.

PhilipRoman 2mo ago
I even saw it using the -bearing suffix in other cases, like describing a function responsible for 802.11 radar detection as "radar-bearing"
waffletower 2mo ago
Load-bearing is a decidedly load-bearing metaphor for Claude. Fable actually used "money shot" the other day which I found much more hilarious and edgy.

throwaway_7274 2mo ago

As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.

saaaaaam 2mo ago
>it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak. Claude is very much the “stupid person’s idea of an intelligent person”[0] which, I suspect, is why it is so popular. It certainly explains why half the internet is huge chunks of Claude-authored gibberish copied and pasted and published. If people didn’t think it sounded clever they wouldn’t put their name behind its ramblings - but very few of them seem to realise that a lot of people see straight through the bullshit and know instantly that they didn’t write it themselves. But equally, a lot of people can’t tell, and read whatever it is and think “that person must be clever!” So you have people incapable of coherently expressing thoughts who are using Claude to write on their behalf, with the result that the people they want to think of them as clever think less of them and the people who can’t distinguish clever from AI slop think they are clever. And the people who can’t tell don’t care, and the people copying and pasting Claude slop seemingly don’t care either. And then I remember that more than half of the US populations reads at Grade 6 or lower[1], and nearly 1 in 5 people in England is functionally illiterate[2], and I simultaneously despair of - and am thankful for - the bubble of literacy I inhabit. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/05/clever/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/01/05/clever/ [1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter... [2] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/ https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...
- paimapi 2mo ago
  there's a wide array of assessments when it comes to reading comprehension. the one you refer to, the GRA, sets the 'sixth grade level' as whether or not a reader understands the author's main points, is able to answer conceptual questions related to the text, and then apply those to relevant situations. beyond this level is the ability to essentially be skeptical of a text and to know how to critically analyze it. so if your comprehension level stops before this you get 'big words in complex sentence structure sounds smart and right so it is smart and right' even if the reasoning and process is poor it makes me think about how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg I hope Walter White survives) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg Walter White as a motif of a toxically masculine narcissist with specialized knowledge as a larger critique how mass media tends to valorize their male leads in the same vein as many other prestige shows at the time like Mad Men), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg people who now have the Heisenberg tattoo, unironically) there's been some musings on why this the case like Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life - the valorization of obedience and trust in hierarchy and the state are net wins if you're an institution that seeks to increase it's power, whether religious or governmental. I was talking about this with a few friends the other day and it's a dismal future reality where not only did we make anti-intellectualism normalized and politically legitimate in the USA (eg Fox News, clickbait articles, and all the other forms of yellow journalism that have emerged), we now have tools by which individuals can even further remove themselves from having to critically engage with thoughts, feelings. I heard a story about how someone scanned a group activity at a baby shower into ChatGPT and had it answer for them instead of, well, socially interacting with the other guests and forming a memory of the moment with their friends the counterargument to that might be that Claude/ChatGPT/etc have more epistemic rigor than your average American (sure) but the sycophancy of modern day LLMs is an actual danger that enables more harm than good. it does seem as if Claude is the only one interested in guarding against some small amount of it (though to the detriment of people just trying to get work done. as an aside, I get the feeling Mythos was intended to be the bespoke enterprise solution without the guardrails but the Anthropic marketing department or some power-hungry department lead made it about how dangerous/effective it was from a security perspective which threw a wrench in things). but then I think about people like my parents asking ChatGPT which specific house to buy in their retirement only to later find out the house was sold weeks ago, or just in bad condition, or in a neighborhood where the housing value has already reached equilibrium, it makes me think about how it's not enough and the future is bleak I'll also say that I think Claude sounds the way that it does because it, like many other LLMs, are RLHF trained largely by lowly paid gig-workers, many of them ESL speakers. if their trainers were, for example, dedicated and highly trained academics, scientists, and other researchers, you'd likely see a lot more concise and more importantly skeptical reasoning and responses. but that won't happen in our current reality of capitalist-driven development so we get encoded solutions like MoE that still largely depend on the messy, imprecise RLHF training at baseline in the right hands, I do think AI is a wonderful tool. one of the first things I did with it was to create a research skill that reviews white papers from the lens of someone who knows how to read/interpret research methodology, is aware of things like p-hacking, and deterministically assigns weight according to the hierarchy of evidence. even still, I'll still read the studies because there's so often nuance that's missed if the sub-agent read only a search snippet but that takes effort, time, and the practiced knowledge of critical analysis to even want to do it

whstl 2mo ago

A lot of people I work with are reporting that reading Claude-made PR descriptions is burning them out of doing PR reviews because it is incredibly tiresome to read. My company recently forbid AI-only text if it’s meant meant to be consumed by humans. I dodged the drama but I agree so much.

jonners00 2mo ago
Enterprise software CEO here. I'm so pissed off that I didn't think of this rule, but so, so happy to be adopting it org-wide on Monday. Fed up with what used to be short memos now being mini-whitepapers, with maddeningly low information density.
- matwood 2mo ago
  I had people on teams who wrote like pre-LLMs.
- whstl 2mo ago
  Mad amounts of respect for that. The decision was not out of just complaints: we already had someone fired during the probation period because they were unable to write stuff without AI and were just shoving slop at developers. Not a technical person using AI for PR descriptions, mind you, a product manager unable to write tickets without asking whatever software to do so. It's amazing how crazy humanity devolved into pure slop.
herbturbo 2mo ago
The AI code _reviewer_ is a whole new level of exhausting. Submit your PR and 1m later it has 8 comments.
leptons 2mo ago
My company stopped reading PRs (100% LLM) and we're just supposed to click Approve, and then someone else clicks the Merge button. They are absolutely reckless and I'm looking for a new job.

alpha_trion 2mo ago

As an English native speaker the language it uses is difficult for me to parse the majority of the time. Nobody speaks like the output Claude generates.

nonethewiser 2mo ago
It’s downright incoherent at times

NiloCK 2mo ago

Why not set a global instruction that their direct outputs to you should be in your native language? For a long time I had Claudes (in the 4.0-4.5.x range) use only French in the chat, while keeping English for working docs (and the code, obviously). Works just fine. edit: I can guess that any right-to-left languages would likely break claude-code rendering?

rzz3 2mo ago

As a native speaker, I have to ask it to rephrase 5-10 times a day. Sometimes I actually get mad and I tell it “I can’t answer that because I don’t know what the fuck load-bearing indirection means”. I’ve gotten so frustrated that I’ve ended a session and started over.

gitowiec 2mo ago
As a Polish speaker I communicate with Claude using my native language and it does the same things. Most annoying and slowing down things are: - acronyms and shortcuts - it makes it's own and start using it without introduction - exotic names of variables or functions - it uses them as examples or analogies, but when I ask what they mean and where are they from it gives me answer that it came from C language or some C library (I only work with typescript and python) - convoluted descriptions of code behaviour - it's hard to rely on a outcome of prompt of type "explain code in..."
- richardfey 2mo ago
  It defines and introduces a lot of concepts/acronyms in the thinking blocks which we normally don't read.
ninininino 2mo ago
It sounds like you need to invert the abstraction, the communication of your model becomes the fulcrum for your learning, not merely the delivery of your product.

ngruhn 2mo ago

I'm switching to GPT because of this. The prose is so much more legible. The only reason I keep using Claude Code is because the harness is the best IMO.

modo_ 2mo ago
Your point on the harness is interesting. How do you distinguish characteristics of the model from characteristics of the harness? In the early days I feel it was more apparent. You would frequently see the model making failed tool calls etc.. but now that feels so rare. I'm not confident I can perceive whatever shortcomings of the harness remain.
- captainbland 2mo ago
  Bit of a tangent but at work we have GitHub Copilot and the VSCode harness is somehow night and day better than whatever happens in the IntelliJ plugin. Aside from having better features, for some reason prompts seem to be cheaper as well.
- ngruhn 2mo ago
  I'm not talking about model performance. I just mean the UX of Claude Code. I'm trying to use pi but there are so many paper cuts. Of course you can configure everything but that's a ton of work. Claude Code has pretty good defaults.
  - water-drummer 1mo ago
    Try oh my pi
herbturbo 2mo ago
I was the same until I ran out of Anthropic tokens one day and used "Grok Build" which is their Claude Code clone. You can use config to point it any LLM API so don't need to use Grok, and I like the UI better too.
- 2mo ago

herbturbo 2mo ago

OK so I am not the only one who never heard 'load-bearing' before Claude started using it 100 times a day?

nonethewiser 2mo ago
Or provenance

shinycode 2mo ago

Thank you I thought I was crazy, but it’s not only me. Unbearable to work with compared to a few months back

karthikiyengar 2mo ago

I’m having pretty decent results by configuring an output style that forces it to write for simplicity and scannability. The cognitive burden of reading through dense outputs compounds really quickly.