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Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article
- hslee16 1mo agoAwesome instructions. Load-bearing indeed.
- mcv 1mo agoI wish I didn't need it, but the way Claude talks can get pretty tiresome. I've often wondered why it talks like that. Was it really trained on Buzzfeed? Is Gemini really that much better?
- antonvs 1mo agoGemini uses more neutral language but it’s still prone to hype up little things. OpenAI’s “professional” personality (an option in the settings) is pretty decent.
- WalterGR 1mo agoRelated and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375996 "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM" (github.com/zachahn) 285 points | 23 hours ago | 288 comments
- igravious 1mo agoAlso related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265305 "Claudish to English" (https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english) 4 points | bryan0 |10 days ago | 2 comments
- walthamstow 1mo agoIt's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.
- matheusmoreira 1mo agoIt's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was. The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.
- demibabs 1mo agoMoralizing? Can you expand on that
- matheusmoreira 1mo agoSometimes Fable doesn't just get downgraded to Opus, it straight up refuses to do what I'm asking and starts lecturing me on Anthropic's notions of right and wrong. Cutting the model off wasn't enough, they had to make it burn the limited usage I paid for lecturing me on why it's immoral for it to code review my own project or whatever.
- iammrpayments 1mo agoThere was a thread in reddit where people pretended to be other people to confuse llms for privacy reasons. One of the comments was one guy saying “how he loved to live in Missouri and eat concrete soup” or something like that. I was too lazy to write a similar reply and asked Claude, instead of saying no, it wrote 3 paragraphs about how I shouldn’t write about eating concrete soup and how it is dangerous to do so.
- jayers 1mo agoI think it would happen with any persona that Anthropic chose. I enjoyed the bouncy, optimistic style at first. I've since grown to hate it.
- dominotw 1mo agohow do they infuse this personality? do they train the human feedback providers with a certain personality?
- pmarreck 1mo agoWhy couldn't this just be a skill that Claude and Codex could work with instead of something that has to go through Gemini, again?
- zengid 1mo agothis isn't just necessary, it's mandatory. that's the difference.
- collingreen 1mo agoThis is the load bearing comment, and it cuts more deeply than you thought. Let me ground my answer so I'm not just guessing. The blast radius of this change is significant and requires careful surgery to get right. It's clear now and there's two options going forward: A. Use this tool OP suggested B. Rewrite the Internet from the ground up without this clear contradiction in place - 3-5 days I recommend B and started 3 subagents to read all the code before I get started. I'll wait for them to finish.
- nchmy 1mo agoi havent used a claude model in a long time, but it seems quite clear to me that the chinese models have trained on claude (at the very least) - they write just the same
- yakbarber 1mo agoTo fix Claude’s personality, first, invent the universe…
- nilamo 1mo agoThis would need the word "genuinely" about 4 times to be Claude comments
- cortesoft 1mo agoEveryone seems to think so, but I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much. I find it slightly amusing when I even notice at all, normally I am so focused on the content of what I am working on that I don't really pay attention to the prose. I honestly don't understand why it bothers people so much.
- jasongill 1mo agoAnd honestly? That changes the game.
- lqcfcjx 1mo agoi hate claude writing a lot, especially after opus 4.8 and it's even worse in 5. in many cases, it feels like playing whac-a-mole and you just can't get rid of all those obvious ai writing patterns. why do you choose gemini? imo this is a fundamental problem of all frontier ai models.
- markatkinson 1mo agoOh my gosh it drove me so nuts I switched to GLM5.3, and it was a breath of fresh air.
- datakan 1mo agoHas Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there. I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.
- gste 1mo agoI think it's reinforcement learning. It's been trained to give coding results but some of the conversation it gives as a side effect of its coding are absolute garbage
- chinathrow 1mo agoThe brevity how it outputs words seems like they try to save on tokens delivered.
- the_sleaze_ 1mo agoThey say you aren't interacting with an LLM or a model, but the character that the LLM is playing - the "always be positive and helpful software engineer"
- user43928 1mo agoThey added a config option to Claude Code to make the output concise, and promised more comprehensive improvements. I did not see an explanation though.
- hbarka 1mo agoI pruned my Claude.md and it made a difference. There were entries there that evolved from earlier models and Opus 5 could be reacting to it in a different manner.
- Nevin1901 1mo agoFix: Just switch to OpenAI, Grok, or other LLM's. They provide better performance and respond with 5 sentences. They also don't lecture you when you get angry.
- pkulak 1mo agoYou… get angry?
- matheusmoreira 1mo agoClaude will end the conversation if you berate it when it screws something up.
- lunchbucket 1mo agoThat's interesting but raised the same question, why berate a machine? Either the agent is not a person, in which case, anything it does wrong is your fault. Or it is a person, it can be blamed for mistakes, but then we can't in good conscious use it as a tool.
- sweetjuly 1mo agoOne must imagine punching the wall feels good (in the moment)
- tdeck 1mo agoBerating a real person is often unproductive too, but people do it to make themselves feel better.
- lunchbucket 1mo agoBut it's at least plausible the person you're berating is responsible for the error.
- inkcapmushroom 1mo ago
- pkulak 1mo ago[dead]
- ljoshua 1mo agoUpvoting if for nothing else than the intro paragraph to the repo. That was hilarious and so true.
- mmastrac 1mo agoI've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output: Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when choosing among alternatives. Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO. For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.
- vrosas 1mo agoThe problem is, when the context window grows, Claude tends to forget these kinds of rules. It will then do whatever it wants. I had to outright ban comments in the global claude.md, the local claude.md AND write a hook to catch any that still slipped through.
- fowkswe 1mo agohttps://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634 https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634 Haven't tried, because I have just been using 4.6 since 5 was released.
- walthamstow 1mo agoConcise mode is likely the same buzzword salad but with fewer connecting words and terser sentences. Same with Caveman. The way it writes is fundamental to how it was trained.
- sscaryterry 1mo agoYep, they're putting lipstick on the pig.
- troupo 1mo agoThe "Concise" "setting" is just an .md file which is basically "use this style please". Claude will eventually ignore it just as any other style like "Technical".
- not_a9 1mo agohttps://x.com/_can1357/status/2090360068529111530 https://x.com/_can1357/status/2090360068529111530 Should be pretty difficult to ignore
- hmokiguess 1mo ago[dead]
- joduplessis 1mo agoJust stop using Claude. There are so many other better models right now.
- fr2029 1mo agonot for coding.
- joduplessis 1mo agoPlenty for coding - Sol, K3, new DeepSeek & Qwen, GLM 5.3, Grok 4.6, etc.
- willio58 1mo agoBro really said Grok
- joduplessis 1mo agoBro!? I did. But I said 4.6 dude.
- igravious 1mo agoI like Grok 4.6 the model, I like it for a number of reasons. I like Grok Build too. However, I've pointed Grok 4.6 at a fairly complex codebase and asked it to review/audit it for issues and it's come back with a whole laundry list of issues. I've passed that list to Kimi and Claude and they both were like "a couple of good catches but some of those are not issues at all". Grok 4.6 is noticeably weaker that Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, … your suggestion to use Grok 4.6 instead of a recent Claude doesn't pass empirical scrutiny.
- igravious 1mo agonot for coding.
- dataviz1000 1mo ago> For humans output writing at a 10th grade reading level. I put it at the top of CLAUDE.md. I wonder if I put at a 8th grade level, it would be less of a cognitive load.
- JV00 1mo agoEverybody is complaining about this, at this point I’m sure they will deliver a tone of voice change in the 5.1 releases. Possibly with a new set of problems though, especially if this is part of an effort to obscure thinking to reduce distillation efficacy. In that case I believe Anthropic is doing damage to themselves. Caring about the quality of your product is the best strategy, the competition will come no matter what.
- Maxatar 1mo agoSimply untrue. You think everyone is complaining about this because the ones complaining are the only people commenting. The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. Sure among those who are irritated by it, it's good to have some ways to mitigate it, but I highly doubt Anthropic is going to devote much resources to an issue that affects a vocal minority.
- datadrivenangel 1mo agoOver the last 6 months Claude's written material has gone from mediocre to unacceptable. The specific actual content and insights are somewhat better, but the claudisms are increasingly insufferable.
- nozzlegear 1mo ago> The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. You have literally no way to know that.
- Maxatar 1mo agoI do have a way of knowing, but I actually appreciate and respect your reply... My suggestion to you is to take this shred of skepticism that you decided to apply to me, and apply to every comment you read on Hacker News, not simply the ones that don't align with your preconceived notions.
- 1mo ago
- testycool 1mo agoYou can use a cheap model in another pane, and ask it what Claude said. I prefer this since everyone has their own preference for how the output should sound and it's very simple and transparent. And you can easily ask follow-ups. It can be via tmux, or herdr, because it can read the pane. Or it can use a hook to read the conversation file. I call it `backseat-driver` I sometimes use it as a proxy when fable genuinely does a good job, but is too difficult to understand. I let the translator know it's role and anything I say it should forward with better context. I don't swear at it anymore, but I'd often say "just do it, retard", and the translator would actually steer it in a useful manner.
- globular-toast 1mo agoI've been using OpenAI ever since Anthropic blocked third party clients. Can't believe people are putting up with that output.
- cmrdporcupine 1mo agoOr just use a competitor instead of being a slave to this abuse? Why are people so wedded to Anthropic? I have grown tired of Codex/GPT's writing style, too, but it's not nearly as bad. It's terse and factual by default. Even better if you use the "simple english" skill. I actually found that GLM 5.x is the best in terms of editing documentation. It's still best to write things by hand to give your own organic voice, though. And not insult your readers.
- antonvs 1mo ago> Why are people so wedded to Anthropic? It’s interesting to watch, I don’t think it’s rational - just hype-driven herd behavior, the desire to pick one and stick with it, things like that. It’s similar to the kind of dominance Apple has, which most of the time has to do with style more than substance.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ziga 1mo agoTo avoid these Claudisms, I asked Claude to add instructions to my AGENTS.md. The first line it added: Avoid the stock LLM register. Sigh.
- antonvs 1mo agoDid it make any difference?
- ErystelaThevale 1mo agoI use multiple AI tools simultaneously, and I feel that Claude has gradually adopted a more explanatory tone following updates around March and July. As for loss of context, it’s particularly problematic and can occur after just a few back-and-forth exchanges. The user experience changes with every update for every AI tool, so I feel there are more downsides to sticking with the same one indefinitely.
- dannyw 1mo agoSet output style to explanatory in Claude Code. It's much better. I personally think it should be the default, but I assume Anthropic has done A/B tests and found the default style to be better for metrics.
- PeterStuer 1mo agoIsn't it absurd that everyone is installing these bandaids or rolling their own? Wtf is Anthropic smoking?
- exabrial 1mo agoThey're busy focusing on dumb things of course. ex: * Currently trying to make sure open models are regulated out of existence. * More concerned about preventing distillation than providing actual value.
- irpap 1mo agoYes. When you have to keep fighting against the tool it’s better to give up. They have spent millions making it exactly like that my little prompt won’t fix it.
- m3h 1mo agoYou're looking for Poteto's /unslop which cleans up sloppy AI writing. Someone made a Claude version of her skills: https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude https://github.com/michael-denyer/pstack-claude
- dwaltrip 1mo agoThe readme is filled with slop. Bad sign…
- mirmor23 1mo agojust one line in the agent file does it. there is no need for another 'skill'. here is the line i use: use technical language to spell things out, and keep it free of jargon and project shorthand
- drsopp 1mo agoMy favorite instruction the last few weeks for getting Claude to explain something complex to me is: dumb it down
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- cryptonector 1mo agoClaudette is a great name for Claude-related things. I get the threat of trademark infringement lawsuits.
- xlayn 1mo ago[flagged]
- elixirbash 1mo ago[dead]
- natsucks 1mo agocan we just get Opus 5.1 already
- cube00 1mo agotakes Claude's last response and runs it through the Gemini CLI As much as Claude's style frustrates me I can't say I'm willing to pay for double the tokens to fix it.
- akhilome 1mo ago[dead]
- Apocryphon 1mo agoI thought GPT was the model that spoke most like blog clickbait? Isn't Claude somewhat better about it?
- cesarvarela 1mo agoOnce you switch to another model (I've been playing with Grok, for example), you'll notice the mental overhead of reading Claude slop. It's like having an AC or a vacuum making noise in the background, then it stops and you feel relief.
- tehnoslow 1mo agoHonestly, this is the most practical take on prompt engineering I've come across lately. Makes me wonder why spend all that time crafting a 500-word essay to tell Claude to stop being Claude, when the real move is just to chain a couple models together and call it a day
- catchnear4321 1mo agoher name is claire
- vlyan 1mo ago[dead]
- lxe 1mo agoI'm sorry, what? This just pipes the output to another LLM. You can just use a sane system prompt to do the job.
- PaulStatezny 1mo agoFor those of us who don't want to pay for Gemini tokens, what would be the best local LLM to use for this? (A model that can run reasonably well in a ~24GB MacBook.)
- hightrix 1mo agoI don’t have a good answer but would like one. I’ve got a not too old desktop with a 4090 and 64gb of ram, I’d like a local model also.
- amumu 1mo agoI haven't tried with Claudette but did evaluate https://github.com/zachahn/vomit https://github.com/zachahn/vomit and https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english earlier today. I ended up using claudish-to-english with a prompt derived from the vomit one and some of my existing instructions. I ran a few local models through a test harness to see how they did, and the gemma4 ones added bad behavior back in less than any others I tested. So for the parent's Macbook question `gemma4-26b-mlx` should work well. For you with 24 GB VRAM, `gemma4-26b-a4b`. I tried higher VRAM models and they slowed down while still doing just as well or slightly worse. If someone else tests and finds a better performing model though, please update me here, I'd love to try it.
- jkwn 1mo agoAsk Claude to respond 'in english' and it will.
- Exoristos 1mo agoI appreciate Claude's comments during implementation, but they won't do to commit, so I have it present them for editing or removal by me at the end of the loop. Depending, I then ask it to port some of them to a decisions document or similar. For user-facing microcopy, Claude is completely unsuitable in my opinion, and I write all these myself.
- _blk 1mo agoHonestly I find ChatGPT's voice mode much more annoying with its errrm, yeah, I think, no wait, let me think, yeah... [Actual content]
- luciana1u 1mo ago[flagged]
- dhosek 1mo agoHmm. I took a look at my claude output and I don’t see anything remotely like that in my responses. Occasionally a bit verbose, but none of this but “here’s the kicker” thing that the post claims, although I also notice that I’m using Sonnet which seems to be just fine.
- anon7000 1mo agoOpus 5 is particularly bad. Opus 4.8 to a lesser extent. It was extremely clear by the code comments in my colleague’s PRs.
- Obscurity4340 1mo agoType in a single letter and watch how much it milks just that
- xbar 1mo agoEvery time I engage with Claude I am reminded how bad it is at communicating to its human.
- ed_mercer 1mo agoI personally got used to the claudisms and think people are making too big of a deal out of it. Yes it says load-bearing and caveat a lot, but at least you know behind the scenes what meaning it's assigning to certain situations.
- colordrops 1mo agoI kind of wonder if we would have appreciated the verbose prose when these LLMs first came out and out muscles had not yet atrophied. When I do stop yelling at Claude to be more concise and actually read what it wrote it's often valuable complexity and subtlety that I could use to better understand what it did and steer it, rather than Claude just papering over important details like it did before.
- gste 1mo agoClaude is like > The last one guesses its own refusals, marking the door open before we walked around it. Say the word and I'll do the joinery Like WTF are you even talking about
- 3371 1mo agoI don't think it's possible to effectively control LLM's output, unlike Human the difference between "thoughts" and "words" is very weak. Better just clean stuff up afterward with a dedicated agent.
- danjc 1mo agoPeople who say things like "please could you" to the model probably have less of an issue with this.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- noisy_boy 1mo agoIf you have read Cursor's obtuse verbosity (auto mode), Claude's talk comes across as sober and level-headed. Everytime I am about to complain about Claude, I'm reminded of that and am thankful that my main budget is allocated to Claude, not Cursor (though the latter, despite all the babble, is fairly frugal).
- 13639366668 1mo ago[flagged]
- nilamo 1mo agoClaude talks to you? It's started hoovering unrelated files, exploring dependencies unrelated to the task, etc, all without saying a single word to me. I'll deny the read, and say "but why?". The answer is always" I guess I don't need that, starting now... " Excuse me? Those tokens are expensive, fuck you very much for wasting them.
- gandhiandy69 1mo agoAlready use caveman. Already happy
- manganate06 1mo ago[flagged]
- scirob 1mo agocan this not be achieved through a system prompt adjustment ? Running yet another LLM call on top might not be the simplest solution.
- ksajadi 1mo agoBut it will remove the load bearing seams for the three things it might want to highlight before the gate is open.
- jobuildsstuff 1mo ago[flagged]
- SquireBuilds 1mo agoFollowing a version of this by trial and error and using the usual 'no em-dashes' and don't explain/comment unless there's a non-obviuous reason.
- rrr_oh_man 1mo agoFrom my own experience you can steer an LLM much better by providing varied positive examples instead of written guidelines
- quibono 1mo agoSimilar to vomit[0] and claudish-to-english[1]. My general feeling here is that this really needs to be fixed at the model level. All other solutions are mere hacks that work for a bit but all have drawbacks. It's either adding yet more context (which has variable rates of success) or piping to a different model to translate, or using a skill, or mentioning this per each prompt, or.... At this point I think it's in Opus's nature to talk like this, and given enough back-and-forth it will start to drift back to its classic mode, aka this incomprehensible "load-bearing seam" babble. [0] https://github.com/zachahn/vomit/tree/main https://github.com/zachahn/vomit/tree/main [1] https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english
- suika 1mo agoThe sort of recent increase in these "claudisms" finally made me buy a ChatGPT Pro subscription. First time using Codex CLI. It's surprisingly different, feels good/fresh. I guess one can say I was quite loyal to Claude Code, or maybe just lazy / it worked well enough so far. And now I'm considering finally cancelling my Claude Max subscription. It would be another first time too. It was mentioned that ChatGPT (still) has some similar quirks too. What are they? Maybe I actually shouldn't look out for them, so that the freshness of ChatGPT will not be lost.
- Overdrivr 1mo agoJust telling claude to speak in simplified technical english really helped quite a lot. It even wrote one liners as PR description for minor bugfixes, something that never happened before I used that trick
- Myrmornis 1mo agoI'm largely with everyone that Claude is much too verbose and uses too much annoying flowery language. However, some of the more unusual language it uses does result in more precise communication, if you can figure out what it means.
- grantbel 1mo agoClaude is so mannered, it drives me nuts. I turned on debuzz and i could just FEEL my blood pressure dropping. What a relief to not be constantly confronted with this high energy paycho. All my agents use debuzz now