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This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause act
by kibibu 1mo ago
This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic.
I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't.
Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.
- chamomeal 1mo agoI don’t think GPT is any better. I swear GPT-3 was the golden area of LLM prose. With a good fine tuning, you really couldn’t tell that an AI was writing (except for when it would devolve into utter nonsense lol)
- adam_arthur 1mo agoCodex (5.6 Sol) is extremely to the point and direct in its responses. Often I'll tell it to summarize what it said only because it's providing too much detail, not that it's using esoteric language or weird claudisms. No idea why people are still using Claude models. My impression is they started on Claude Code and never tried Codex or other harness+model combos
- CodingJeebus 1mo agoI was on the Anthropic train for 2 years, and I tended not to jump between vendors much because it felt like a lot of distraction for little gain. But last week I switched to 5.6 Sol during an Anthropic outage and it made me realize how frustrated I was with Opus 5 and I haven't switched back.
- kif 1mo agoThat is true. On 5.6 I have noticed it to be a little bit more like Claude, which I dislike. But still way better than Claude.
- amunozo 1mo agoI've read many people saying that the huge GPT-4.5 has the best prose of LLMs, but never actually tried it.
- seanieb 1mo agoIt’s really grating. It’s made technical analysis so tiring to read I often give up and give the output to another llm to make it readable.
- _dark_matter_ 1mo agoYeah but, which other llm?
- keybored 1mo ago> Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. As a side note, I think we are about too dismissive of computers and the Internet as “not real life”, that stuff written in text boxes by humans are just sticks and stones, etc. And now that we shouldn’t anthro-po-morphize or whatever the LLMs. But I do think, at least for some of us, that there is no way to avoid certain impacts that even non-personal text can have on us. It can feel alienating to interface with five different people in order to figure out how to solve a problem or navigate some burocracy (think Kafka). Well just interacting with one single LLM can induce that same feeling. The long-winded replies and the uncanny ways to miss the context. Disclaimer that for my own needs I would be happy if the whole AI thing crashed and burned post-haste.
- isqueiros 1mo agoKimi K3 is slightly better at this. I'm using it via oh-my-pi. Can definitely sound like it's trying to be clever, but I found it less than Claude.
- marrone12 1mo agoI asked the same question to chatgpt, claude, and kimi and kimi gave the most sane answer. Part of me wonders if it has anything to do with having more chinese language structure in their dataset
- fearmerchant 1mo agoIt's become Oswald Bates from In Living Color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71xxvp5R9hE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71xxvp5R9hE
- bunderbunder 1mo agoI've been using the Caveman plugin and it helps quite a bit.
- thinkingtoilet 1mo agoHa! I 100% agree. Despite multiple rules in my cluade file it still talks like an insane person. I am getting irrationally frustrated at the output of these math equations.
- yearolinuxdsktp 1mo agoThe writing style is extremely frustrating/maddening! I’ve tried so many things and I have to beat Opus 5/Fable 5 over their head every time. With Opus 5, the failure to actually improve the writing is borderline comical. Both models have been building up tomes of memories on top of my core rules, all to be ignored. Nothing sticks mid-writing! The only lever is to ask to revise after the fact, a particularly futile proposition for anything non-trivial with Opus 5. In contrast, GPT 5.6 Sol Max absolutely obeys my edicts to write well. I selected the concise writing style and its default writing is really not bad, but tighten it up with a standing AGENTS.md order and it obeys. The downside is that even at Max, it’s not as good as Fable or Opus 5 xhigh at writing code. Larger work and the 256k context’s forced compactions cause it to lose track/fidelity of critical details. Review passes are essential. Another reason I’m considering leaving Anthropic are the sporadic refusals… Fable printed a Markdown body with a hex dump to inspect for trailing white space and line endings, boom, denied due to `reasoning_extraction`. Had to tell Fable to never do hex dumps. Asked it a few times “what do you think is typically done for this?”, got another `reasoning_extraction` error. It forces you to lose a whole turn of work when you have to press Esc/Esc to “retry” the last prompt… except if that prompt was mid-turn, you’re losing your entire turn. The recent BashFirst experiment is hella nuts, where it prefers writing bash over Edit/Write tools in auto mode. WTF Anthropic? I pity those stuck with Claude in an enterprise/work setting.
- Rover222 1mo agoGrok 4.6 is a delight to use in this regard, compared to Claude
- c0rruptbytes 1mo agothe writing style is so easy to fix, output styles is documented in claude code and you can change it still don’t think anthropic models are worth the money
- yearolinuxdsktp 1mo agoPray tell, what output style does the job?
- bicepjai 1mo agoYes, it’s written like a crazy LLM, and no matter what rules and where you put it, it does not follow. It comes with advantages and disadvantages. I like brainstorming with Claude than Codex/Qwen/Deepseek or others; its gregarious nature provides more colorful ideas. But implementation and review are cataclysmic with Claude. Especially Opus 5, I purposefully avoid Opus 5.
- harshaw 1mo agoI've heard it's writing style referred to as "Claudish". I agree that it is very hard to read and creates work for me.
- _fat_santa 1mo agoI did a comparison between Opus 5 and Sol and the results were night and day. Basically took a feature in my app and asked it to explain to me how it works. Sol gave me a straightforward bulleted list, easy to scan and read. Opus 5 though....it gave me a solid 7 paragraphs of how it worked. I read through it and yeah it nailed the same points Sol did but the output was way harder to read.
- PUSH_AX 1mo agoSounds like both models are guessing at what you want and one guessed right. Or you can just tell it...
- cheeze 1mo ago> I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. One of them writes better by default. One of them doesn't. That's the thing. With enough steering, I can get a cheap low-capability model to do things correctly in most cases as well. But why bother? You can tell it to write high quality code, to test things, and to come up with a proper rollout plan of a feature. Or it could just do it by default. I know where I'm putting my money in that case.
- sockaddr 1mo agoLikewise. I really love CC and have been using it exclusively for a year now but reading Claude's verbose and semantically-obfuscated writing style is wearing me out and I'm planning to move to another provider. I hope they fix this. It's terrible.
- nprateem 1mo agoSame. Downloaded chatgpt today. I can't take reading Claude any more.
- renyicircle 1mo agoI'm with you on this. We have Claude at work and I get exhausted from using it just a bit. I've recently seen it say "let me verify the most load-bearing claims". I couldn't imagine anyone using "load-bearing", let alone "most load-bearing". Doesn't "load-bearing" alone imply "most"? I have so many questions for Anthropic about how they came up with this style.
- juanre 1mo agoA significant percentage of what Opus 5 writes is pure padding. "The results are in, and they are load bearing". Remove the sentence and nothing is lost. Fable is much better; still much too verbose, but at least I don't have the feeling that I am being charged for gratuitously added verbiage. I have been changing my processes and the roles of my agents to avoid interacting with Claude Code as much as I can.
- perrygeo 1mo agoFor research tasks, I like Meta's muse glimmer 30b model run locally. Whatever they did in post-training to make it so terse and direct, it worked. Gets right to the point and wastes no tokens. Here's a snippet from a recent thinking trace: > Calculation done. Potential confusion: sq km vs acres. Provide both. Output. Other models would have written paragraphs dancing around the idea. Glimmer barely does sentences. It doesn't really sound human - which is a plus in my book. I want my robots to talk to me like they are robots.
- Royce-CMR 1mo agoI dropped back to Opus 4.8 and it's so much better. Opus 5 was - to your point - actually driving me insane.
- acuozzo 1mo agoJust tell it to exclusively write briefly and in ASD-STE100.