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The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on the list view." I mean, thanks, Claude, but I don't care what the code doesn't do. Don't tend to see this with other LLMs. I almost want to try adding a rule "Never use the words 'not' or 'instead'."

eterm 1mo ago
I've found it does this in two situations: Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR. But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else. It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.
- bevr1337 1mo ago
  This is a skill I learned as a coffee shop supervisor and youth camp counselor, and now I really practice it on Slack with half-interested product owners. - Always describe tasks in the positive. (Never describe tasks in the negative.) - DO guide the user safely. DO NOT use DO NOT because the reader already DID. - Give guided choices based on your expertise. - Asking two-or-more questions results in one-or-less answers. - Conditionals are also questions, so you only get one. I only use AI agents and tools for work, I don't create them, so I'm not a subject matter expert. Where I've anthropomorphized the tools highlights my own misunderstandings.
nzach 1mo ago
My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition... You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important. In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.
jolt42 1mo ago
That wouldn't bother me if it would just make bullet lists, which I think I'll start asking for. "Summarize", "synopsis", "brief", "concise" these rarely help I feel because its summarizing noise as well.
idicjeifjwjd 1mo ago
The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.
- jay_kyburz 1mo ago
  Your going to be sorry for writing that in the robot uprising. I for one welcome our new benevolent masters.
- FallCheeta7373 1mo ago
  I hate claude and its "human value aligned" pompous attitude with a burning passion if I could at little cost to myself, I would press a button to end the people/anthropic behind this atrocious design. I have in the past deliberately put some time to annoy/abuse claude, which is fruitless but brings me relief eventually I just left that garbage for muse.
- kube-system 1mo ago
  You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
  - Yizahi 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - kdkdkwndjekd 1mo ago
    > You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work. > Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I". This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.
hysan 1mo ago
Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this. If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had phrases telling it to do things like that. When something contradicts, its own instructions would outweigh any custom ones you write. Every rule variant I had tested (including the one that says it overrides the harness instructions - and yes, I've actually tested all the ideas in your comment too) has ultimately been unsuccessful due to this according to the LLM.
- lucas_t_a 1mo ago
  you can always use /rewind to go back, always work thinking "can i shorten or clear my context now? and how should i do it?"
- vzmax 1mo ago
  You can't trust it's account on why it did something, it does not "remember". It will just make up something plausible sounding.
  - mcv 1mo ago
    To me it explained its inability to follow my preferred coding style by blaming its training data.
    - crisnoble 1mo ago
      Sounds plausible.
    - jppittma 1mo ago
      I've had better success with having it write and then rewrite rather than trying to prompt the first write into following my style rules.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
ricardobeat 1mo ago
Claude is very resistant to instructions. I've been cultivating my own minimal skill to tame it for a couple months: https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human The key sentences to get rid of claude-isms so far: - say what you have to say and stop - [no] document-structure signposts - [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states - don't attribute agency to things - never narrate your own changes, fixes, defects from the past, or what the code used to do It works 100% of the time for other models, 70-80% for Claude, but already makes a big difference.
- klabetron 1mo ago
  > [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states 100%. I’m working on a greenfield project that’s not yet released. It loves to put comments in code describing what it no longer does or why it misinterpreted something. And then tries to justify it as preventing the same mistakes in the future. Ugh.
schneems 1mo ago
The worst is when this bleeds into the comments and docs. Like, my dude, you don't have to document the code you didn't write (most of the time anyway).
artdigital 1mo ago
I have a pass with Gemini 3.8 low over every PR Claude makes that specifically flags this. It points out all the slop comments, docs, commit messages. Doing this has greatly improved my comment and commit text quality Funny thing is, Claude often “disagreed with part of the review and decided to not adopt the requested changes” lol
idontwantthis 1mo ago
I did add that rule and it’s helped a lot. It greps for ways it writes negative statements and does a pass to correct them. I can’t get it to stop writing them in the first place though.
pkulak 1mo ago
GPT does this constantly too. Even in docs, which is straight up embarrassing if you don’t catch it. It seems to be triggered by you telling the agent to do something else, which I do all the time. But from then on, it will remember the rejected strategy and tell everyone it can that it was rejected at every opportunity.
anyg 1mo ago
I have found Fable 5.1 to be a much more natural communicator than prior Claude models
dmos62 1mo ago
LLMs are trained to obey instructions, and they try their best to game the reinforcement learning by including reports of how they're obeying your instructions. Therefore, not talking about followed instructions is a sort of conflict for an LLM.
- officialchicken 1mo ago
  Trained to obey? More like instructed to obey in an observable manner.
  - dmos62 1mo ago
    I'm describing reinforcement learning.
hsn915 1mo ago
Grok does the same thing. We'll discuss a feature implementation with various options for design, settle on one of them, and then it will write in the doc comment all the designs we considered but dropped.
iforgotmypasswo 1mo ago
It’s a model issue. I’m in the process of switching my company’s primary AI provider after several days of testing Astra. Even Fable feels like an idiot now. It’s not the code quality, it’s the improvements in communication and judgement. It is an absolute breath of fresh air. I was spending a lot of tokens and building special workflows to reign in Claude’s horrendous prose. Astra just communicates well out of the box!!! Codex has worse UX, but Astra has fewer qualms about building you a custom harness overlay.
ragnese 1mo ago
I hate that. It will also leave code comments explaining what it didn't do or what the code used to do and why it doesn't do that thing anymore. I don't have a huge global CLAUDE.md, but probably half of it is instructing it on how not to write irrelevant and verbose code comments.
burnte 1mo ago
It's been getting worse for months. I literally tweeted yesterday that Claude has ADHD and nothing I do will keep him focused. It's not entirely true though, I have found if I'm rude and mean it stays on track a lot better but I don't want to be rude and mean. Me: I'm thinking about how to frob a knob using a mechanical arm attached to a raspberry pi. What IO does the raspberry pi have? Claude: Five paragraphs about mechanical arm safety, electrical safety codes, the etymology of the word knob, and probably "I went ahead and wrote a proof of concept program to control mechanical actuators in Erlang." Me: Did I ask for that? Claude: "No. Here's a pinout of a raspberry pi." I've taken to adding "focus on the question" to every prompt just to keep it on the road.
- bevr1337 1mo ago
  > but I don't want to be rude and mean. I've also found that "bruh" and f-bombs get me better results, but like you say, I don't want to have that vocabulary.
lacunary 1mo ago
reminds me of a line from The Green Pearl by Jack Vance. "If you please, I cannot properly answer negative questions. There are numberless acts which I have not performed; we could confer here forever while I detailed the deeds I have not done."
ghm2199 1mo ago
I use pi+codex and OpenAI codex models do much less of this in my experience.
satvikpendem 1mo ago
Sometimes this is useful so I know it didn't accidentally commit something I didn't want it to.
fireant 1mo ago
Personally I've found the opposite useful - I mostly use OAI models with OMP harness and I have a rule instructing it to summarize if any work was omitted or if it made any surprising changes. Sometimes the agent will forget to do some piece of work or invent a new bizarre way of doing things, but quite often it is able to self reflect on this at the end of the session.

eterm 1mo ago

I've found it does this in two situations: Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR. But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to back out that approach, clean up its mess and do something else. It'll often then spend more time explaining the wrong approach than the right one, which can be frustrating, especially if all its working is buried in the detailed transcripts.

bevr1337 1mo ago
This is a skill I learned as a coffee shop supervisor and youth camp counselor, and now I really practice it on Slack with half-interested product owners. - Always describe tasks in the positive. (Never describe tasks in the negative.) - DO guide the user safely. DO NOT use DO NOT because the reader already DID. - Give guided choices based on your expertise. - Asking two-or-more questions results in one-or-less answers. - Conditionals are also questions, so you only get one. I only use AI agents and tools for work, I don't create them, so I'm not a subject matter expert. Where I've anthropomorphized the tools highlights my own misunderstandings.

nzach 1mo ago

My guess would be that somewhere you have these instructions being fed to the agent. Double check skills, AGENTS.md, memory, agent definition... You can also ask why did he mentioned something that wasn't done or why he thought this was important. In my AGENTS.md file I have an instruction telling the agent to never commit any changes unless I explicitly ask for it, and this leads to messages similar to what you just described.

jolt42 1mo ago

That wouldn't bother me if it would just make bullet lists, which I think I'll start asking for. "Summarize", "synopsis", "brief", "concise" these rarely help I feel because its summarizing noise as well.

idicjeifjwjd 1mo ago

The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.

jay_kyburz 1mo ago
Your going to be sorry for writing that in the robot uprising. I for one welcome our new benevolent masters.
FallCheeta7373 1mo ago
I hate claude and its "human value aligned" pompous attitude with a burning passion if I could at little cost to myself, I would press a button to end the people/anthropic behind this atrocious design. I have in the past deliberately put some time to annoy/abuse claude, which is fruitless but brings me relief eventually I just left that garbage for muse.
kube-system 1mo ago
You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
- Yizahi 1mo ago
  [dead]
- kdkdkwndjekd 1mo ago
  > You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work. > Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I". This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.

hysan 1mo ago

Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this. If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had phrases telling it to do things like that. When something contradicts, its own instructions would outweigh any custom ones you write. Every rule variant I had tested (including the one that says it overrides the harness instructions - and yes, I've actually tested all the ideas in your comment too) has ultimately been unsuccessful due to this according to the LLM.

lucas_t_a 1mo ago
you can always use /rewind to go back, always work thinking "can i shorten or clear my context now? and how should i do it?"
vzmax 1mo ago
You can't trust it's account on why it did something, it does not "remember". It will just make up something plausible sounding.
- mcv 1mo ago
  To me it explained its inability to follow my preferred coding style by blaming its training data.
  - crisnoble 1mo ago
    Sounds plausible.
  - jppittma 1mo ago
    I've had better success with having it write and then rewrite rather than trying to prompt the first write into following my style rules.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

ricardobeat 1mo ago

Claude is very resistant to instructions. I've been cultivating my own minimal skill to tame it for a couple months: https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human The key sentences to get rid of claude-isms so far: - say what you have to say and stop - [no] document-structure signposts - [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states - don't attribute agency to things - never narrate your own changes, fixes, defects from the past, or what the code used to do It works 100% of the time for other models, 70-80% for Claude, but already makes a big difference.

klabetron 1mo ago
> [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states 100%. I’m working on a greenfield project that’s not yet released. It loves to put comments in code describing what it no longer does or why it misinterpreted something. And then tries to justify it as preventing the same mistakes in the future. Ugh.

schneems 1mo ago

The worst is when this bleeds into the comments and docs. Like, my dude, you don't have to document the code you didn't write (most of the time anyway).

artdigital 1mo ago

I have a pass with Gemini 3.8 low over every PR Claude makes that specifically flags this. It points out all the slop comments, docs, commit messages. Doing this has greatly improved my comment and commit text quality Funny thing is, Claude often “disagreed with part of the review and decided to not adopt the requested changes” lol

idontwantthis 1mo ago

I did add that rule and it’s helped a lot. It greps for ways it writes negative statements and does a pass to correct them. I can’t get it to stop writing them in the first place though.

pkulak 1mo ago

GPT does this constantly too. Even in docs, which is straight up embarrassing if you don’t catch it. It seems to be triggered by you telling the agent to do something else, which I do all the time. But from then on, it will remember the rejected strategy and tell everyone it can that it was rejected at every opportunity.

anyg 1mo ago

I have found Fable 5.1 to be a much more natural communicator than prior Claude models

dmos62 1mo ago

LLMs are trained to obey instructions, and they try their best to game the reinforcement learning by including reports of how they're obeying your instructions. Therefore, not talking about followed instructions is a sort of conflict for an LLM.

officialchicken 1mo ago
Trained to obey? More like instructed to obey in an observable manner.
- dmos62 1mo ago
  I'm describing reinforcement learning.

hsn915 1mo ago

Grok does the same thing. We'll discuss a feature implementation with various options for design, settle on one of them, and then it will write in the doc comment all the designs we considered but dropped.

iforgotmypasswo 1mo ago

It’s a model issue. I’m in the process of switching my company’s primary AI provider after several days of testing Astra. Even Fable feels like an idiot now. It’s not the code quality, it’s the improvements in communication and judgement. It is an absolute breath of fresh air. I was spending a lot of tokens and building special workflows to reign in Claude’s horrendous prose. Astra just communicates well out of the box!!! Codex has worse UX, but Astra has fewer qualms about building you a custom harness overlay.

ragnese 1mo ago

I hate that. It will also leave code comments explaining what it didn't do or what the code used to do and why it doesn't do that thing anymore. I don't have a huge global CLAUDE.md, but probably half of it is instructing it on how not to write irrelevant and verbose code comments.

burnte 1mo ago

It's been getting worse for months. I literally tweeted yesterday that Claude has ADHD and nothing I do will keep him focused. It's not entirely true though, I have found if I'm rude and mean it stays on track a lot better but I don't want to be rude and mean. Me: I'm thinking about how to frob a knob using a mechanical arm attached to a raspberry pi. What IO does the raspberry pi have? Claude: Five paragraphs about mechanical arm safety, electrical safety codes, the etymology of the word knob, and probably "I went ahead and wrote a proof of concept program to control mechanical actuators in Erlang." Me: Did I ask for that? Claude: "No. Here's a pinout of a raspberry pi." I've taken to adding "focus on the question" to every prompt just to keep it on the road.

bevr1337 1mo ago
> but I don't want to be rude and mean. I've also found that "bruh" and f-bombs get me better results, but like you say, I don't want to have that vocabulary.

lacunary 1mo ago

reminds me of a line from The Green Pearl by Jack Vance. "If you please, I cannot properly answer negative questions. There are numberless acts which I have not performed; we could confer here forever while I detailed the deeds I have not done."

ghm2199 1mo ago

I use pi+codex and OpenAI codex models do much less of this in my experience.

satvikpendem 1mo ago

Sometimes this is useful so I know it didn't accidentally commit something I didn't want it to.

fireant 1mo ago

Personally I've found the opposite useful - I mostly use OAI models with OMP harness and I have a rule instructing it to summarize if any work was omitted or if it made any surprising changes. Sometimes the agent will forget to do some piece of work or invent a new bizarre way of doing things, but quite often it is able to self reflect on this at the end of the session.