I've wrestled with this lately. I partially solved with a very specific instruction saved to claude.md regarding the style of responses, but prior to this, the dense yammer coming back was getting impossible to parse. I mean REALLY nonsensical euphemistic phrases. My next instruction will be having it replace incessant "honest assessment" and "genuine result" and crap like that with something, I don't know, less extremely weird and concerning.
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
201–210 of 650 posts
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#202Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue.
Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my brief and abortive foray into education, I discovered that they friggin' love to use "surface" as a verb. As in: This activity surfaces an understanding of the turboencabulation principle for learners. Or somesuch. It's been a while, happily. Unless you're a submarine, "surface" is not a verb.
Sure it is. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surface#dictionar... > : to come into public view : show up > letters that have recently surfaced
Congratulation! You are a submarine!
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#204[flagged]
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#205Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#206I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does. I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning. Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!
I definitely care. They are impressionistic responses that smooth over exceptions and lack precision and are often completely wrong in the sense that, when pressed, the agent will acknowledge the lack of rigor in the response. "That phrase was wrong of me to use. There is clearly an exception to what I just said, and it goes like this..."
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#207The real problem is not terms like "load-bearing," which communicate clearly enough. It's the constant invention of cryptic shorthand terms and phrases that have no referent, and end up acting like a puzzle to be decoded. This is often paired with hyphenation, but not always: "The current behavior paper" -> The behavior in the running system that was previously described as papered over. "Marker transport over-claim"…
I have this exact problem with 4.8 and Fable. Sometimes I can barely understand what it’s saying. I’m no english first-language speaker, but I don’t consider myself bad at English either, and it’s gotten increasingly hard to understand Claude’s claims and explanations.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#208Does anyone have a theory for what causes Claude to speak this way? A few months ago OpenAI came out with a bit on "gremlins". It's strange IMO that Anthropic hasn't addressed how irritating, dare I say oppressive, Claude can be. Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope they fix it soon. If product folks at Anthropic think it's charming, it's not, it's terrible.
I had a VP of engineering that loved to use “abstracty” engineering terms like Claude uses. Perhaps he was operating one level above what everyone else was doing.
Loved to use fancy words, speak at a “conceptual” level. Unfortunately it was mostly just tech mumbo-jumbo and he couldn’t actually back it up with real work - but I wonder if that’s why Claude does it. Makes it seem like a higher power, hand wavey abstractions that “seem” correct but don’t actually need to be rooted in truth or detailed.
“That’s exactly the type of seam we need to prepare for in a prod-like environment, if this change lands in the data plane, we’ve effectively shut down the load bearing critical path that was needed. It’s not over-engineered; it’s the right thing to do.”
Thanks Claude, whatever that means.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#209I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does. I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning. Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!
I hate it because put together, it all increases the cognitive load of understanding what it's saying. It routinely invents phrases, and every single one makes me pause and think "okay, what the fuck does that mean". Half the time the phrases are incoherrent.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#210“Smoking gun”
I want to be straight with you, I overstepped by naming it a "smoking gun."
"Honest assessment: I was wrong to say I was being straight with you. You pointed out that a "smoking gun" is a sign of evidence, and I clearly didn't have any. This is not a bug but a gap that can be fixed like [this]. Give me the word and I'll wire it in."
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