How do you manage to make Opus follow any rules? Maybe it’s a windsurf thing but I have a ton of custom rules and Opus just ignores most of them. GPT on the other hand follows them like it’s a cult - if I have a rule I can’t ever force it to ignore it. Opus just doesn’t care. If I ask why it’s not following rules it will apologise and suggest creating a rule for it …
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
211–220 of 650 posts
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating I make fun of people all the time for shoehorning their favorite phrase into every context where it doesn't apply.
Wow sounds like you're streets ahead.
Streets ahead has to earn its keep.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#213Lots 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 x10,000,000,0…
I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying.
So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing "honest" assessments. "The honest caveat" - I'm sorry, did you mean the caveat, period? But also, use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model. I used the word "analytical" once, in a conversation with Gemini 3 Pro. I am pretty sure every single response from that point on had "analytical" in it at least once.
This is especially funny because system prompts and whatnot can also cause this behavior, but at least you can tweak those. You can't really do much about the model weights just having a weird affinity for a word.
I bet someone will or probably already has come up with a way to detect and prevent these problems during training or post training. I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it has the benefit that it really should be detectable with just statistics.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#214"substrate" - I don't know what training they did with Opus 4.7 --> Fable/Mythos 5, but dang does it like the word substrate. Drives me insane. I had never heard anyone use this word prior in real technical writing or speaking.
The one I've noticed a ton recently with Sonnet 5 is that it loves the phrase "different not in degree, but in kind." It drags that one out constantly now, at least once a day. Gemini and GPT don't at all.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#215This literally proves it's not "intelligent," no?
"Stop typing in 'load-bearing' or you're fired," would work with any competent human.
But this requires tinkering and tooling?
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible. My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy becaus…
I wish my company would do this. A coworker pulled an all nighter before a vacation and just left me with a million line claude summary of their work then just fucked off. The message was two-part due to size and lacked basic stuff like, "how to run". He's going to be annoyed that none of that work was used. But the reality is, at least 75% of claude generated text is pointless.
Somewhat off topic but every time I've experienced this sort of thing it was management's fault. If an engineer needs to pull an all nighter and hand off a pile of garbage then someone in management fucked up. If they can't see this scenario happening a mile away then they aren't paying attention.
It's easy to blame the engineer, but all too often they don't deserve it.
Sorry that happened to you.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.
Mine is obsessed with "planes". Data plane, control plane, management plane. Everything is a plane :)
See also, surface.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#218Earlier 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
I find this usage less objectionable than the education jargon. It suggests that we all have a latent understanding of the turboencabulation principle just waiting for the right activity to force air into its ballast tanks and make it pop above the waves.
That said, I don't love this non-education jargon usage for its passive-voiced-ness. The letters didn't "surface" of their own accord. Somebody found them, decided that they were noteworthy, and made the choice to bring them into the public view.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#219Lots 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 x10,000,000,0…
Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective.
Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language.
The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#220I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`... https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude... > It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fu…
> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself") Could you please provide an example of what you mean?
IIRC I experienced this confusion the most when reading commit messages and documentation authored by Claude in my repos. Now that I've managed to convince it to stop using first-person pronouns, I haven't gotten tripped up by its prose.
I think a second-order effect is that my installation of Claude writes with a less-personal perspective, which I'm also finding a little easier to understand.