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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#631

Post by alxndr »

bitgood wrote: post #121
alxndr wrote: post #99

I 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…

I'm just glad to hear that we're all infallible. I really thought I made some mistakes here and there. https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude... Joking aside, it's nice to see a human written CLAUDE.md

Ha, good catch, thank you. I must have been thinking of "inflammable"...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#632

Post by alxndr »

port11 wrote: post #627
alxndr wrote: post #99

I 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…

I laughed a good 20 seconds at this, and even typing Clod makes me chuckle. This is great, can you please provide us with more guidance of the sort? I wanna laugh a bit at my LLM.

Thanks, it makes me chuckle too. It also serves as an indicator of how much it's adhering to what I've laid out in the file, sorta like how Van Halen's rider specified a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed — if the band found brown M&Ms, they'd know to tell the crew to double-check everything else the venue is supposed to provide; if Clod starts using 1st-person pronouns, then I'm a little more skeptical of what it's presenting as absolute truth...

Unfortunately I don't think I have any other funny suggestions. I do ask Clod to always follow a specific format when it's authoring Git commits including the "robot face" emoji as the first character, which brings a little levity to a commit history when it's otherwise being very serious about the contents of the commit message.

https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/9356bb9960e63/claude...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#633

Post by sgerenser »

zzrrt wrote: post #308
mapmeld wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst one for me. I can maybe think of what it means, but I never heard it before, and could easily be imagining a meaning. Some of the other Claude-isms (quickly googling, especially 'gate' and 'canonical') I feel the issue is they sound right, but aren't specific enough to why we are doing something.

I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.

Yeah I've definitely heard belt-and-suspenders since way before LLMs were a thing. Probably even used it once or twice myself.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#634

Post by aakresearch »

wcookeverton wrote: post #542
kperry wrote: post #98

"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.

seriously... i literally tell claude every prompt to not use the word substrate. i have never seen an agent use a single word so much. how did that happen? it is so interesting

Does it obey?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#636

Post by noduerme »

nobleach wrote: post #379
noduerme wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attack surface is another one I use.

Yes, I've always heard it used in this context. I really believe the other use is because someone misheard "service", and it stuck.

That's rather funny! Probably true. "API surface" sounds exactly like a CEO trying to say "API service" without understanding what an API is. lol.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#637

Post by nomel »

flipthefrog wrote: post #516
nomel wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice there's a whole tech bro speak it gets into anytime it approaches web related tasks around auth, to the point where it stops using complete sentences, making them ambiguous and borderline nonsense. I have to periodically tell it "Speak professionally and use complete sentences." so I can understand what it's even saying. I've even pasted the output to another session to see if it was me, but Claude can't eve…

I have added a skill to make Opus 4.8 use Opus 4 6 to translate its answers into teadable English, sine it had much higher quality prose. Im seriously considering switching from Claude 20x to Codex because I just cant read more of of Opus or Fable's walls of text

In my case, since "new session" Claude couldn't understand it either, I assume it means it's going to contribute significantly to context rot. In your case, it probably results in a lower quality context.

Hey Anthropic, give agents/skills the ability to modify previous context! This could be used to truly clean reasoning and task definition mistakes, corrected by the user, and strip output to more fundamentals, which should strengthen/purify the context!

CLAUDE_REWRITE_HISTORY=true ;)

Editing agents, and my own, messages is still how I get the best results for high reasoning planning, in chat clients. I remove the mistakes, because I naively assume that if your context has mistakes, now your next token prediction will be biased to a space where the AI makes mistakes! It would be interesting to write some benchmarks around this, but I've seen significant differences when I do this for less capable models.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#638

Post by tekacs »

brookst wrote: post #550
tekacs wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite worried about the way that Anthropic in particular have trained their models to implement what they believe to be safety. When the model has been trained not to do something [1], in my large-scale benches of such, it always says things in the spirit of: - "... and that's a line I'd rather hold. Happy to " - "I'm genuinely happy to , but I'm not comfortable with " - "I don't want to keep going in direction"…

Do those phrases sound like how you talk to Claude? I've found that it mirrors my verbiage, and I have never seen any of those. I go through ~20B tokens/month and I've never seen "genuinely happy... but not comfortable" or your other examples. The closest I've seen (fairly often is) "I *will not* ship to main with a red test", but that's close to how I write. Claude may well be mirroring your speech patterns rather t…

It's not my patterns – as I said, this is from bulk tests to characterise the models, including their refusals – with very very different inputs, too. No matter the conversation tone, you get these.

You wouldn't have come across these in coding – these are more for 'things Anthropic's team have decided aren't acceptable enough for their taste'.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#639

Post by Shorel »

The funniest thing here is that all of you are complaining because you are expanding your working vocabulary xD xD xD

La previamente mencionada afrenta no es algo habitial en mi idioma, en contraposición a la posición de los angloparlantes, nosotros nos regocijamos con una tácita satisfacción al expresar la riqueza lingüística de nuestra lengua, incluso en nuestras interacciones más cotidianas.

Busca en Instagram a @pedrititox y a @yeisonsotog5 para que puedas apreciar a lo que me refiero.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#640

Post by staticman2 »

drgo wrote: post #511
seba_dos1 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.

I believe that the “thought process” of humans is just another automatic process albeit more sophisticated because it is running on a far more powerful processor that has evolved over millions of years and was honed by many more years of fine tuning in a complex social system. The difference is only a matter of degree.

The comment you replied to was making the point that when humans communicate the writing can reveal their thought processes. Outsource that to AI and that thought process is concealed.

This has almost nothing to do with your reply.

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