Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

I've been grappling with this for weeks, not just in Claude but in Codex as well, which isn't quite as bad but still annoying. AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on. It's incredible to me that there's no good way to reliably change the way an LLM responds to you that a workaround like this would even be necessary. It seems like such a failure to live up to the promises of the product.

The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.

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Seriously, of all the complaints for a coding agent, "I don't like the explanatory prose" seems pretty far down on the list.

There are a variety of political tensions in the US associated with whether academia has its head up it's ass (a right leaning perspective), or whether it's populated by experts that need to be supported and listened to (a left leaning perspective).

There's an echo of that tension in OpenAI vs Anthropic. For a while OpenAI seemed reckless and ignorant, preferring to just throw compute at the problem. Meanwhile Anthropic is hiring philosophers. But now that Claude has its head up its ass to the point where nobody wants to talk to it, OpenAI is looking rather pragmatic.

It brings to mind a skepticism about just letting the ivory tower do its thing without some kind of anchor to the everyman (this is why we make researchers also be teachers, though I'm not sure what the AI equivalent of that practice would be).

Watching the models seesaw in the same ways that humans do, but faster, is so surreal. I wonder if their tendencies will remain an echo of ours, or if they'll one day be more of a forward projection, a representation of where were going if we don't change our ways, and if we're lucky, a reason to change them.

> especially as the session drags on.

This is because these harnesses are missing a very important feature. Anything like this needs to be included with every turn, otherwise the LLM quickly drifts.

I first noticed it when I wrote a harness for D&D (because it's so damn noticeable there), but now I include this for any harness I write.