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

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

#141

Post by theGeatZhopa »

porkpieshoe wrote: post #128
cafebeen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, u…

You're absolutely right, it would be a load-bearing mistake to adopt LLM jargon as a human speaker.

honestly, it's really load bearing and boiling the ocean which we don't want. There is no edge!

To avoid speaking vibe'ish I start to speak in 3 words sentences. Like this typical dialogue

How are you? that's not/very good. I think too. ...

Even complexity works. everything is expressible! Just try it.

/S

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

#142

Post by Bluestein »

zachahn wrote: post #123
Bluestein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author's blog has what follows (link also follows): [Seriously y'all in what universe would some "caveat" or another NOT "be a real one" by whatever severity you'd want to measure that AND/OR need of saying so ... ] Claude (Original) Force pushed. 1234567...890abcd main -> main (forced update). Verified Local main and origin/main both at 890abcd, in sync. Every commit reachable from origin/main: no old string fou…

Hehe thanks for sharing the example, and thanks also for posting! Made my day :)

Oh, please, gratitude is due you. Great points. The whole idea is great and the example is very very telling.-

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

#143

Post by dofm »

Apposite name but — grim trivia — bear in mind some emetophobes have a meaningful physiological reaction to the word and various euphemisms.

I have tried not to use it analogously ever since someone pointed this out. The word itself causes discomfort for a lot of people, many of whom will be surprised by it out of context, but in a non-trivial fraction it causes proper discomfort.

If you want people to use your tool it is probably better not to invoke nausea with its name or commands.

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

#144

Post by jasonlotito »

trefoiled wrote: post #31

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 s…

Config -> Output style

You can add your own. wfm

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

#145

Post by tadfisher »

rudiksz wrote: post #127
svara wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think it's not as bad as it looks at first. I was similarly frustrated a few months ago, but have noticed I've started to learn the idiom. Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it. After a while it gets much easier to read and even becomes somewhat efficient,…

Claude is the Deepak Chopra of computer programming. Reviewing PR's created by it is 90% digesting the meaningless word salads in the comments, and the rest is figuring out that it has nothing to do with the code it is commenting.

Because it is somehow incapable of separating the conversation with its human operator from the code it is generating and commenting on. Incidentally, this is also why prompt-injection works.

No one wants to know about the three other approaches tried when reading the first sentence of a function's documentation. No one cares that the implementation was planned in six phases and "Phase 3" will implement this interface in a concrete type. But the LLM internalizes absolutely everything and you have no idea that it is producing slop because you included some "load-bearing" phrase that sent it on some unwanted tangential vector in its latent space. And you will not be able to debug the problem with closed models because you cannot see it referencing this phrase in its internal traces.

I don't understand why this isn't the highest priority for the big labs to fix. This is anti-productive.

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

#146

Post by wpasc »

brumbelow wrote: post #136
porkpieshoe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, it would be a load-bearing mistake to adopt LLM jargon as a human speaker.

You're right to pushback. This isn't just a grammatical problem -- its a conversational one, too.

This is the key seam that proves the investigation.

Two things to flag:

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

#147

Post by Terr_ »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #72
Jenk wrote: post #65

I have very little in my agents.md file wrt style, except for: > Caveats belong inline, no "one thing to note" or "it's worth mentioning" footer. If it is worth raising or calling out, do so where it is most relevant and not as a foot note. Opus 5 has a god awful habit of always doing a Columbo on every single response, and it is such a jarring read that it amps my cognitive burden having to back-read everything.

That's the growth hacking at play.

Soon: "The 7 weird tricks about your Pull Request WEB-1725 that THEY don't want you to know!"

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

#148

Post by striking »

trefoiled wrote: post #31

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 s…

I asked Claude to do the following:

> hello i would like to configure a new output style for you. it should keep the coding instructions (as you will still be coding!) and otherwise produce the same output, but with two new caveats. first, long detailed replies are still permitted, but if employed they must end in a bullet pointed summary whose points are all brief; if the summary attempt ends up not being so brief, produce subsequent summaries until the most recent summary attempt is digestible. second, if there is an open queue of actions for me to execute and you are about to end a turn to wait for a reply or this set of actions has not recently been mentioned, please tabulate the open actions i should take and why i should take them before ending the response. does this make sense or do you have any follow up questions

And now every message contains the same stuff I don't bother reading, but followed by a nicely formatted bullet point summary of the response and a table of follow up actions for me to take that I do read.

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

#149

Post by DANmode »

medwards666 wrote: post #99
trefoiled wrote: post #31

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 s…

This morning I asked Claude to provide a summary of the work it had done but to '... explain it as if you were talking to a moron' and it actually turned out a quite comprehensible summary. So going to continue trying that as a command structure going forwards...

That’s just common parlance for “simplify this for me”.

Believe the big services wouldn’t reply as if you were mentally diminished, or a toddler, unless you specifically asked for that: The whole training stack tends to instruct the things to mimic politeness and eagerness to help.

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

#150

Post by Bluestein »

wpasc wrote: post #146
brumbelow wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to pushback. This isn't just a grammatical problem -- its a conversational one, too.

This is the key seam that proves the investigation. Two things to flag:

Honest take, you genuinely forgot to flag the flags ...
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