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

Post by timacles » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #208

cnity wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that most people seem to consider the core problem of Claude's output as "too verbose" but I don't think this actually cuts to the heart of the matter at all. It's almost, in some weird way, the opposite: like the text is far too _dense_. It tries too hard to invent odd terminology to try to condense stuff, but it doesn't tell you up front that it is going to call your company wide error-handling mechani…

Kind of both. On the one hand, it is “verbose” in the sense that it will tell me every little nit that it can think of while doing a task, it will tell me a narrative about its thought process, and it will tell me every other detail it can think of. But it does so in a way that tries to be incredibly dense to the point that I have to struggle to figure out what it is saying. I wonder if there are any “legibility benc…

Post by clbrmbr » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 1:53 AM UTC

svara wrote: post #81

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'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,…

Post by alansaber » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

Post by alansaber » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 2:12 AM UTC

user102030 wrote: post #3

Looks like a wrapper around this prompt: You are an editor. You'll be given a message with strange characteristics: - Weird subject and verb combinations - Subjects that should be objects - Very roundabout reasoning, peppered with pseudo-epiphanies - A distracting beat to the flow of the message - Self-praise Remove these characteristics, and rewrite it in a clear, conversational style. Keep the intent of the message…

Post by 4d66ba06 » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 2:16 AM UTC

ericpauley wrote: post #42

I suspect that sustained reading of Opus 5's unconscionably bad prose could actually cause psychological harm. We're strongly considering moving all of our Anthropic spend to Codex/open weight models. It's a mental health decision at this point.