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Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

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Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#61

Post by datadrivenangel »

Razengan wrote: post #29
matheusmoreira wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude will end the conversation if you berate it when it screws something up.

wow I've been saying this since probably a year, that the entire Claude product: from the sign-up, the payment, the UX, the UI, the harness, the intelligence itself, the output, the "flavor" ..is just so mid that all the hype posted on HN about Claude must have been paid PR or a case of the emperor with no clothes.

Back at the end of 2025 Claude Code was truly the best. They've watered it down and the competition has caught up.

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#62

Post by fr2029 »

nojs wrote: post #51
JV00 wrote: post #38

Everybody is complaining about this, at this point I’m sure they will deliver a tone of voice change in the 5.1 releases. Possibly with a new set of problems though, especially if this is part of an effort to obscure thinking to reduce distillation efficacy. In that case I believe Anthropic is doing damage to themselves. Caring about the quality of your product is the best strategy, the competition will come no matte…

How does it help prevent distillation?

it doesn't

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#64

Post by cmrdporcupine »

walthamstow wrote: post #4

It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.

Anthropic has explicitly chosen to anthropomorphize the model. It's kind of in their mission statement. It's most noticed once you walk away for a while and use models/agents/harnesses that haven't pushed as hard on this. Codex/Sol rarely uses personal pronouns and basically no superlatives. It has its own verbal ticks, but I hate them less?

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#66

Post by demibabs »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #16
walthamstow wrote: post #4

It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.

It's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was. The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.

Moralizing? Can you expand on that

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#68

Post by YuriNiyazov »

datakan wrote: post #9

Has Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there. I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.

It's easiest to explain this while anthropomorphizing the model, I know some folks here hate that, sorry about that. I heard an interesting diagnosis for why Claude does this: the output is a compressed version of its thought traces, very dense because the model is under pressure to use as few tokens as it can and to pack as much (for accuracy) of its concepts into the output.

One of the reasons that "don't do X" type of instructions work reliably is because you are telling the model "don't think of a pink elephant". There's also Anthropic's related research that shows that when you tell a model "don't do X", and it does X later for whatever reason, it starts acting more misaligned. This is because it thinks "well, I guess I am the sort of model that disobeys instructions, whatever" - this was specifically about cheating on tests, but you can imagine this happens in other contexts as well like following instructions on what kinds of text to output.

So, what you want to do is to avoid telling Claude "don't do X", and tell Claude "in your thoughts, in memories and various notes that you write, use your Claude-ese. In your output to humans, translate everything into long full sentences."

If anyone's interested, I can share my Claude Code output style that reflects this.

(Hi Adnan! Long time! (Adnan is an ex-coworker))

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#69

Post by troupo »

Maxatar wrote: post #44
troupo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compacting context compacts context. So Claude forgets a lot during compaction.

Compacting mostly gets rid of reasoning tokens, and honestly it would be nice of reasoning tokens did not constantly follow every follow up query. Asking even a simple/trivial question can have Claude use thousands of tokens. Compacting is good for getting rid of those.

I've had Claude immediately fall back to its usual verbose style immediately after compaction.

To be fair, I've had it do that immediately after re-reading the output style instructions, too.

My chat history is filled with "Yes, I broke the language rule. Let me rephrase that and update my memory. — You already have that in memory — Yes, true, I ignored that" (because "Memory" is a yet another .md file)

Re: Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

#70

Post by nozzlegear »

Maxatar wrote: post #47
JV00 wrote: post #38

Everybody is complaining about this, at this point I’m sure they will deliver a tone of voice change in the 5.1 releases. Possibly with a new set of problems though, especially if this is part of an effort to obscure thinking to reduce distillation efficacy. In that case I believe Anthropic is doing damage to themselves. Caring about the quality of your product is the best strategy, the competition will come no matte…

Simply untrue. You think everyone is complaining about this because the ones complaining are the only people commenting. The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. Sure among those who are irritated by it, it's good to have some ways to mitigate it, but I highly doubt Anthropic is going to devote much resources to an issue that affects a vocal minority.

> The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another.

You have literally no way to know that.

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