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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

#183
post #47
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.

Customers of a language model don’t care or notice about the quality of the language produced by the model?

And your reasoning to get to this conclusion? Obscured like Claude’s thinking traces?

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

#184

I've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output: Comment blocks are Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO. For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.

So this works better then any other humanizer skill repo on github?

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

#185
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude not only writes verbose comments, it also writes comments about how things used to work when refactoring. That might have a place in version control comments, but not in the code.

We call these temporal comments. We recently updated our code review skills to heavily discourage them. It doesn’t matter why funcA was added then later refactored to funcB. That much can be ascertained from git history. What does matter is why approach A doesn’t work, but B does.

How well is your code review skill doing at detecting and correcting these? History in comments in git is so annoying! As is missing why A didn't work but B does. None of the models I've tried get this right

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

#186
post #114
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude not only writes verbose comments, it also writes comments about how things used to work when refactoring. That might have a place in version control comments, but not in the code.

This speaks to the general problem with using LLMs for writing. The audience they are writing for us you, but you're trying to write for a totally different audience. In code, this manifests as comments in the code that are hyperspecific to the conversation you are having, and not the long term benefit of having those comments in the code. I see this in docs a lot. I've been reading a lot of docs these days where it…

>It's like it has no conception

This is the point.

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

#187
post #3

Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375996 "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM" (github.com/zachahn) 285 points | 23 hours ago | 288 comments

Also related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49265305

"Claudish to English" (https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english)

4 points | bryan0 |10 days ago | 2 comments

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

#189
post #47
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.

I usually dont comment, but just had to. Opus 5 talls garbage, Im back om 4.8 which is better but still verbose. I use the caveman skill, but after a while it is just ignored.. I switched to Deepseek for a task lately. It was a wow experience (the language part)

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

#190
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, when the context window grows, Claude tends to forget these kinds of rules. It will then do whatever it wants. I had to outright ban comments in the global claude.md, the local claude.md AND write a hook to catch any that still slipped through.

Hooks is the way. Intermittent nudges

I have a post-edit hook that asks the model if this edit introduced any comments, and if it did, remove them. This was the only reliable way to get it to stop that I found.
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