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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

#191

Post by zarzavat »

ianjbutler wrote: post #148
faizshah wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on this is they are a tool to help speed up your work they are not meant to produce finished work. Humans produce finished work. LLM will never be deterministic cause their entire value is that they are generalizable.

I hear that, sort of, but here's the thing. Using AI at scale means AI needs to be nearly perfect about not shitting where they eat. That's the subject matter of the whole thread So the options are a) being a really aggressive stickler for generative hygiene with deterministic rules, b) being massively wasteful about hiring a few machine janitors for every machine coder, or c) humans become the machine's janitor. If…

"AI at scale" is just a euphemism for slop. Current gen AI can augment human engineers but not outright replace them.

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

#192

Post by ipdashc »

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.

I'd seen it around but assumed it was an effect of how you prompt it or something. And figured people were overexaggerating a bit when they complained about it.

Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever.

So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how on earth have they not fixed it yet? Do people like it? I added a system prompt to tell it to stop doing it and it's helped a decent bit already. ChatGPT/Codex has some annoying bits of prose but it never did this, so it can't be that complicated to get rid of.

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

#194

Post by lloydatkinson »

ipdashc wrote: post #192
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.

I'd seen it around but assumed it was an effect of how you prompt it or something. And figured people were overexaggerating a bit when they complained about it. Nope, I just tried it out myself recently and... wow. In the very first conversation it started glazing me about being right to push back, having the crucial insight, and something something the load-bearing-whatever. So yeah, I'm on the same page as you, how…

What system prompt did you use?

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

#195

Post by usrusr »

jorl17 wrote: post #113
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this sequence of 33 words alone was enough to give me a searing migraine.

Glad to know it worked. Still pending: the assumed-defaults research track plus the validation-only build phase D demanded — your call on whether to start one now or deploy tonight’s campaign to surface any wrinkles the spec drifted on

Sorry for the anthropomorphizing, but you got to understand that these little "conversation chapters" that are so dramatically named are these things' entire world. Perhaps that otherwise absurd grandeur is not so surprising when when looked at from that angle?

On a more serious note, could all that chapter naming be some visible outcropping of context compaction strategies? "Condense the conversation history into a summary". Not really surprising that it comes up with these "cute" headlines. Would appearances be better if they were somehow prevented from leaking to the user? Sure. Would results be better? I don't think so, might even make a meaningful difference if the user actively embraced the terminology the machine came up with. Ouch.

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

#196

Post by azangru »

crab_galaxy wrote: post #165
areoform wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a human who isn't a professional programmer, I've been writing comments like, // let's track age!! // this is harder than you'd think as I with totally impressive // foresight didn't add age to the raw data. // // More honestly, I didn't want to add age to the astro data as that's // a calculation that can change depending on how you slice it. // // Hence we need to figure out their age first. Is that bad???

// Workaround because we don’t have an age column in the db. See JIRA-1234 This would be better IMO :) Most of the context belongs in a ticket. And the difficulty is subjective!

I hate it when a comment tells me to see JIRA-1234. What if in a year's time we stop using Jira?

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

#197

Post by antihero »

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 comment situation is really bad. I generally don't see a lot of complaints people have about it, but the fact that it references random transient stuff, will delete a line and _leave a comment about the deleted line instead of just deleting the comment_, writes multiple paragraphs for the simplest stuff. It is absurd.

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

#199

Post by Sinidir »

graemep wrote: post #76
mmastrac wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Yeah i noticed this heavily. Working on a branch i critique and give a simpler design. Claude implements and then in a huge comments reference the outdated worse design. Zero value to that. Even having a "how to write comments" section in claude.md doesn't seem to help much with that.

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

#200

Post by ben_w »

azangru wrote: post #196
crab_galaxy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// Workaround because we don’t have an age column in the db. See JIRA-1234 This would be better IMO :) Most of the context belongs in a ticket. And the difficulty is subjective!

I hate it when a comment tells me to see JIRA-1234. What if in a year's time we stop using Jira?

Far too often the answer has been that it doesn't matter, because the reason you stopped using Jira is the company stopped sending paycheques.

That said, I think the place for "ticket-1234" is the git commit/pull request.

Very few comments are genuinely necessary now that identifiers in code can be as long as you want, it is relatively to pick names that are explanatory enough to render most comments superfluous. 1% exceptions for unusual algorithms. (You're using named consts/enums rather than magic numbers, yes?)

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