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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

#202

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

I've observed a bunch of people not being vocal and complaining, but just flat out switching. For every person you see online complaining, there's bound to be more who are equally annoyed and not being vocal, but just acting. Any many others that aren't bothered at all.

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

#203

Post by feffe »

areoform wrote: post #163
jorl17 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

// The lesson from the Parse-dont-fail-era campaign // Judged on merit from computed properties during the cursor saga // Chop 6ms due to lenience and lax-constraints vs 18ms baseline April perf measurements

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???

I think this passes. In general "why" over "what". Give context to why something is made like it is (when seeming convoluted or strange). Sometimes I think one can give historical facts for really hairy hard to fix issues that have seen multiple iterations. But LLMs don't see these nuances. They frequently smuggle in completely irrelevant details in comments, e.g. including details from the given task context, not understanding what is relevant for the code module as a whole.

Edit: For API comments it's "what" of course, detailing the workings and contracts of the exported method, function or type, so one doesn't have to read the code to figure out how to use it.

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

#205

Post by hilariously »

klardotsh wrote: post #175
pluralmonad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And will reference transient working docs in code comments. // No retry was added here per AC 37b in FEATURE.MD.

This one drives me nuts, especially because I divvy up plan documents into such granular sub chunks and Ralph loop over them, I get nonsense commit messages and comments like “PLAN-5.1.A.d.42 load bearing reassertion” unless I AGENTS.md to hell and back… and still end up having to manually reject 5-10% of commit messages because the agent simply forgets AGENTS.md instructions until reprompted.

Sometimes you can do a separate skill for committing only and basically minimize the context - "analyze the commit messages, the original instructions, and this set of things to stop wasting my FUCKING TIME"

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

#206

Post by antonvs »

mcv wrote: post #2

I wish I didn't need it, but the way Claude talks can get pretty tiresome. I've often wondered why it talks like that. Was it really trained on Buzzfeed? Is Gemini really that much better?

Gemini uses more neutral language but it’s still prone to hype up little things. OpenAI’s “professional” personality (an option in the settings) is pretty decent.

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

#207

Post by antonvs »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #53

Or just use a competitor instead of being a slave to this abuse? Why are people so wedded to Anthropic? I have grown tired of Codex/GPT's writing style, too, but it's not nearly as bad. It's terse and factual by default. Even better if you use the "simple english" skill. I actually found that GLM 5.x is the best in terms of editing documentation. It's still best to write things by hand to give your own organic voice,…

> Why are people so wedded to Anthropic?

It’s interesting to watch, I don’t think it’s rational - just hype-driven herd behavior, the desire to pick one and stick with it, things like that. It’s similar to the kind of dominance Apple has, which most of the time has to do with style more than substance.

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

#209

Post by noisy_boy »

If you have read Cursor's obtuse verbosity (auto mode), Claude's talk comes across as sober and level-headed. Everytime I am about to complain about Claude, I'm reminded of that and am thankful that my main budget is allocated to Claude, not Cursor (though the latter, despite all the babble, is fairly frugal).
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