Ask HN: Why are Claude models so verbose?

Hello! First time poster, longtime reader. I’m a professional software engineer at a startup with about 50 engineers. My primary languages are Ruby (Rails), TypeScript (React), and Go.

Of my colleagues, I’m one of the ones who tries to keep up with new AI models on every release. When there’s a new frontier or open-weight model, I’ll give it an honest try for a few days as my main driver and report back to my colleagues.

I’m a Cursor user at work and in my side projects. My go-to models are GPT-5.6 Sol on high/xhigh for planning, GPT-5.6 Sol on low/Grok 4.6 on medium for implementation, and the occasional Claude Fable 5 for complex, harder-to-understand and implement tasks. Many of my colleagues are exclusively Claude users and use Claude Code.

I’m not the first one to observe this but I feel like any time I use Fable, Opus, or Sonnet, they are extremely verbose. They make a ton of extra code comments, they ignore instructions, and they invent solutions for things solved by language built-ins or preinstalled libraries like Active Support and es-toolkit. I don’t see this happening with any other model at the same rate.

My question are: Why do we think the Claude models do this at a seemingly higher rate? And have people found any effective means to curb this behavior?

I think there are a few nuances here:

1. On the ignore instructions point: using Cursor with Claude as the underlying model is quite different from using Claude directly through Claude Code. The agent/tooling layer can have a pretty big impact on the behavior.

2. On verbosity: IMO, Claude's default writing style tends to be more verbose than GPT's. GPT models are generally more concise when coding, while Claude often explains more. That said, I think this can be mitigated quite a bit by how you harness the model.

3. I agree that it’s worth trying new models. The pace of AI development is so fast that models can change significantly in a short time. But I’d also suggest trying different agent tools rather than sticking with Cursor alone. The tooling and agent loop can make a big difference too.

I churned off of Cursor for about a year to use Claude Code from spring 2025 to spring 2026 and I noticed it’d regularly ignore CLAUDE.md & Claude rules. It’s part of why I came back to Cursor. The Cursor harness has produced more reliable results, but the excessive verbosity is still pretty common across harnesses, in my experience.

Why would LLMs be concise and to the point? There is no truth in these machines.

p.s. You've just discovered a load bearing seam with your dossier and have a right to push back on this.

Claude Code has output styles; one of the predefined styles is Concise [1].

    Concise: Claude leads with the result, skips preamble and narration, and
    keeps responses short by default, while doing the engineering work as
    thoroughly as in the Default style. When you ask for an explanation or
    more detail, Claude answers in full. Claude always keeps the complete
    content of error reports, security warnings, and confirmations for
    destructive actions. Requires Claude Code v2.1.237 or later.

[1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles