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I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

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Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#111

Post by hinkley »

sleazebreeze wrote: post #12

Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single…

> for a few turns at most before they completely forget

Which sounds more like Claude has ADHD than the user does.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#112

Post by saghm »

jp57 wrote: post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

You think that they communicate? I just assumed they sent each other output of Claude, which is then fed into Claude

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#113

Post by nvch »

jp57 wrote: post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

I was wondering why Fable's 5.1 writing in Claude Code became even more unreadable, and found that they added "No em-dashes, no parentheticals, no arrows" to its system prompt.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#114

Post by asdff »

arrowleaf wrote: post #93
agentdev001 wrote: post #82

Until either of these cases happen: A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic models B: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-output We will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tende…

I'm a developer at a company who has signed contracts to use Claude. I wish I had a choice in model providers, especially considering I spend around $4k in API tokens each month, my company as a whole is around a million. I desperately wish I could use OpenAI models or open weights, Claude's writing style is definitely contributing to my sense of burnout.

I'd be burned out too if 48k of my comp went to what amounts to a facilities spend. Crazy. You think the models actually give you ROI, or this is a sort of jumping with the lemmings thing your company is doing, and you could probably deliver the same output working in "The Old Way" with another 48k on top your base?

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#115

Post by jp57 »

MisterMunchkin wrote: post #94
jp57 wrote: post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

They've corrupted their data set by padding it with generated slop, in the misguided belief that you need 10PB of data to train a brain. Every training round they load more AI slop into it, further amplifying the slop language. It's fascinating, Sonnet 4 is still available via API and it's so much less moronic than the current model. All of the em-dashes and nonsense are a result of the repeated rounds of reinforceme…

But why did that style of writing get rewarded? The people at Anthropic are ultimately responsible for the reward signal and what it produced.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#116

Post by creesch »

hinkley wrote: post #109
jp57 wrote: post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything or do you think maybe this is a stalling tactic to get people to spread out their transactions? Like how theme parks generally don't do much to keep queues short (or Disney charges you a premium to skip the queue)

> Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything

Considering how much of the input must me nonsense SEO bullshit articles and blogs that only serve to promote a person or company that might be a factor.

I also often have wondered if it is also targeting those same people. Certainly with tools like deep research options (not just Anthropic's offering) the result report seems to be aimed at management, aiming to look impressive while talking around the results.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#117

Post by seniorThrowaway »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #95
hbn wrote: post #89

> Install > Copy/paste into your CLI prompt: > Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd , refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions. This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter" I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named githu…

Always good to be paranoid. Even MCPs are not safe. For example Notion injected ads [1] to its official MCP connector to advertise products mid-task. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1w9dluw/notions_o...

MCP is SOAP-XML without the contract or formal language, it's hilarious

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#118

Post by charlieflowers »

alaithea wrote: post #96
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here. That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.

And that tension matters.

That tension is doing real work.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#119

Post by cpill »

alaithea wrote: post #96
8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here. That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.

And that tension matters.

[flagged]

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#120

Post by hysan »

ryandrake wrote: post #74

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this.

If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had phrases telling it to do things like that. When something contradicts, its own instructions would outweigh any custom ones you write. Every rule variant I had tested (including the one that says it overrides the harness instructions - and yes, I've actually tested all the ideas in your comment too) has ultimately been unsuccessful due to this according to the LLM.

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