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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

#181

Post by tstrimple »

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…

It helps to understand how these tools work. One of the reasons CLAUDE.md doesn't survive longer contexts is it's towards the top of the context. One of the reasons the Claude Code voice survives is it's part of the output style which gets "reminded" to the context at every turn as part of the system context. If you want something truly durable, you should customize your output style. I have zero "load-bearing" issues.

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

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

#182

Post by smallnix »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #83
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've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming

The missing seam was a smoking footgun

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

#183

Post by sqquima »

cyanydeez wrote: post #171
saghm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why even copy-paste when you can just plug the two terminals together and observe like fish; then just occasionally sprinkle in the flakes. Isn't that the idea here, just stop being people.

This gives new meaning to the fish shell (fishshell.com)!

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

#184

Post by smcleod »

asdff wrote: post #114
arrowleaf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's not really how it works. I'm able to get 5-10x more work done, perhaps more, it's a significant accelerant to those that know how to be productive. The problem is more for those who don't - and we bring them up to speed or help them pivot to other work.

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

#185

Post by saltypixel »

acaloiar wrote: post #90

I used it for a few months, and can say that no skill is up to the task of keeping Claudeuage in check. You'll get a lot more mileage out of an "output style" with the same instructions, because output styles regularly remind Claude how to speak. Even output styles are not always up to the task (Claudeuage slips through), and they're mutually exclusive, so you can only have one active at a time.

[flagged]

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

#186

Post by flerchin »

In my experience I get better work output out of claude if I don't constrain its conversational style. I want Claude to stop saying how "absolutely right" I am, or the new hotness "honest take", but I get better code if I let it do that annoying stuff. Yes, that makes me fight ADHD harder.

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

#187

Post by Dylan16807 »

idicjeifjwjd wrote: post #97
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…

The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.

What do you want it to use instead?

"I" is normally used for everything. You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".

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

#188

Post by 3stacks »

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…

What I find strange is that it uses different prose in different contexts. It's absolutely insufferable in a general claude-code session, but then I got Opus to annotate a non-disclosure agreement and it uses very clear legal language. I was wondering how I could get it to speak like that all the time

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

#189

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

idicjeifjwjd wrote: post #97
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…

The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.

How would you suggest it do that? Take a simple example. "I found three issues." How would you phrase that without an "I"? "Three issues were found" doesn't tell you who/what found them. Was it the AI itself? Was it a command line tool it ran?

I'm fine with conversational interfaces using "I". It makes the grammar easier and more clear.

Strong emphasis here on conversational interfaces. I don't want a compiler to say "I ran into an error" or my printer to say "I'm low on paper".

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

#190

Post by altern8 »

With Claude—and I feel Opus 5 in particular—I always feel like I'm talking in circles.

Just when I think the task is finally done, it mentions a caveat that might invalidate the whole thing. Or it adds a hint at the end about something that it didn't look into but might be a potential problem. ALWAYS.

If I ask a yes/no question, it's always a short novel that barely answers the question and adds 3-4 side quests.

It's exhausting. Luckily I get paid for it but Jesus Christ, can't they see how annoying it is to use the thing? What were they thinking

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