Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
Sycophantic behavior.
I think it's more a mix of click bait and getting paid by the word.
I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
191–200 of 387 posts
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I want it to use nothing. Use impersonal statements. Say “X was changed for Y” not “I changed X for Y”. As any tool would.
Finder doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to delete this file?”. Photoshop doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to save this file?”. Claude shouldn’t assume itself to be a person either.
> You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".
Except this isn’t prose. Claude is not telling me a story from the point of view of a concrete slab. It is assuming personality to present objective facts. If my entire operating system can be interfaced with without it referring to itself as “I” then so can Claude.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#193Let'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
The behavior is in the training data... What does that say about software dev culture?
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
> You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.
Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work.
> Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#195Let'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 added “ respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories.” to my Claude’s instructions best thing I ever did.
Superficially subservient but with a subtle air of smug superiority? (Or was that just Stephen Fry's interpretation?)
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I imagine that, corpus aside, it uses personal pronouns for much the same reason that humans do. It's useful for it to have a self-referential vector embedding, and this lets it solve problems faster and more efficiently.
Except in this case this makes 0 sense since AIs are sycophantic by nature. You tell it to do something and it just does it. If it can burn tokens trying to sound more human (which is programmed in, not a byproduct), then it can very well just not do that and get on with the work.
Impersonating a human does nothing to help it solve problems faster, quite the contrary in fact, it has to waste even more time coming up with human-like speech patterns to present the work done.
It shouldn’t assume any personality unless I explicitly tell it to. It is a tool until I tell it otherwise.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can't trust it's account on why it did something, it does not "remember". It will just make up something plausible sounding.
To me it explained its inability to follow my preferred coding style by blaming its training data.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#198I’ve been scolding my LLM quite a bit lately for this. Instead of telling me what to do, it first tells me 3 ways that might technically work, but I probably shouldn’t use for various reasons. This is all a waste of my time, tokens, and sanity.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 found these issues.” Could be easily written as “These issues surfaced.”.
Do you need to point out the finder of the issues? Easy.
“Tool x ran for x amount of time and surfaced these issues…” “Parsing x code surfaced these issues.”
I don’t understand why are people pretending like the English language is incapable of transmitting information without personal pronouns when every program under the sun has always been written to interface with humans in a cold, detached, straight-to-the-point and impersonal way.
Finder doesn’t ask you “I see you want ME to delete these files. Want ME to do that for you?”. Toolbars don’t feature “Create a new file for me” options, terminal utilities don’t report back with “I’ve pattern matched the text you input and here’s the results I’ve found”.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming
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.
That subtle caveat is why you were absolutely correct to push back, and we should adopt a belt-and-braces approach.