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Claude is a Contrarian

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Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#41

Post by Chance-Device »

Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable.

It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong.

It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.

This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded.

I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#43

Post by ismailmaj »

paulddraper wrote: post #31
manmal wrote: post #11

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch. I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, wit…

You have to use Fable or Opus 4.6 for tolerable language output. Using Opus 4.7-5 is harmful to your health. https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058?s=46

5 for sure is unbearable, 4.8 is a reasonable sweet spot, 4.6 tends to just agree with whatever I say.

But lately I haven't downgraded because 5 is so much better at tool use, so I just accept the cost of Fable for chatting and hope Opus 5.1 fixes this mess.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#44

Post by wccrawford »

knollimar wrote: post #6

Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.

I have absolutely seen this, and love to read out it's quotes to my wife. Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:" and crap like that.

Even if it's correct about that, if it were a human, I'd assume they were 1-upping me on purpose to make themselves look better.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#45

Post by epgui »

shawnz wrote: post #33
epgui wrote: post #18

Well, I agree that all of that is annoying, but "Don’t contradict sentences" is not a very good instruction. The construction "A, not B" is not a "contradiction", it's a clarification, a juxtaposition, a contrast. It's self-consistent and non-contradictory.

I have this worded in my CLAUDE.md as "avoid counterfactuals". It still does it anyway, of course, but that language combined with a few rounds of review back-and-forth seems to work for me

That’s better but I’d argue it’s still not clear enough. If you told me that, I’d interpret that as meaning “don’t try to imagine things that never happened as a thought exercise”, which is what I normally understand “counterfactual” to mean.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#47

Post by writeslowly »

mikepurvis wrote: post #25
twentyfiveoh1 wrote: post #15

I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention. It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.

ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge. With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.

With Claude it feels like those engagement invitations have turned into things like "By the way, it's worth sitting with this problem I've identified in your assertions..." or "Here's an alarming gap worth resolving in your code..."

Gemini also does the same lighthearted GPT-style invitation with the default prompt in the Google webui, but it doesn't seem to exist on the API. The Claude models seem to have been trained to force this structure on every one of their responses, and until I realized they always stick the same thing in the last part of their response, I found the Claude version more distracting since it's always pointing out an imaginary and supposedly very important problem.

Re: Claude is a Contrarian

#50

Post by SoftTalker »

I probably use LLMs less than most people here, and I rarely use Claude but I've noticed that if I ask ChatGPT about some shell commands or linux admin task, it will give me three paragraphs of "you could do X, then Y, check that output, then do Z," and then say "What I would do instead of all that is "

I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.

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