Claude for me absolutely loves to be overly nitpicky. Granted, I told it to push back on things that I suggest that are stupid and things like that, but it took that and transformed it into "nitpick everything I say down to the minutia. If I write something that isn't exactly true down to the precise wording, nitpick the wording and claim that I wasn't as precise as I should've been". Idk if it does this for anyone else but it does this to me all the time, and it's absolutely infuriating. And here I thought English was supposed to make programming and doing what I wanted to do easier. Never thought my own computer would nitpick my linguistic precision!
Claude is a Contrarian
91–100 of 149 posts
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#92Where 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.
Surely, SOMEone at these companies realized training LLMs on the content of the internet (namely the vast amount of comment sections) would result in such outcomes. Or at least that they should weight heavily against that content for purposes of writing voice.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#93The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.
Paid campaigns.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#94I 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…
Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.
"Avoid use of "mannered" speech in your responses."
goes a long way for Opus and Fable.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#95The only way to stay sane with Claude is to use Fable. I let Fable spawn Opus review agents but I won't chat with Opus, and I won't let Opus write code.
I thought I could use Opus 4.6 but I gave up on it too. From a prose perspective it's much better than Opus 4.8 or 5. But it's still very verbose and Fable is dramatically more capable.
I'm sure folks from Anthropic love this conclusion because this setup is extremely expensive.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#96It wasnt like that several months ago. It and then-GPT suddenly swapped personalities. GPT has loosened up considerably and now makes more mistakes while Claude has become what it is while also smarter.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
i see what you did there
And LLMs do it a lot but it's not unique to their writing. Plenty of humans did and do use those constructions for effect or emphasis, or just because they think it makes them sound smart, as if they are revealing something profound.
It's a correction. What the model does is not real contradiction. So more nuance is welcome in this case - even if at another layer it's tongue in cheek
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#98The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this. It tries so hard not to be sycophantic that it inserts little negging sidecars into any sentence that agrees with you. "That's true but not how you're thinking" or simply "yes but" answers. All kinds of "I didn't" and "You didn't" statements to the point it's often talking more about what didn't happen than did.
That just sounds like effective communication with emotional beings to me. I was taught in college to find points I agree with, acknowledge those, then move on to the parts I don't agree on. It makes the recipient feel good at first, which puts them in a frame of mind willing to accept criticism.
You even start your reply with "That's true but Claude has so many more forms of this." It's just a friendly way of speaking.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.
"Avoid use of "mannered" speech in your responses." goes a long way for Opus and Fable.
The issue isn't the prompt you give it. The issue is that as context grows, Claude distributes it's "attention weight" over all that context, and quickly reaches the point of "missing" stuff.
You can give it any prompt in the world, but Claude's ability to remember that instruction quickly degrades the more you use it.
Re: Claude is a Contrarian
#100It sounds like your Claude caught the BuzzFeed disease. Ask it to dial it to zero. Have no compassion on that topic you guys, it's not worth it to sift through those hit-piece quality prose. While you're at it, also ask it to remove as many double negatives as possible, Jesus Christ.
And for the love of God, if you feel like you're losing an argument against AI, don't argue with it. You're paying it to answer, so just ask it to steelman your position. Then ask "see, my position wasn't so bad". AI will concede a lot of ground back to you for free, instead of Claude going dog headed in its misinterpretation of your original ideas.