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Claude Code has been downright bad the last couple of weeks. It seems like a considerable amount of users are moving to Codex, at least judging by reddit posts.
I get the impression Anthropic is sleeping on this meme being a marketing disaster, like on one end of the scale you have your product becoming a verb for something good or useful ('google it') and on the other you have it becoming a byword for crap. Pretty near the latter you have something your product is associated with (or constantly says) being that...
There, fixed it.
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I once found a "+1 subscriber" random notification on some page and asked the LinkedIn person who sent me the page to knock it off. It was obviously fake even before looking at the code for proof. But there's self-advertised "Appeal to popularity" everywhere. Have you noticed that every app on the play store asks you if you like it and only after you answer YES send you to the store to rate it? It's so standard that…
My bank app asks me to review it every time, and only when, I deposit money. It’s so transparent in its attempted manipulation: you just got some money and are likely to be in a better mood than other times you’re using the app! Literally every deposit. Eventually, I’ll leave a 1-star nastygram review for treating me like an idiot. (It won’t matter and nothing will change.)
If enough people give it 1 star with the same complaint, it might. After all, like you said they’re trying to manipulate you to a specific behaviour but if it has the opposite effect it’s in their best interest to reverse it.
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So how does it do it?
I haven't read this particular code, I did some analysis of various prompts it uses, I didn't hear about anything specific like this. Mostly wanted to say "it's at least possible to dig into it if you'd like," not that I had the answer directly.
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It is a tactic. OpenAI is changing the tone of ChatGPT if you use casual language, for example. Sometimes even the dialect. They try to be sympathetic and supportive, even when they should not. They fight for the user attention and keeping them on their platform, just like social media platforms. Correctness is secondary, user satisfaction is primary.
I find the GPT-5 model having turned the friendliness way, way down. Topics that previously would have rendered long and (usefully) engaging conversations are now met with an "ok cool" kind of response. I get it - we don't want LLMs to be reinforces of bad ideas, but sometimes you need a little positivity to get past a mental barrier and do something that you want to do, even if what you want to do logically doesn't…
If you want ceaseless positivity you should try Claude. The only possible way it’ll be negative is if you ask it to be.
OK, so I love this, because we all recognize it. It's not fully just a tic of language, though. Responses that start off with "You're right!" are alignment mechanisms. The LLM, with its single-token prediction approach, follows up with a suggestion that much more closely follows the user's desires, instead of latching onto it's own previous approach. The other tic I love is "Actually, that's not right." That happens…
In my experience, once it starts telling me I’m right, we’re already going downhill and it rarely gets better from there.
It's nice to see Claude.md! I checked out the commits to see which files you wrote in which order (readme/claude) to learn how to use Claude Code. Can you share something on that?
The CLAUDE.md file in the repo is basically just the result of the `/init` command. But honestly, on small repos like this, it's not really needed. Fun fact: I usually have `- Never say "You're absolutely right!".` in my CLAUDE.md files, but of course, Claude ignores it.
I've only had good experience concluding any prompt with "and don't talk about it" but my colleague says it hampers the agent because talking to itself helps it think. That's not been my experience, and I vastly prefer it not spending tokens I give no shits about