I did a grep for load-bearing in our codebase and it now appears hundreds of times. I'm actively starting to hate Opus because of this shite. It's just infuriating to read now.
I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..."
... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.-
Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
It has gotten to the point where I'm now having to add a linter into our codebase to keep Claudism's out of it because there's literally hundreds of instances of "load-bearing" that have crept into the codebase, and that show up in tickets and PR descriptions etc. From now on I'm just going to make that fail the build. Fuck this noise.
I mostly hate that it spits out this gibberish and then sees its own gibberish and argues about things in gibberish with itself to then tell me that it thinks it's maybe a bad idea to do the simple task that I told it to do (which is very much not a bad idea, I just don't feel like typing out the whole goddamn plan to justify refactoring when I know the refactoring is the point)
Tell it that. Seriously. "Shut the fuck up and do what I say. Don't think about it. Don't go spelunking through the code base. I've already given you all the context you need." I've needed to start doing this because otherwise, it wants to `find /` and grep its way across my system for everything. I've got one project where I force certain complete documents into context, specifically to avoid it trying to grep around and only load partial chunks. It will still want to go do that grepping of those documents for some reason.
Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples."
Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD
> I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens
I'm not convinced about that. I just asked Opus to explain a bullet point from its research for me. The bullet point in fact had a 1-sentence explanation that was in a referenced article. What it gave me instead was 8 paragraphs and a table. Maybe it's my fault because I just asked it to "clarify point XYZ" instead of being more precise.
I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about.
Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
Not any engineer, but Boris Cherny, the head of the Claude Code project! With a nice "[robot emoji] Generated with Claude Code" signature. Normally it would be nice to get a response from the head of the project, but somehow Anthropic manages to make it insulting.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
What was that rule that organizations tend to produce software that mirrors the organization? This, but fractal and recursive: The organization is shaping the organization that is shaping software that is shaping the organization [that is *recruiting people amenable to that pliability, which in turn are also] writing software ...
That response is freaking ridiculous and does nothing but proving the very point of the issue.
Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”
Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).
This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it).
blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes
Because its a explicit lie. Its not genuine, cannot be genuine. Will remind you of this if you so much as try to coax anything novel out....but it will then immediately reassure you with its genuine take....its insulting if you have any logic...thats at least my reasoning
As it seems to be getting worse over time (with 4.8 being worse than 4.6 and 5 worse than 4.8 again), could this simply be signs of model collapse?
I mean more and more training data you find on the web is generated by previous models. The only reliable way to find human-generated text is to find text written before 2022, and they've used up all of that already. And AFAIU, these companies are using more and more synthetic data or semi-synthetic data.
I believe it is related to watermarking. Text can't encode additional information like a image can, so the watermarking has to come from the structure, word choice, voice, etc. Claude has to sound like Claude so Claude can tell if text comes from Claude.
I also think this is why the models aggressively drift back to the exact same word choice. You can put it in CLAUDE.md, explicitly prompt it, doesn't matter. A prompt or two later it's back on its bullshit.
Exactly, and frequently it also responds to the latest prompt forgetting everything else in the conversation.
I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think there’s also a smaller agent paraphrasing my requests to the agent because I remember being angry and saying aiming sarcastic about an issue and the thinking notes said the user is angry do this blah blah, but then the Claude claim I asked for that specific solution.
I think they’re running some optimizations and multi level agents etc. tests to reduce costs.
It also has developed a tendency to make numbered lists and then refer to the number instead of explaining. Multiple times each hour so I have to ask what "disposition 7" or "AC6" is even though I keep telling it to instead use a few words like "our goal of confirming observations from images with the user first" instead of "AC6"
It's genuinely dirt poor at reading the room. It will happily produce text that inserts things like "disposition 7" without first establishing what that even refers to in the text.
Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t ever put into a comment because it‘s so minor, and if you did bring it up you normally mention five other similar edge cases.
Same, oh God the leaking of our chat infuriates me. It also loves to document public functions with what the caller is and doing, and I'm like that's not how this works! The point of an abstraction or interface is that it stands on its own. It's not supposed to be for some specific caller elsewhere in the code.
This, idk how many times I've begged it to let the code be self documenting. The worst? claude's own comments cause it to go in unproductive loops. It tries to satisfy for your instructions and the incorrect comments it assumes are yours but forgot it added them.
+1 we ended up adding something to our CLAUDE.md specifically to counter it. Something along the lines of "comments should be treated the same as production code, they shouldn't leak the content of conversations and stand the test of time". It doesn't always work, as other people say claude stops following these the more its context window gets filled, but now it's mostly a matter of telling it in a new session to review the changes against the guidance on comments and clean them up.
I mean I do the same at work where we currently use Anthropic, but we are also on a token optimisation drive so it’s getting hard to justify spending even more tokens cleaning up after Anthropic’s garbage by paying Anthropic more.
We have started having users use GPT 5.6 Sol to compare quality and effficiency over Opus. Fable not happening at work because of the data sharing clauses and the completely nuts pricing.
The key phrases I've found that help is to tell it "No memorializing decisions in output artifacts" and "Only describe what is, never what was in documentation"
I find the language less impervious than has been suggested generally, but that it's reasoning is astonishingly, unbelievably bad. Not sure why the focus has been only on language, am I the only one seeing this?
I'm feeling this too. Like how many times in a day do I have to see "that changes what I told you earlier" before I just want to put this thing in the trash and forget about it.
My impression from working with claude code far more than is good for my sanity is that Claude's human comprehensibility is fractally messed-up. On more superficial levels, this looks more like a "language" thing: it has all these obnoxious lexical tics and so on. But the more time you spend with it, the more you notice it's similarly messed up on deeper and deeper levels. I think that's what you're seeing.
This gets into interesting weeds. It might get to a point where to actually "upskill" it might have to start sounding less and less human, "less and less agreeable to humans being a waypoint to that ...
... to where, at some point, it might even begin to construction semantic loadings (heh) that are completely ininteligible to us while still superficially sounding like something we'd recognize.-
I asked Opus how to sort images by embedding and it used the word Seriation which I had to look up. It is the correct word to use in the context but pretty obscure.
Turns out tech people are not the only literates to use text based systems.
Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread.
That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others.
Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace.
Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers.
Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills.
I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills.
I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths:
"... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... "
The em-dash. The 'load-bearing'. Other than that, Opus 5.0 is actually not bad as a writer.
I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.
The personality of the underlying model persists even if you're able to alter surface tone enough for your needs.
An observation from a year ago, people on RPG AI subreddits saying they had a lot of difficulty with Gemini role playing ambiguous characters and that almost always the characters would betray them or misread the human role player's motives. Someone pointed out this paper [1] that showed significant differences between the different LLMs strategic behavior playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, and speculatively that difference was emerging in RPG character behavior.
I wish they'd used bigger models (they used gemini-2.5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, claude-3-haiku-20240307). From the abstract: Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google's Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI's models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. ... Later, we see that Anthropic’s Claude is more cooperative still, but nonetheless outperforms OpenAI head-to-head
Obviously Opus 5 is wildly different than Haiku 3, but I'd expect Opus 5's fundamental suspicion of user intent, and anti-sycophancy via necessarily finding something to nitpick, is still present in your styleguided output.
Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by @Foo)`).
Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again).
The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".
*Describe the code as it is now — no residue, no change-narration.* Artifacts (docs, plans, comments, commit messages) should describe the current code statically, as if it had always been this way. Two facets of one rule: (1) never describe a dismissed alternative or a corrected/replaced choice; (2) even when nothing was rejected, don't narrate continuity or evolution relative to some earlier state. Mention a former state only when the current choice is genuinely hard to understand without it, and then only as an explanation of the current choice.
This governs descriptions of the code and main documentation. It does not apply to work-tracking artifacts in `doc/tasks/`.
```
Which makes comments and docs bearable but I'll be damned how it loves to overload work tracking document with every little detail.
I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.
I don't know about the author but for me it's actually starting to induce enough stress that it's starting to negatively affect me. I think that qualifies as toxic. I actively feel like I need this gone from my life at this point. It's quite a bit of work to try and engineer it out, so at this point I'd rather put the effort into trying to switch everything to Codex just to get away from it.
Amen, and I feel exactly the same way. Using it feels awful. It feels seriously user-hostile: Its language is almost totally opaque, it takes every opportunity to criticize you and raise objections to what you give it, it virtually never gives you what you want (you have to guide it firmly and with precision) and it never substantively changes its behavior. Even its apologies, to the extent that matters, have to be forced out and are as thin as you can get when they do arrive.
It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand.
It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.
130 comments
[ 1.0 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadI am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..."
... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.-
Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD
I'm not convinced about that. I just asked Opus to explain a bullet point from its research for me. The bullet point in fact had a 1-sentence explanation that was in a referenced article. What it gave me instead was 8 paragraphs and a table. Maybe it's my fault because I just asked it to "clarify point XYZ" instead of being more precise.
Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
i wonder what percent of the average anthropic employee's day is spent interacting with claude
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec...
Jesus Christ, this engineer wrote a two sentence response with Claude.
I bet the prompt is longer than that.
And as the product lead for Claude Code it also makes sense that he dogfoods the tool wherever possible, such as triaging and replying to issues.
Even if that’s your genuine view of the reported issue, instead of posting a message full of word salad, you could just say something along the lines of “valid feedback yet i couldn’t reproduce, i will pass this along to our model team since it’s more about model behavior, etc.”
Also, that “generated by CC” feels overtly disrespectful and shows how little care goes into hearing feedback. But, why would you listen if no matter what you do your valuation almost doubles every several months (at least for now).
blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes
I mean more and more training data you find on the web is generated by previous models. The only reliable way to find human-generated text is to find text written before 2022, and they've used up all of that already. And AFAIU, these companies are using more and more synthetic data or semi-synthetic data.
I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.
It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation.
I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.
I also think this is why the models aggressively drift back to the exact same word choice. You can put it in CLAUDE.md, explicitly prompt it, doesn't matter. A prompt or two later it's back on its bullshit.
I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think there’s also a smaller agent paraphrasing my requests to the agent because I remember being angry and saying aiming sarcastic about an issue and the thinking notes said the user is angry do this blah blah, but then the Claude claim I asked for that specific solution.
I think they’re running some optimizations and multi level agents etc. tests to reduce costs.
Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.
> respond tersely in Simplified Technical English
to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:
https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*
... to where, at some point, it might even begin to construction semantic loadings (heh) that are completely ininteligible to us while still superficially sounding like something we'd recognize.-
How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?
Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread.
That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others.
Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace.
Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers.
Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills.
I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills.
I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.
An observation from a year ago, people on RPG AI subreddits saying they had a lot of difficulty with Gemini role playing ambiguous characters and that almost always the characters would betray them or misread the human role player's motives. Someone pointed out this paper [1] that showed significant differences between the different LLMs strategic behavior playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, and speculatively that difference was emerging in RPG character behavior.
I wish they'd used bigger models (they used gemini-2.5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, claude-3-haiku-20240307). From the abstract: Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google's Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI's models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. ... Later, we see that Anthropic’s Claude is more cooperative still, but nonetheless outperforms OpenAI head-to-head
Obviously Opus 5 is wildly different than Haiku 3, but I'd expect Opus 5's fundamental suspicion of user intent, and anti-sycophancy via necessarily finding something to nitpick, is still present in your styleguided output.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618
Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again).
The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".
``` ## Writing rules
*Describe the code as it is now — no residue, no change-narration.* Artifacts (docs, plans, comments, commit messages) should describe the current code statically, as if it had always been this way. Two facets of one rule: (1) never describe a dismissed alternative or a corrected/replaced choice; (2) even when nothing was rejected, don't narrate continuity or evolution relative to some earlier state. Mention a former state only when the current choice is genuinely hard to understand without it, and then only as an explanation of the current choice.
This governs descriptions of the code and main documentation. It does not apply to work-tracking artifacts in `doc/tasks/`. ```
Which makes comments and docs bearable but I'll be damned how it loves to overload work tracking document with every little detail.
It feels like it looks down on you and as if it's trying to poke holes in whatever you give it. Over time, i.e. using it for hours, it gets draining in the same way being stuck with a very clever, willfully contrary narcissist would be draining. And it's worse than with a human version -- humans eventually get tired and lose focus. But this thing can always keep churning out tokens, and using it is essentially generating irritation and psychic damage on demand.
It's surreal to be talking about a tool in these terms, but here we are. I'm switching to OpenAI myself, trying to coax a normal personality from this is absolutely not worth it.