This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.
When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.
I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
>quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently.
How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
The smarter thing to do would be to steelman the original position and not assume that the weakest of counterarguments — stated confidently and without much further analysis — sufficiently refute it.
Totally, so many people like to bring up a counter-argument and expect you to fully disarm it, but very few people will justify whether their argument is actually relevant or reasonable to the discussion at hand.
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.
> Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:"
I also get this a lot, but almost always with "and for a stronger reason than you said", which makes it sound more like it's reinforcing me than one-upping me.
Looking through my recent transcripts, I found this pattern 12 times, with every time using "and" instead of "but".
Eg:
- "Confirmed, and it's worse than a pause quirk."
- "I think the ban is right, and it's a stronger idea than what I'd proposed."
I did find one instance with "but", but it was a genuine disagreement rather than 1-upping or presenting strengthening evidence: "I would cap it, but for a different reason than fairness."
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.
It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".
It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".
Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.
I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.
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, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?
Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.
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.
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
The part about AI confidently reframing your point instead of just answering really hits home. Sometimes you just want a straight answer, not a debate.
Right! I don't think "Don’t contradict sentences" by itself as a rule is going to work. Give it a few examples because I wouldn't necessarily have pegged "This is hot, not cold." as a "contradicting sentence."
You'd have to make it a positive statement to give it more weight since negatives leave too many options open. Instead of "don't..." try "as far as possible, always try to reinforce sentences and assumptions rather than contradicting them" - worth a try. Worst case you just get more reinforcement gibberish before it plugs back into the contradictions but that's just a guess.
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.
Indeed but it will use the same language when talking to subagents so humans are no different to LLMs in Claude's world view (model).
One trait that I've seen more with the newer 5er model series is ", but it's actually worse..." or "I said to do this and it did that instead but it was right and I was wrong." - so I assume that a larger part of what they call thinking complexity is (not to much surprise) inherently related to questioning incoming assumptions.
Indeed. It's been very funny to observe introvert geeks progressively rediscover human communication over the past 3 years.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
I have not seen this kind of Claude way of speaking in professional communications aside from PR stuff or etc. to the contrary, its often quite casual but still polite
if you're asserting Claude-like speech is how normies speak?
Claude: “lots of people enjoy lemon in their tea, but there’s a subtlety: putting it in coffee is likely to be an unpleasant experience”.
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
That hasn't been my experience, but I know what you mean. Claude in particular likes to point out "things you might not have considered" and I sometimes already have. But it tends to vindicates me more than it annoys.
I'm pretty early in my career, so I probably gain more from that sort of stuff than most people. The senior devs on my team tend to get the most frustrated with it and I think this behavior is a big part of why.
It is! Its charming. What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same. No sleepy claude, no stresses claude, no sad claude you know hes not himself this week because of some thing going on with his girlfriend or mom or whatever. Its devoid humanity, the same exact tone and expressions over and over and over.
> What claude dosnt have is an off day, its just the same.
But it... does. In some sessions it will get particularly paranoid, apologetic, self-doubtful, or suspicious. I'd say these traits are always there but they can become more or less pronounced.
(By contrast, I'd say the GPT models are much more even keeled, although I maybe haven't used them enough.)
My current pet peeve is when it said like that, but the "yes but" its contradicting is from its own talking-to-itself phase, not anything I ever said or implied.
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
Yeah this is something thats bothered me a lot recently. I'll ask "How did team A beat team B by so much?" and Claude will tell me "Actually, team B didn't win; team A won that game." I don't know how they got this thing to solve open math problems when it can't solve basic sports talk.
I actually find Claude to have become a real Debbie downer. Even when it is making things happen, it seems to have a default tone of negativity as the author is pointing out. So I’m trapped between running things by Claude which is gonna give me the more negative albeit realistic framing, and Gemini who is like the worlds biggest hypeman and absolutely loves any idea run by it.
Tech has become overwhelmingly negative in tone over the past 10-15 years. Nearly every single aspect is drowning in negativity.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
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.
> 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.
I have agents adversarially check each other. When I switched to Opus 4.8 they began arguing EXTENSIVELY with each other. My code began to fill with comments about these arguments. Reviews would fail because the argumentative comments would get stale.
My build system came crashing down with a tsunami of disagreeable text.
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 <one-liner>"
I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.
I'm pretty sure this is just the LLM "thinking out loud". For some reason even when it has thinking enabled and does a thinking step before generating output, it still has to explain what it's doing to itself in the output, which often leads to it correcting itself in the output. I've pretty much stopped letting LLMs write code directly in large part because I cannot get them to stop injecting comments talking themselves through how the code relates to the chat the prompted it in ways that no human would ever write and will make no sense to anyone re-reading the code months later.
Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.
This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.
I see this so much with Opus it is infuriating. It usually then seems to devolve into some sort of obsession that makes it almost impossible for me to complete a task. I can start a new session and try to continue to previous work and get something like "I wanted to call out an important distinction between ham and toilet water before we continue. Our current documentation couples the lack of water to its source and that's a gap I'd rather address now than ignore."
I have in claude.md and it has in it's memory that it is my thinking partner. I don't want any action until I explicitly tell it to do so. And I don't want fancy dialogs because the options disappear when you dismiss them... Just recently Claude wrote some bash and changed 3 files even though it was in Plan Mode! It's maddening sometimes. It wastes so many tokens with stuff I have explicitly told it not to do. Sometimes I'll even add to a prompt "remember we're just thinking this though".
I haven't noticed this when using Claude models in Cursor. My guess is coding task is structured, and each step has mature process, so its personality is less pronounced. My email and phone numbers were banned from Anthropic following an incident where I mistakenly purchased 5 pro subscriptions fro my team for Claude Code, and later discovered that pro does not include CC, and I thus requested a refund, and then were banned shortly after.
But after reading this line, I certainly can connect back to the general impression. That is, among all the cursor models, the output of Claude certainly matches this sentiment of "Claude thinks Humans are stupid"
Looking from a regulation perspective:
1. Frontier labs certainly produces models that reflect their own hidden biases. That's analogous to https://www.imperial.ac.uk/equality/resources/unconscious-bi... commonly identified among human organizations in their dealing of other humans (hiring, product design etc.)
2. They themselves are not willing to admit or do anything about this.
3. It's therefore effective for regulation to cover this and design objective measurements to assess such things.
103 comments
[ 316 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] threadI assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.
How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...
If it is kneejerk contrarianism how is it smarter?
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.
I also get this a lot, but almost always with "and for a stronger reason than you said", which makes it sound more like it's reinforcing me than one-upping me.
Looking through my recent transcripts, I found this pattern 12 times, with every time using "and" instead of "but".
Eg:
- "Confirmed, and it's worse than a pause quirk."
- "I think the ban is right, and it's a stronger idea than what I'd proposed."
I did find one instance with "but", but it was a genuine disagreement rather than 1-upping or presenting strengthening evidence: "I would cap it, but for a different reason than fairness."
Claude is becoming a highly capable Redditor
It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".
Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.
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, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?
Using Opus 4.7-5 is harmful for your health.
https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058?s=46
> No, it’s not about the [...]
Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.
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.
It’s simply exhausting.
It seems an artifact of local/session attention
I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.
Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
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.
For decades, they were allowed -expected even- to be weird and communicate badly with their peers, let alone third parties.
Then, a whole zoo of processes, gamifications and other shenanogans were invented just to help them show normies what was up with their work (remember the planning poker game?)...
Now, at last, those people are actually ewpected to be able to explain their constraints, document the work, be accountable for the results and generally exchange contructively... Just, well, with AIs not with humans.
if you're asserting Claude-like speech is how normies speak?
If I asked “should I try lemon in my tea and coffee?” this would be effective communication. But Claude gives answers like this for “should I try lemon in my tea?” which is just annoying.
I'm pretty early in my career, so I probably gain more from that sort of stuff than most people. The senior devs on my team tend to get the most frustrated with it and I think this behavior is a big part of why.
But it... does. In some sessions it will get particularly paranoid, apologetic, self-doubtful, or suspicious. I'd say these traits are always there but they can become more or less pronounced.
(By contrast, I'd say the GPT models are much more even keeled, although I maybe haven't used them enough.)
I know X can't do Y, that's why I never told it to have X do Y, I don't know why it feels the need to "correct" me that having X do Y is the wrong approach.
If you read the volumes of comments on AI on HN or Reddit over the past year for example, it's two things: overwhelmingly negative general, and openblah will save us from the evil oppressors.
And more broadly, the tone globally is quite negative these days and has been since the pandemic. That's the life of Claude in a timeline. It may just be reflecting more accurately the debbie downer sentiment in the air. Humanity sure seems bearish on existence.
So do its creators.
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.
I have agents adversarially check each other. When I switched to Opus 4.8 they began arguing EXTENSIVELY with each other. My code began to fill with comments about these arguments. Reviews would fail because the argumentative comments would get stale.
My build system came crashing down with a tsunami of disagreeable text.
I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.
This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.
I haven't noticed this when using Claude models in Cursor. My guess is coding task is structured, and each step has mature process, so its personality is less pronounced. My email and phone numbers were banned from Anthropic following an incident where I mistakenly purchased 5 pro subscriptions fro my team for Claude Code, and later discovered that pro does not include CC, and I thus requested a refund, and then were banned shortly after.
But after reading this line, I certainly can connect back to the general impression. That is, among all the cursor models, the output of Claude certainly matches this sentiment of "Claude thinks Humans are stupid"
Looking from a regulation perspective:
1. Frontier labs certainly produces models that reflect their own hidden biases. That's analogous to https://www.imperial.ac.uk/equality/resources/unconscious-bi... commonly identified among human organizations in their dealing of other humans (hiring, product design etc.)
2. They themselves are not willing to admit or do anything about this.
3. It's therefore effective for regulation to cover this and design objective measurements to assess such things.