I've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output:
Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when choosing among alternatives.
Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO.
For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.
The problem is, when the context window grows, Claude tends to forget these kinds of rules. It will then do whatever it wants. I had to outright ban comments in the global claude.md, the local claude.md AND write a hook to catch any that still slipped through.
Has Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there.
I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.
It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.
It's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was.
The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It doesn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly becomes intolerable the second I remember I'm paying for those tokens.
Fix: Just switch to OpenAI, Grok, or other LLM's. They provide better performance and respond with 5 sentences. They also don't lecture you when you get angry.
Concise mode is likely the same buzzword salad but with fewer connecting words and terser sentences. Same with Caveman. The way it writes is fundamental to how it was trained.
I wish I didn't need it, but the way Claude talks can get pretty tiresome. I've often wondered why it talks like that. Was it really trained on Buzzfeed? Is Gemini really that much better?
i hate claude writing a lot, especially after opus 4.8 and it's even worse in 5. in many cases, it feels like playing whac-a-mole and you just can't get rid of all those obvious ai writing patterns.
why do you choose gemini? imo this is a fundamental problem of all frontier ai models.
I've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output:
Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when choosing among alternatives.
Limiting the number of words is the strongest factor in cleaning up the output, IMO.
For older code I've instructed it to delete all the comments, and then I re-comment it using a new session and these guidelines, asking it to rejustify the need for every comment to itself.
The problem is, when the context window grows, Claude tends to forget these kinds of rules. It will then do whatever it wants. I had to outright ban comments in the global claude.md, the local claude.md AND write a hook to catch any that still slipped through.
Has Anthropic said anything about how or why Claude writes the way it does? So many people hate it, seems like they need to do some damage control there.
I haven't had the same problems others have but I'm also not a heavy user of it.
The brevity how it outputs words seems like they try to save on tokens delivered.
Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375996
"Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM" (github.com/zachahn)
285 points | 23 hours ago | 288 comments
It's such a sad indictment of Anthropic's product that so many people hate interacting with it. Claude is on its way to the Microsoft Teams zone of hatred.
It's pretty sad indeed. Switching to other models made me notice how weird and verbose Claude was.
The moralizing is incredibly obnoxious as well. It doesn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly becomes intolerable the second I remember I'm paying for those tokens.
Why couldn't this just be a skill that Claude and Codex could work with instead of something that has to go through Gemini, again?
bro is good
https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...
Upvoting if for nothing else than the intro paragraph to the repo. That was hilarious and so true.
Oh my gosh it drove me so nuts I switched to GLM5.3, and it was a breath of fresh air.
Fix: Just switch to OpenAI, Grok, or other LLM's. They provide better performance and respond with 5 sentences. They also don't lecture you when you get angry.
You… get angry?
Claude will end the conversation if you berate it when it screws something up.
this isn't just necessary, it's mandatory. that's the difference.
https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2090245922685063634
Haven't tried, because I have just been using 4.6 since 5 was released.
Concise mode is likely the same buzzword salad but with fewer connecting words and terser sentences. Same with Caveman. The way it writes is fundamental to how it was trained.
I wish I didn't need it, but the way Claude talks can get pretty tiresome. I've often wondered why it talks like that. Was it really trained on Buzzfeed? Is Gemini really that much better?
i hate claude writing a lot, especially after opus 4.8 and it's even worse in 5. in many cases, it feels like playing whac-a-mole and you just can't get rid of all those obvious ai writing patterns.
why do you choose gemini? imo this is a fundamental problem of all frontier ai models.