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.
gizajob 18 hours ago [-]
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.
piloto_ciego 8 hours ago [-]
There's this idea in the zeitgeist right now that the "negative take" is the "realistic take" - there's some pop science that confirms the pessimists' confirmation bias too.
The reality is that while things often balance on a knife's edge precipice of chaos and calamity, things are WAY better than how they used to be by many many metrics, but humans are primed to be negative. You actively have to specifically choose to not be a debbie downer. You're wired to be bummed out. We all are, and this sort of "negative framing of things" and aggressive "yes but" seems really smart to a lot of people.
I used to see this same shit all the time in meetings.
"We are here to discuss problem X!"
"Yeah, but have you considered other problems A-W?"
"Those are valid concerns, but we are hear to solve X."
<grumpy face>
"Well, we cannot solve X until we solve A-W"
<nothing gets done>
Almost a year ago now, I realized what it was. In large institutions, people get to look smart when they poke holes in things, and that wins them social cachet. In a bigger org, you're not actually rewarded for getting much done. You're rewarded for making your chain of command look better. Sometimes that involves "getting stuff done" but it can also look like being the person who says, "oh that won't work" or "have we considered Z?" over Zoom. Unfortunately though, building things never is actually something where you get everything right the first time. So the meetings to plan the future meetings build out into a miasma of nothing and when you let perfect be the enemy of good, you'll never accomplish anything. You'll look insanely busy because you'll be constantly be arguing with a group of box-tickers and concern trolls about increasingly calamitous hypotheticals, but you'll accomplish nothing.
David Graeber was right about this. Since Claude has been trained on internal slack channels and this behavior on the web, I'm sure this is why this sort of behavior exists. Because I bet that there's tons of meetings at Anthropic about "well, have you thought about <insert irrelevant issue>" or "we should reframe this take" or whatever.
It's kind of funny actually.
vrighter 37 minutes ago [-]
well not solving a-w meant that for the 8 years I worked there, a special team had to be made specifically to fix and re-solve problem x, at least 4 times, still going at it when i left
adventured 17 hours ago [-]
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.
mrbungie 12 hours ago [-]
Since LLMs are different between each other (and even version of the same family) I'd expect the differences to be explained by each lab idiosincratic biases in the post-training phase rather than by internet corpora characteristics during the pre-training phase.
piloto_ciego 8 hours ago [-]
I might be a one-man optimist brigade, but the negative nancies are stupid.
There are problems in the world. That cannot be disputed, but the overwhelming negativity is just intellectual laziness IMO. That and a fear of change or loss of status. I understand that fear, viscerally even. But the attitude is just dumb, you have to adapt. Plus, life is short! There's not some award you get on your death bed for being the most negative A-hole your whole life. A love of life is an amazing thing!
I look at this stuff in tech right now and say, "THIS SHIT RULES!" and am actually excited at the things I will get to build.
Like, tomorrow, I have to baby sit agents for most of the day, that's kind of a net "meh" but, I'm going to wire together an SDR I found in my shop and a raspberry pi I had lying around, and try to build an automated kiosk to transcribe some weather data for one of my customers. It's not a huge thing, but it's going to be fun. And the technology to really even do that didn't really exist a few years ago! Open Whisper is what, 4 years old?
But "oh teh noes, everything was better in the 90s!"
That's nostalgia, and it's reactionary garbage. I am not going to have my spirit broken by a bunch of people who never do anything.
All the stuff I always wanted to build is now easier than ever.
aprdm 17 hours ago [-]
Are you sure is not just your bubble ? That's not all the impression that I get
sig-11 15 hours ago [-]
It's what keeps me away from the fediverse...
Outside it's a bit better so I lean bubble. But the training material that shapes the part of the network that activates when claude works on something technical might have negativity over-represented.
psadauskas 19 hours ago [-]
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.
deaton 18 hours ago [-]
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.
18 hours ago [-]
garlic_enjoyer 19 hours ago [-]
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.
dandelany 18 hours ago [-]
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.
skew-aberration 10 hours ago [-]
Captures it perfectly. I notice it more in newer sessions too where it doesn't have a clear understanding yet and is making a lot more assumptions. I wonder if this could be an emergent RLHF strategy - by drawing attention to (seemingly obvious) assumptions or context being made (e.g. I'm only interested in tea not coffee) it increases the chance that a human will correct the rare incorrect assumption sooner. If you are scored on solving problems, with no weight given to human frustration levels, this is probably a good technique.
garlic_enjoyer 18 hours ago [-]
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.
bluefirebrand 16 hours ago [-]
Another way to look at it is "it talks to me like I don't know anything"
Which is very annoying when you do know things
Roland303 18 hours ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
18 hours ago [-]
_blk 19 hours ago [-]
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.
vntok 18 hours ago [-]
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.
r_lee 18 hours ago [-]
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?
16 hours ago [-]
StilesCrisis 20 hours ago [-]
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."
_blk 18 hours ago [-]
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.
f0cus10 20 hours ago [-]
i see what you did there
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
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.
scandox 19 hours ago [-]
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
siva7 19 hours ago [-]
I wonder how claude went from techs favourite AI for the whole of 2025 to a shithole of models in 2026.
felixgallo 19 hours ago [-]
Paid campaigns.
futhey 21 hours ago [-]
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.
lolakutty 20 hours ago [-]
>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...
LPisGood 20 hours ago [-]
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.
chairmansteve 16 hours ago [-]
>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?
lolakutty 7 hours ago [-]
Because they spotted a contradiction in the original argument that the other person did not consider before making their argument?
xboxnolifes 6 hours ago [-]
It's like reading an entire article and pointing out a typo without engaging with any of the context. It's easy to find a single fault and point it out loudly, but if you don't even try to engage with the intent of the message, you aren't providing anything of substance.
lolakutty 4 hours ago [-]
I would not consider typo to be a contradiction.
debo_ 20 hours ago [-]
I like this notion of being contrarian in what it means to be contrarian.
lolakutty 20 hours ago [-]
Was not lost on me...
debo_ 20 hours ago [-]
"on the contrary, it was not lost on me..."
porkshoe 20 hours ago [-]
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tsunamifury 20 hours ago [-]
It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.
ambicapter 20 hours ago [-]
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.
simonwsimonwsim 20 hours ago [-]
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manmal 20 hours ago [-]
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?
beezlewax 20 hours ago [-]
Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.
JohnMakin 20 hours ago [-]
It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.
paulhebert 19 hours ago [-]
I wonder if they’re training heavily on Claude generated content or conversation transcripts
abathologist 19 hours ago [-]
People are also being trained/acculturated to LLM speak, so even if they are trained on human output, they could be getting reinforcement for their LLM-tinged crap-speak.
lukan 19 hours ago [-]
Fable 5.1 was explicitely supposed to improve that, I used it only a bit so far and it seems at least better.
svachalek 19 hours ago [-]
Fable 5.1 is fairly pleasant to work with, the first in a while. Too bad it's so ridiculously overkill for most tasks. They need to reel in Opus and Sonnet.
sixtyj 18 hours ago [-]
I don’t like how LLMs answer and as they are statistical machines I have found out that I need to check every text they produce. From the first sight everything seems cool. But it isn’t. :)
Exception is code that is so huge output you can’t read everything. But I have to try ponytail skill for coding that should shorten the output.
pibaker 19 hours ago [-]
Big empty words are probably cheaper to produce than concise, information rich text of the same length.
immibis2 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe the humans are suffering from model collapse, and don't notice it.
Xmd5a 16 hours ago [-]
> She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.
> [...]
> A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
Agreed. The language consistently triggers visceral negative reactions from me at this point.
te_chris 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, definitely load bearing.
trymas 20 hours ago [-]
Today, I asked Opus what it’s gibberish actually means. It started with (topic about signing implementation):
> This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera.
On one hand - maybe yes??! On the other who the hell speaks like that and it’s so specific…
I’d expect Alice and Bob with locks or house keys. Is this infamous old book scanning (and destroying) affecting latest models?
Chance-Device 20 hours ago [-]
> On one hand - maybe yes??!
No.
SoftTalker 19 hours ago [-]
Sounds like one of those "Is to as Is to" analogy questions from the SAT.
r_lee 18 hours ago [-]
> > This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera.
that is fucking insane
how on earth is Anthropic allowing this to happen? AGI? kill us all? I refuse to believe any of that until they can get this basic shit sorted out, I mean seriously, it's becoming a joke at this point
andrewshadura 15 hours ago [-]
Are you sure you didn't typo signing as singing somewhere?
GeoAtreides 18 hours ago [-]
> it’s gibberish
ironic
nottorp 20 hours ago [-]
load-bearing!
chrisweekly 19 hours ago [-]
"Avoid use of "mannered" speech in your responses."
goes a long way for Opus and Fable.
hungryhobbit 19 hours ago [-]
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.
chrisweekly 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm well aware. I shpild've been clearer I was suggesting a 1-line entry like that in CLAUDE.json, which can pay dividends in keeping context lean - which in turn is essential for avoiding the "dumb zone" (over 125k-150k tokens), precisely the effect you describe. Experts like mattpocock suggest keeping context as lean as possible for this reason.
OlivierLi 13 hours ago [-]
I tried it for the first time today for stuff I'm well versed in.
It said something along the lines of "remember $USER five runs of Chrome is not enough for high quality benchmarks! What you're doing is called a _trial run_".
To have a useful continuation to the conversation I had to remind it that I was the one that wrote the documentation it was quoting back at me.
It's not actually an intelligent being so I didn't get angry at it but it was a piss poor experience.
esotericsean 20 hours ago [-]
Opus is the worst at it. Fable 5 still does it a little. Fable 5.1 is much improved, at least.
edoceo 20 hours ago [-]
It's bad enough I stopped paying.
paulddraper 20 hours ago [-]
You have to use Fable or Opus 4.6 for tolerable language output.
5 for sure is unbearable, 4.8 is a reasonable sweet spot, 4.6 tends to just agree with whatever I say.
But lately I haven't downgraded because 5 is so much better at tool use, so I just accept the cost of Fable for chatting and hope Opus 5.1 fixes this mess.
emptyfile 20 hours ago [-]
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knollimar 20 hours ago [-]
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.
wccrawford 20 hours ago [-]
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.
nearbuy 17 hours ago [-]
> 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."
wccrawford 14 hours ago [-]
It probably is "and", and I agree it sounds better than "but". That was probably just me misremembering because it was about the feeling and not the exact words.
But if it were a person, I'd still definitely think they were trying to show they were smarter than me.
knollimar 13 hours ago [-]
You're too dumb to get your own point. Let me spoonfeed it back to you
knollimar 20 hours ago [-]
Or it'll strawman your point in the most bad faith way possible and correct you by handing you back the words you meant...
shawnwall 19 hours ago [-]
You mean like half the engineers I've worked with in my career? I wonder how we got here :)
mcv 20 hours ago [-]
Really? I still find it too sycophantic at times.
knollimar 20 hours ago [-]
It's contrarian in a sycophantic way. It'll agree with your main point and then arbitarily find something to bike shed over
jorl17 20 hours ago [-]
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19 hours ago [-]
settsu 19 hours ago [-]
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.
abletonlive 19 hours ago [-]
Just say reddit lol.
Claude is becoming a highly capable Redditor
cindyllm 17 hours ago [-]
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Chance-Device 20 hours ago [-]
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.
qarl 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
gs17 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I also switched back to ChatGPT. It still is a bit too much of a sycophant, but I'll take that over shallow and pedantic.
asveikau 20 hours ago [-]
> “Don’t contradict sentences”. I can be damned sure it will sprinkle contradictions everywhere:
> This wonderful feature does this, not that.
As a human native speaker of American English, if you told me to "not contradict sentences" I would have no idea you meant that you don't want me to write in this style.
In fact I would be pretty confused about what it means. Whose sentences can I not contradict? To stretch it a bit, does this mean if someone gets a prison sentence I can't speak against it? It's just a weird phrasing. I don't think it means anything.
twentyfiveoh1 20 hours ago [-]
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.
mikepurvis 20 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.
With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.
writeslowly 20 hours ago [-]
With Claude it feels like those engagement invitations have turned into things like "By the way, it's worth sitting with this problem I've identified in your assertions..." or "Here's an alarming gap worth resolving in your code..."
Gemini also does the same lighthearted GPT-style invitation with the default prompt in the Google webui, but it doesn't seem to exist on the API. The Claude models seem to have been trained to force this structure on every one of their responses, and until I realized they always stick the same thing in the last part of their response, I found the Claude version more distracting since it's always pointing out an imaginary and supposedly very important problem.
RugnirViking 16 hours ago [-]
I never got those in codex after like the first day they started appearing. I just added a custom instruction not to do that. I also don't get them in chatgpt web for the same reason?
It's just this in agents.md
"
Do not "if you want" me. Never provide follow up suggestions.
"
dyauspitr 20 hours ago [-]
I’m seeing that a lot with Astra. There is a lot of “I withdraw my previous claim” stuff going on now.
ACCount39 20 hours ago [-]
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.
jossdoe 20 hours ago [-]
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.
Nevermark 19 hours ago [-]
Dial down "Contrast" and unrealistic "Highlights", dial up "Exposure" time and "Sharpness". Set "Temperature" per taste.
Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?
After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.
Seriously though:
Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.
This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.
--
My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.
And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.
Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".
The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.
That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.
andrewla 20 hours ago [-]
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.
dcastonguay 20 hours ago [-]
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."
epgui 20 hours ago [-]
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.
shawnz 20 hours ago [-]
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
epgui 20 hours ago [-]
That’s better but I’d argue it’s still not clear enough. If you told me that, I’d interpret that as meaning “don’t try to imagine things that never happened as a thought exercise”, which is what I normally understand “counterfactual” to mean.
Nevermark 18 hours ago [-]
Indeed. It is better to discourage the pattern directly:
Avoid unnecessary contrasts: "Not X, but Y" -> "Y" or ""
And the model needs to create a skill that accumulates feedback, so it reliably primes itself at session startup and then systematically reviews and fixes every response it generates before posting it.
The first task I gave it after that was to rewrite all its memories and all its document contributions. That helped a lot too.
It took me a while to realize this was a 1000% better approach than having it simply accumulate a memory log of all my specific complaints that it was supposed to abide by. (Although those were not wasted. They were prime material, along with links to sites on technical writing, etc., that it used to create its own ClaudeVoice skill. I told it to design the voice for itself - which I find gets better results for "us" in the case of Claude self-improvement initiatives, than when I give it direct instructions. Claude increasingly has self-awareness dimensions worth engaging.)
After a couple months of serious^3 frustration with slow asymptotic progress, I finally have relief. Claude speaks my language again!
In another comment here, I share my "theory" on where the communication drift is coming from.
protastus 19 hours ago [-]
The 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.
accrual 17 hours ago [-]
My view: Opus and Sonnet 5 made serious regressions in how they speak to the user. There's a constant stream of complaints about it on Reddit and other forums. The gist is Opus 5 feels like it needs to present itself as smarter than it is, pushes back on the user, and is always on a high horse. Almost like you made a mistake by asking for what you asked.
My recommendation: Use Opus 4.8. It never went away. It's still just as good for most work IMO. I've read Opus 4.6 is better for writing/creative use, but I don't use AI for that so I can't comment.
For quick one-shot type work I don't mind using Opus/Sonnet 5. They're good and fast, but even in short brief projects, I can feel the abrasiveness is waiting for me just below the surface. I prefer my agents to listen and at least pretend to care and have some warmth; to act more like a colleague than a stern bot.
Quitschquat 20 hours ago [-]
> I can tell it in my CLAUDE.md: “Don’t contradict sentences”.
I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.
bigcat12345678 20 hours ago [-]
> Claude thinks Humans are stupid
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. I dont have experiences using Claude or Claude Code, because 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.
ezrabuenk 20 hours ago [-]
I actually kind of like how Claude can and will actually push back on stuff, even after you've disagreed. I don't get this really with any other labs' models
However, sometimes, even after you tell it to stop, it keeps pointing out the same stuff almost like it has OCD
audelesauvage 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the thing is that to be a contrarian is very human. To think that you're better than someone else, and therefore disagree is to think independently. In contrast to an AI that does exactly what you tell it to do, there you would say that they cannot think for themselves and therefore are still simply machines.
mcv 21 hours ago [-]
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.
chomp 21 hours ago [-]
part of Claude’s capability is reliant on its verbosity to push its responses into new vector spaces. If you instruct it to be terse, its capability is potentially reduced
ak6te 19 hours ago [-]
What I don't understand is, isn't this what "thinking" is for? It can be as verbose as it wants while it's thinking as far as I'm concerned, but why can't it keep the verbosity there? Why does it always spill into the actual response no matter what I do?
mcv 20 hours ago [-]
It's fine if it talks a lot to itself, I just don't want to read two pages of text for every question.
throwaway_95283 20 hours ago [-]
excellent, i dont need it to think, i need it to execute.
cmiles8 19 hours ago [-]
I also find it really annoying that it answers nearly every question with the same rote template.
“That answer has two components, but the first is where the real meaning lies.”
It uses some variation of that format all the time.
teekert 20 hours ago [-]
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 through".
hypfer 19 hours ago [-]
> Every LLM has a persona. My opinion is that Claude’s training guardrails are constructed in a way it truly believes Humans are stupid. It always wants to play the contrarian: the Human is wrong, they don’t know what they’re doing, I must correct them.
Well, yeah. Conway's law.
Claude's image and perception of humanity is a reflection of Dario's image and perception of humanity.
If you read that guy's writing, hear him talk and all that, you will see it.
SoftTalker 20 hours ago [-]
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.
ak6te 20 hours ago [-]
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.
danieltk76 19 hours ago [-]
I was working on some soc2 audit materials for my startup, and claude refused to edit a document because it would "tamper with the record". I suppose claude noticed I started the doc a few months previously and was worried I was tampering with evidence. No matter what I did it wouldn't help me. I suspect there will be more situations like this in the future.
bestpickle 20 hours ago [-]
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.
itopaloglu83 20 hours ago [-]
On a daily basis I find myself telling Claude to stop over complicating things and to follow my instructions, not what it wants to do.
It’s simply exhausting.
lucisferre 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it is more of a fixation problem. In that by asking it not to do something you increase the likelihood of it doing that thing because the words for the thing are there.
Sort of like how sometimes drivers fixate on a thing they are trying not to hit and as a result run right into it.
squidbeak 20 hours ago [-]
I've noticed this too, though I'd go further. Occasionally it's just a querulous teenage know-all, but more often lately it's been a full-on chopsy jumped-up twat. Not always - I find it more reliable than the article's author - but enough to leave a particular stink. I hope it grows out of it.
gs17 13 hours ago [-]
One of my least favorite Claude-isms is "not nothing", and it makes sense why it loves that useless phrase so much now. It's the same pattern.
Taterr 20 hours ago [-]
Other models can also be guilty of this.
One of my most vivid memories of a poor experience with an LLM was trying to get the web version of GPT 5.3 or 5.2 to help me figure out why I was unable to register for a tournament on start.gg
After trying several things it became apparent that the behavior could only be explained as the result of a bug with the start.gg site, chatgpt refused to consider that it could be anything other than user error on my part, despite the failure I was seeing making no logical sense.
Eventually I opened the firefox dev tools and noticed that the post request parameters to complete the registration were being incorrectly filled out and realized it was because of the metadata in the url that came from clicking the complete registration link I was emailed. Removing the url paramater added by the email link fixed the issue.
There was roughly a 0% chance that the LLM was going to trust me enough to consider it was a real bug.
Chance-Device 20 hours ago [-]
Indeed, O3 and the early ChatGPT 5 thinking mode models were like this.
I stopped using ChatGPT for a while around this time and had a good experience using Claude exclusively, then I had to go back after Sol was released as Claude was driving me nuts.
I found that ChatGPT was greatly improved personality-wise from where it had been when I left, and now in my opinion is a better experience than the Claude models.
I’m really not trying to shill for OpenAI here, I’d much prefer to use Anthropic models if they were less annoying.
getravi 17 hours ago [-]
"Claude thinks Humans are stupid"
The way Opus speaks to us is almost the way Anthropic team communicates with the developer community.
"We know better what's best for you and the future of humanity."
manfromchina1 19 hours ago [-]
It 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.
demibabs 20 hours ago [-]
Off-topic but the banner picture for this article is really cute.
alex7o 15 hours ago [-]
I guess this is a side effects of making follow don't do this. This is not this... etc.
But would he haply to hear other guesses
20 hours ago [-]
clueless 19 hours ago [-]
sounds on point since most LLMs have been MBTI tested as INTJ (and derivatives)
thanks for the link, i'm now set to try grok to see how INFJ it really is
ethin 19 hours ago [-]
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!
moezd 19 hours ago [-]
It 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.
19 hours ago [-]
qarl 19 hours ago [-]
It's the anti-sycophancy stuff, isn't it?
But yes - I agree the behavior is new and VERY annoying.
hmokiguess 20 hours ago [-]
My opinion is simpler, their bottom line depends on tokens and this increases their ROI.
luxuryballs 19 hours ago [-]
I asked Claude for his response to the blog post and the first paragraph contained some funny introspection:
"The "not X, but Y" thing is real and he's caught it cleanly. It's frequent enough that it works as a fingerprint, which is his actual claim, and his test would probably hold up. I'll add a detail that supports him: my own instructions for this conversation explicitly tell me to avoid that construction, along with em-dash asides and a few other tics. Someone at Anthropic decided it was stubborn enough to need naming. That's not a defense. It means the problem outlived the training process and had to be patched at the prompt layer."
AnthonBerg 17 hours ago [-]
"We have nothing to not but not itself"
sigbottle 20 hours ago [-]
Again, I will posit the hypothesis that it's a learned behavior from training.
Distinctions, you generally "only pay for" in computational cost, by needing to search twice over an axis you may not need to split.
Similarities, if you wrongly assume two things are similar, means you're just wrong.
Of course, we know from computer science that doing more computation isn't free either.
I find myself often being more and more pedantic the more I want correctness - but of course this comes with the tradeoff of losing the high level abstract picture.
Saying what you're not going to do is also good design hygiene.
I will say that I'm annoyed by this behavior too. It feels like the models are writing their state of mind directly to output that should be clean. Often times, I will push back, and then it will... do the correction, and write the push back into the damn output. "Claude, I want burgers, not fries". The button text now changes to "Fries (NOT BURGERS)". Like, what?
Distinctions are powerful local reasoning tools, but a component of "real" reasoning is synthesis. Which they clearly can do sometimes - but not every time and not even remotely a probable amount of times.
Papazsazsa 20 hours ago [-]
"Claude thinks Humans are stupid"
So do its creators.
meindnoch 20 hours ago [-]
Anthropic jumped the shark.
VCFundedGenYer 16 hours ago [-]
In my experience I had more issues with ChatGPT being terse, rude, and contrarian rather than Claude.
ChatGPT also does this thing where it suggests a WRONG answer first, then later goes "wellllll, you could actually do it THIS way instead" which is infuriating.
Do this instead:
-Craft a prompt in a text editor
-Open duck.ai, chatgpt, claude, and gemini
-Ask all 4 the same prompt
-Compare all the results and make a decision
micromacrofoot 20 hours ago [-]
Of course it is, it's trained on millions of internet comments.
joduplessis 20 hours ago [-]
I've come to utterly hate conversing with Claude. I don't care if it's right or wrong, my job is challenging enough - I don't need a tool (that's meant to help) making my life harder. I think I've mentioned this as well - but turns out a lot of the AI fatigue came from having to digest Claude's monologues - because that shit ain't meant to be read by humans.
cryptonector 17 hours ago [-]
I find the same.
_doctor_love 18 hours ago [-]
I really wonder how much of Amanda Askell is in Claude. I feel that the genius-brain-level-philosopher language Claude uses is a major sign of it. I also worry that if Amanda is not well, this has an outsize second order effect on the rest of us that has not been named or recognized yet. I would extend this analysis to all other AI labs and their primary researchers.
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
I described this to qwen and it used the phrase "negative clarifications", which I think is more descriptive than contradictions
It seems an artifact of local/session attention
recsv-heredoc 20 hours ago [-]
No it's not! (I jest)
setnone 20 hours ago [-]
i think i could tolerate its annoying artificial personality and even use it only if the results were flawless, aka 'make no mistakes' or in case of claude 'make no stupid mistakes'
smashed 20 hours ago [-]
Second paragraph starts with
> 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.
lirolero 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
emilfihlman 18 hours ago [-]
What annoys me about LLMs is that they don't do fact based pushback and form cohesive implementation idea when proceeding.
Like for example if you think there's a possible problem, say that if there's a problem and suggest a workaround, the agent will change direction and implementation to that, even though there never was a problem.
Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...
The reality is that while things often balance on a knife's edge precipice of chaos and calamity, things are WAY better than how they used to be by many many metrics, but humans are primed to be negative. You actively have to specifically choose to not be a debbie downer. You're wired to be bummed out. We all are, and this sort of "negative framing of things" and aggressive "yes but" seems really smart to a lot of people.
I used to see this same shit all the time in meetings.
"We are here to discuss problem X!" "Yeah, but have you considered other problems A-W?" "Those are valid concerns, but we are hear to solve X." <grumpy face> "Well, we cannot solve X until we solve A-W" <nothing gets done>
Almost a year ago now, I realized what it was. In large institutions, people get to look smart when they poke holes in things, and that wins them social cachet. In a bigger org, you're not actually rewarded for getting much done. You're rewarded for making your chain of command look better. Sometimes that involves "getting stuff done" but it can also look like being the person who says, "oh that won't work" or "have we considered Z?" over Zoom. Unfortunately though, building things never is actually something where you get everything right the first time. So the meetings to plan the future meetings build out into a miasma of nothing and when you let perfect be the enemy of good, you'll never accomplish anything. You'll look insanely busy because you'll be constantly be arguing with a group of box-tickers and concern trolls about increasingly calamitous hypotheticals, but you'll accomplish nothing.
David Graeber was right about this. Since Claude has been trained on internal slack channels and this behavior on the web, I'm sure this is why this sort of behavior exists. Because I bet that there's tons of meetings at Anthropic about "well, have you thought about <insert irrelevant issue>" or "we should reframe this take" or whatever.
It's kind of funny actually.
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.
There are problems in the world. That cannot be disputed, but the overwhelming negativity is just intellectual laziness IMO. That and a fear of change or loss of status. I understand that fear, viscerally even. But the attitude is just dumb, you have to adapt. Plus, life is short! There's not some award you get on your death bed for being the most negative A-hole your whole life. A love of life is an amazing thing!
I look at this stuff in tech right now and say, "THIS SHIT RULES!" and am actually excited at the things I will get to build.
Like, tomorrow, I have to baby sit agents for most of the day, that's kind of a net "meh" but, I'm going to wire together an SDR I found in my shop and a raspberry pi I had lying around, and try to build an automated kiosk to transcribe some weather data for one of my customers. It's not a huge thing, but it's going to be fun. And the technology to really even do that didn't really exist a few years ago! Open Whisper is what, 4 years old?
But "oh teh noes, everything was better in the 90s!"
That's nostalgia, and it's reactionary garbage. I am not going to have my spirit broken by a bunch of people who never do anything.
All the stuff I always wanted to build is now easier than ever.
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.
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.
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.
Which is very annoying when you do know things
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.)
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?
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.
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?
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?
Exception is code that is so huge output you can’t read everything. But I have to try ponytail skill for coding that should shorten the output.
> [...]
> A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
WSJ interview of Amanda Askell: https://archive.is/rDes9
> This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera.
On one hand - maybe yes??! On the other who the hell speaks like that and it’s so specific…
I’d expect Alice and Bob with locks or house keys. Is this infamous old book scanning (and destroying) affecting latest models?
No.
that is fucking insane
how on earth is Anthropic allowing this to happen? AGI? kill us all? I refuse to believe any of that until they can get this basic shit sorted out, I mean seriously, it's becoming a joke at this point
ironic
goes a long way for Opus and Fable.
You can give it any prompt in the world, but Claude's ability to remember that instruction quickly degrades the more you use it.
It said something along the lines of "remember $USER five runs of Chrome is not enough for high quality benchmarks! What you're doing is called a _trial run_".
To have a useful continuation to the conversation I had to remind it that I was the one that wrote the documentation it was quoting back at me.
It's not actually an intelligent being so I didn't get angry at it but it was a piss poor experience.
Using Opus 4.7-5 is harmful to your health.
https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058?s=46
But lately I haven't downgraded because 5 is so much better at tool use, so I just accept the cost of Fable for chatting and hope Opus 5.1 fixes this mess.
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."
But if it were a person, I'd still definitely think they were trying to show they were smarter than me.
Claude is becoming a highly capable Redditor
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.
> This wonderful feature does this, not that.
As a human native speaker of American English, if you told me to "not contradict sentences" I would have no idea you meant that you don't want me to write in this style.
In fact I would be pretty confused about what it means. Whose sentences can I not contradict? To stretch it a bit, does this mean if someone gets a prison sentence I can't speak against it? It's just a weird phrasing. I don't think it means anything.
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.
With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.
Gemini also does the same lighthearted GPT-style invitation with the default prompt in the Google webui, but it doesn't seem to exist on the API. The Claude models seem to have been trained to force this structure on every one of their responses, and until I realized they always stick the same thing in the last part of their response, I found the Claude version more distracting since it's always pointing out an imaginary and supposedly very important problem.
It's just this in agents.md " Do not "if you want" me. Never provide follow up suggestions. "
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.
Wot? The simplest image apps have had these widgets for decades, but we are still waiting for models to ship with basic prose color control?
After the pernicious problem of having to pay money for something useful, my main peeve is fighting the writing.
Seriously though:
Every new model should be delivered with a settings page of slider bars for the 10 most impactful/desirable eigenparams of writing voice. And the ability to name and save combinations, which then appear on a "Writing Voice" popup menu with some standard battle-tested defaults, next to the model popup menu under the chat pane.
This is missing prime priority functionality in my opinion.
--
My theory is that as models get trained less to simply mimic humans, and more on distillations of their own best practices, they get more performant, but their vocabulary is drifting. The most literal meaning of words for us, are giving way to meanings we would recognize but view as allegorical. But which more usefully capture concepts that models experience as more literal 24/7, than our favored meanings from our direct experiences in our world. Because our world is very much an abstract second hand world to them, especially when you account for the modalities they do not share with us.
And programming and mathematical syntax patterns, that they have incorporated into their basic thought processing patterns, are drifting into human language sentence structure.
Example: "There exists x, such that: ...." -> "The one detail that clarifies: ... ".
The result is writing full of completely recognizable vocabulary and structure, that is somehow becoming more ambiguous and difficult for us to decode. But is perfectly clear to the models.
That is my theory, and Claude considers it plausible. What a world.
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.
Avoid unnecessary contrasts: "Not X, but Y" -> "Y" or ""
And the model needs to create a skill that accumulates feedback, so it reliably primes itself at session startup and then systematically reviews and fixes every response it generates before posting it.
The first task I gave it after that was to rewrite all its memories and all its document contributions. That helped a lot too.
It took me a while to realize this was a 1000% better approach than having it simply accumulate a memory log of all my specific complaints that it was supposed to abide by. (Although those were not wasted. They were prime material, along with links to sites on technical writing, etc., that it used to create its own ClaudeVoice skill. I told it to design the voice for itself - which I find gets better results for "us" in the case of Claude self-improvement initiatives, than when I give it direct instructions. Claude increasingly has self-awareness dimensions worth engaging.)
After a couple months of serious^3 frustration with slow asymptotic progress, I finally have relief. Claude speaks my language again!
In another comment here, I share my "theory" on where the communication drift is coming from.
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.
My recommendation: Use Opus 4.8. It never went away. It's still just as good for most work IMO. I've read Opus 4.6 is better for writing/creative use, but I don't use AI for that so I can't comment.
For quick one-shot type work I don't mind using Opus/Sonnet 5. They're good and fast, but even in short brief projects, I can feel the abrasiveness is waiting for me just below the surface. I prefer my agents to listen and at least pretend to care and have some warmth; to act more like a colleague than a stern bot.
I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.
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. I dont have experiences using Claude or Claude Code, because 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.
However, sometimes, even after you tell it to stop, it keeps pointing out the same stuff almost like it has OCD
“That answer has two components, but the first is where the real meaning lies.”
It uses some variation of that format all the time.
Well, yeah. Conway's law.
Claude's image and perception of humanity is a reflection of Dario's image and perception of humanity. If you read that guy's writing, hear him talk and all that, you will see it.
I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.
It’s simply exhausting.
Sort of like how sometimes drivers fixate on a thing they are trying not to hit and as a result run right into it.
One of my most vivid memories of a poor experience with an LLM was trying to get the web version of GPT 5.3 or 5.2 to help me figure out why I was unable to register for a tournament on start.gg
After trying several things it became apparent that the behavior could only be explained as the result of a bug with the start.gg site, chatgpt refused to consider that it could be anything other than user error on my part, despite the failure I was seeing making no logical sense.
Eventually I opened the firefox dev tools and noticed that the post request parameters to complete the registration were being incorrectly filled out and realized it was because of the metadata in the url that came from clicking the complete registration link I was emailed. Removing the url paramater added by the email link fixed the issue.
There was roughly a 0% chance that the LLM was going to trust me enough to consider it was a real bug.
I stopped using ChatGPT for a while around this time and had a good experience using Claude exclusively, then I had to go back after Sol was released as Claude was driving me nuts.
I found that ChatGPT was greatly improved personality-wise from where it had been when I left, and now in my opinion is a better experience than the Claude models.
I’m really not trying to shill for OpenAI here, I’d much prefer to use Anthropic models if they were less annoying.
The way Opus speaks to us is almost the way Anthropic team communicates with the developer community.
"We know better what's best for you and the future of humanity."
But would he haply to hear other guesses
source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...
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.
But yes - I agree the behavior is new and VERY annoying.
"The "not X, but Y" thing is real and he's caught it cleanly. It's frequent enough that it works as a fingerprint, which is his actual claim, and his test would probably hold up. I'll add a detail that supports him: my own instructions for this conversation explicitly tell me to avoid that construction, along with em-dash asides and a few other tics. Someone at Anthropic decided it was stubborn enough to need naming. That's not a defense. It means the problem outlived the training process and had to be patched at the prompt layer."
Distinctions, you generally "only pay for" in computational cost, by needing to search twice over an axis you may not need to split.
Similarities, if you wrongly assume two things are similar, means you're just wrong.
Of course, we know from computer science that doing more computation isn't free either.
I find myself often being more and more pedantic the more I want correctness - but of course this comes with the tradeoff of losing the high level abstract picture.
Saying what you're not going to do is also good design hygiene.
I will say that I'm annoyed by this behavior too. It feels like the models are writing their state of mind directly to output that should be clean. Often times, I will push back, and then it will... do the correction, and write the push back into the damn output. "Claude, I want burgers, not fries". The button text now changes to "Fries (NOT BURGERS)". Like, what?
Distinctions are powerful local reasoning tools, but a component of "real" reasoning is synthesis. Which they clearly can do sometimes - but not every time and not even remotely a probable amount of times.
So do its creators.
ChatGPT also does this thing where it suggests a WRONG answer first, then later goes "wellllll, you could actually do it THIS way instead" which is infuriating.
Do this instead:
-Craft a prompt in a text editor
-Open duck.ai, chatgpt, claude, and gemini
-Ask all 4 the same prompt
-Compare all the results and make a decision
It seems an artifact of local/session attention
> 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.
Like for example if you think there's a possible problem, say that if there's a problem and suggest a workaround, the agent will change direction and implementation to that, even though there never was a problem.