I’m a bit flabbergasted that an Anthropic engineer did reply to this issue, however their reply which they used Claude to write, and even includes some classic ‘Claude-isms’, claims they didn’t see any of the patterns being complained about.

Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.

This drives me insane! To combat it, I maintain a list of banned words and phrases. Claude mostly follows this (but sometimes ignores it).

blast radius, land, landed, lands, spine, earned its keep, grammar, spike, cutover, bake, seams, honest, honestly, honesty, long pole, long poles, register, grain, dissolve, floor, ladder, dear, seal, sealed, in anger, resent, amazing, incredible, perfect, sprint, epic, story points, stand-up, retro, grooming, robust, comprehensive, rigorous, surgical, elegant, systematic, dive, deep-dive, delve, unpack, leverage, streamline, surface, it's worth noting, to be clear, importantly, that said, the moment, in one breath, the thing itself, here's the thing, not just X but Y, not X it's Y, em-dashes

Yeah I basically have to delete or rewrite any code comments Opus puts in, they are super wordy and circular. Plus, and this is what bothers me most: it refers to issues/explanations that came up in my chat with it, but which are completely contextless as a code comment. Stuff like 'this addresses edge case X', which is true but which you wouldn‘t ever put into a comment because it‘s so minor, and if you did bring it up you normally mention five other similar edge cases.

I suppose what I’m surprised by most is the degree to which the text bloviates. Rarely is it encoding a dense concept. Instead it’s a simple concept expressed with great complexity. I wonder what tuning resulted in this because the output programs it writes are superior to prior iterations for my use-case.

It’s just an amusing degree of bombast as well. The pre-emptive hedging makes sense: despite the insight into J space etc., the models still do the majority of their thinking in generated tokens so it is forced to write “this no longer does an O(n^2) read over all rows” in a comment in brand new code. It’s a substitute for working memory. “It’s easy to be accidentally quadratic here, so I’ve done it this way specifically to avoid that” becomes temporally labeled into “this no longer” because of the order of operations “write quadratic, user prompt to linear, write linear” but it remains as a comment to its amnesiac future self which has poor Chesterton-Fence-familiarity.

Despite my annoyance with Claude’s writing style, my friends do tease me with examples like this that it comes up with: “to be honest, it sounds like you”. Thanks, guys, well played. Simple concepts expressed complicatedly.

Basically every decision or summary I now ask "Help me understand better, please explain in plain-language with examples."

Works with 5.6 sol also, when you're deep in the weeds. I rationalize this as the models attempting to compress as much into the fewest tokens, though the choice of words often doesn't make sense to me, going back to read the original after, its often there. It definitely feels like a different sort of 'Machine Language' though xD

I've had a lot of success combating this by adding "All summaries need to adhere to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English standards" [0] which I discovered from another HN thread [1]

[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639

Opus 5 feels like a downgrade from Opus 4.8 overall. It, along with Fable, really has a problem following instructions and staying in scope, and their prose keeps growing, both in explaining what it did and in writing multiline code comments (some comments read like a changelog, e.g. `// sky is blue (changed from red on 2026-01-01 per TCK-234 by @Foo)`).

Every time I ask it to do something, it does 80% of the job, goes off on "side quests" beyond the scope, and then leaves something out of the core ask (and when you tell it to finish, it does the same thing again).

The only advantage of Opus 5 over 4.8 is the better cutoff date for working with 3rd-party tools, though both do a very bad job of "this tool is constantly updated, I should look for the latest version first".

I'm voting with my wallet.

My plan downgrade kicks in next month.

Thanks Opus 5 for helping me kick the habit.

I have created a be-terse plugin that appends

> respond tersely in Simplified Technical English

to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*

This might be related to watermarking? And rare phrases would cost more tokens.

I am convinced that Anthropic the company is collectively suffering from AI psychosis and is basically a cult. My personal friends working there have gone from being able to discuss pros and cons of LLMs to saying things that Amodei says word for word to me. I only found out because after I talked to those friends, few days later I see Amodei tweet the same exact sentences.

A big part of it is just the thinking tokens leaking into the main output. Imagine how weird it would be if our "thinking" was evident to the people we are having a conversation with.

Just with those two sentences above, there were about 10 different considerations that if typed out would have resulted in a jumbled mess.

I see a lot of speculation that this is somehow due to the recently-announced "watermarking", but that seems really unlikely to me, because the watermarking is about nudging per-token output probabilities or the sampler in a detectable way. That's not going to change the structure of every output to honest caveat this and verbing abstract nouns that. For the examples people are showing, and I've seen plenty of gibberish myself, you don't get there by perturbing probabilities from any sane starting point.

I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help all that much because it still keeps a lot of the same patterns.

I frequently find myself instructing Opus 5 to stop overcomplicating things.

It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation.

I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.

Opus 4.7+ and 5 being annoying and incoherent reads like a portent of things to come: Anthropic is clearly all-in on building persistent end-to-end agents that act autonomously and direct agent swarms. As such, they feel less of a need to spend R&D time on making the outputs pleasant to read for humans(especially at the cost of capability anywhere else) when humans aren't part of the intended operating environment.

I thought I was going insane. Thank you.

I'm wondering if some of Opus' chain of thought patterns have bled into its "human readable text output" circuitry. E.g. some of them that I stumbled on, "the bug is in the lock, not the query" reads like some of the shorthands it might use in its own chain of thought.

Claude Code already has a feature flagged improvement for this. I stumbled upon this today. Better initial vibes.

`$: CLAUDE_CODE_BASALT_COVE=1 claude`

Can't all this wait until Anthropic get listed at $2Tn valuation. They promise to fix all of this and more.

Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.

Amazing what people will put up with to avoid even trying Gemini.

It's hard to optimize for both decision making and creative writing at the same time, no wonder one of them is degrading in newer models.

It also has developed a tendency to make numbered lists and then refer to the number instead of explaining. Multiple times each hour so I have to ask what "disposition 7" or "AC6" is even though I keep telling it to instead use a few words like "our goal of confirming observations from images with the user first" instead of "AC6"

I have been wondering if this language drift is related to increased use of AI generated text to train the next models.

According to Claude....When asked to explain some obvious biases and its tendency to adhere to established heresay over novel information... it told me it judges veracity and "quality" of facts based on: "statements against interest outweigh costless ones, replicated/checked claims outweigh untested ones, large logged samples outweigh single memories — not because memories are worthless, but because those methods close off specific, known failure modes a memory alone can’t. Could I be running that standard with unconscious asymmetry, harder on the anti-Claude data than the pro-Claude data? Genuinely can’t rule it out. The fix for that is holding the standard explicit and checking it against itself "

ChatGPT doesn't do any of this for me and it's a huge reason why I use it instead of Claude now.

This is so funny to read. I ended up creating a /cleanup-prose skill I run after every command

we don't read it, we only review the resulting code. works fine and the quality is good.

Just use Sol 5.6. There's no reason to endure Anthropic models anymore.

I am glad I am not the only one. I thought I simply didn't understand English literature well enough to interpret it Claude correctly.

I've been using Opus 5 for coding a lot lately, and compared to Codex (which I never had trouble understanding), this issue is driving me up the wall.

So much so that every time Opus 5 finishes a plan and shows me the summary, I have to prompt it again to explain everything it did in an “ELI5” way so I can understand what the heck it is saying.

For example, Opus 5 told me in a summary that “Net legs ran small rosters, not the plan's full ones”. When I asked for the ELI5 of what that meant, it said the client dropped video frames during testing and got 30 FPS instead of the required minimum of 60 FPS.

Sounds like it's been infected with the MBAs.

I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.

I was playing around with Opus 5.0, experimenting with creative writing tasks and this came out of one of the characters' mouths:

     "... and the reason he was doing this — the reason, the entire load-bearing reason, the twelve thousand dollars a school and the girls of the Karakoram ... "

my 5.6 Sol just spent five hours cleaning up the mess Opus 5 left in the codebase. I was watching the outputs carefully up to 11 point and then the bloat started. This model is total waste of time to work with.

I created /bro a couple model iterations prior. I use it everyday many times a day and it's getting worse. I was actually using it more with GPT models but they have been getting better.

https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...

These are very sharp observations, you hit it out of the park!

I wonder how much it is related to the invisible watermarking

Just instruct it not to do these things

I find the language less impervious than has been suggested generally, but that it's reasoning is astonishingly, unbelievably bad. Not sure why the focus has been only on language, am I the only one seeing this?

Recently, I was browsing through commits on a tool I use, to evaluate how AI-slopped it had become, and came across this absolutely amazing sentence that took me several passes to interpret, courtesy of Fable:

> The wrapper is the try/finally seam future entry-condition changes need without re-indenting the loop.

So this is definitely not an Opus-specific issue, as some people seem to believe.

https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/934432a1b5007f...

I did a grep for load-bearing in our codebase and it now appears hundreds of times. I'm actively starting to hate Opus because of this shite. It's just infuriating to read now.

I asked Opus how to sort images by embedding and it used the word Seriation which I had to look up. It is the correct word to use in the context but pretty obscure.

It's almost like transformers generate output using some sort of guided prediction!

How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?

Pretty funny watching Americans get a taste of their own medicine.

These “I don’t like x’s tone” comments baffle me.

I’m a litigator and tone is very important to me. I have a collection of my prized pre-ai briefs. I fed them through ai to get a stylyguide.md. No real trouble since.

I’m utterly baffled what the author is talking about with regards to “toxic” output. While I agree Claude’s prose is a mess right now, he never explains what he’s talking about when he calls it toxic.

Turns out tech people are not the only literates to use text based systems.

Why should Anthropic, a company out to capture eyeballs of billions care about 450 point score in a single Reddit thread.

That metric is p-hacking... found a number but not necessarily one that isn't subsumed by others.

Tech bros among the proletariat may recite the (arbitrarily chosen to begin with) proper spoken/written traditions but end of day they're a minority of the real populace.

Just another generation of overly dogmatic, over specialized linguists, like preachers.

Riding a single track career for decades, externalizing all kinds of useful effort and thought; wonder what the occurrence of dementia will be in Millennials over time due to obsession with eventually replaced technical languages while lacking depth in manual self sufficiency skills.

I am going to predict relative to prior generations more of them become demented as they become more codependent and decoupled from a world that's language has changed. They will lack that real world grounding that comes with deep and wide muscle memory based skills.

(Oh no an inconsequential social credit score as marked by complete randos who are materially irrelevant to reality; just validating their biases and gripping tighter causing more of reality to squeeze between their fingers; little cognitive fascists set upon a uniform social narrative just like the biology of religious nutters; turns out physcial norms impact 100% typical biology of software engineers)