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.

Yep. Same here. I frequently tell agents things like "answer using only a single sentence" and "write no more than 10 words". They are excellent at writing code, so have them write code (and not English prose). Besides, most of the time we want them to make reusable software that doesn't require users (or future agents) to read too much text. Software should generally just work and do the obvious thing, without needing verbose explanation.

It's easiest to explain this while anthropomorphizing the model, I know some folks here hate that, sorry about that. I heard an interesting diagnosis for why Claude does this: the output is a compressed version of its thought traces, very dense because the model is under pressure to use as few tokens as it can and to pack as much (for accuracy) of its concepts into the output.

One of the reasons that "don't do X" type of instructions work reliably is because you are telling the model "don't think of a pink elephant". There's also Anthropic's related research that shows that when you tell a model "don't do X", and it does X later for whatever reason, it starts acting more misaligned. This is because it thinks "well, I guess I am the sort of model that disobeys instructions, whatever" - this was specifically about cheating on tests, but you can imagine this happens in other contexts as well like following instructions on what kinds of text to output.

So, what you want to do is to avoid telling Claude "don't do X", and tell Claude "in your thoughts, in memories and various notes that you write, use your Claude-ese. In your output to humans, translate everything into long full sentences."

If anyone's interested, I can share my Claude Code output style that reflects this.

(Hi Adnan! Long time! (Adnan is an ex-coworker))

I pruned my Claude.md and it made a difference. There were entries there that evolved from earlier models and Opus 5 could be reacting to it in a different manner.

They say you aren't interacting with an LLM or a model, but the character that the LLM is playing - the "always be positive and helpful software engineer"

They added a config option to Claude Code to make the output concise, and promised more comprehensive improvements.

I did not see an explanation though.

The brevity how it outputs words seems like they try to save on tokens delivered.

Producing more tokens means charging more money to solve a given task.

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 didn't seem so bad at first, but it instantly became intolerable the second I remembered I was paying for those tokens.

I think it would happen with any persona that Anthropic chose. I enjoyed the bouncy, optimistic style at first. I've since grown to hate it.

Anthropic has explicitly chosen to anthropomorphize the model. It's kind of in their mission statement. It's most noticed once you walk away for a while and use models/agents/harnesses that haven't pushed as hard on this. Codex/Sol rarely uses personal pronouns and basically no superlatives. It has its own verbal ticks, but I hate them less?

They should run a focus group!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08WmKiwcSs

Simply untrue. You think everyone is complaining about this because the ones complaining are the only people commenting. The vast majority of people using Claude don't really care or even notice this one way or another. Sure among those who are irritated by it, it's good to have some ways to mitigate it, but I highly doubt Anthropic is going to devote much resources to an issue that affects a vocal minority.

How does it help prevent distillation?

This is the load bearing comment, and it cuts more deeply than you thought.

Let me ground my answer so I'm not just guessing. The blast radius of this change is significant and requires careful surgery to get right.

It's clear now and there's two options going forward: A. Use this tool OP suggested B. Rewrite the Internet from the ground up without this clear contradiction in place - 3-5 days

I recommend B and started 3 subagents to read all the code before I get started. I'll wait for them to finish.

The answer is in TFA.

bro is good

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

not for coding.