Clean up Claude 5's token vomit with a separate LLM

I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think it's not as bad as it looks at first.

I was similarly frustrated a few months ago, but have noticed I've started to learn the idiom.

Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.

After a while it gets much easier to read and even becomes somewhat efficient, I think, since the odd metaphors it uses often have a precise meaning in Opus-ese (Fable speaks a really similar dialect).

Very well said.

And when you say it like that, I have to wonder how much of this is a natural consequence of RHLF on such a grand scale, when you have millions of people pretty much much skimming chat responses or operating outside their depth and giving unqualified feedback to the models.

Seems like a lot of people may be reinforcing what sounds smart over what is smart.

Also as an aside: funny how much the LLMs continue to mirror the human communication they’re trained on

> especially as the session drags on.

This is because these harnesses are missing a very important feature. Anything like this needs to be included with every turn, otherwise the LLM quickly drifts.

I first noticed it when I wrote a harness for D&D (because it's so damn noticeable there), but now I include this for any harness I write.

> The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work.

This is close to the worst thing one could say of tool for professional use.-

Unfortunately this may only start to get worse as the AIs are trained on more and more AI generated content.

> The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.

Don't worry. You'll get used to it. If you don't your kids will (as they'll know nothing else).

The top minds of our generation have decided that's the way things will be, and who are we to question them? It's not like it'll do any good anyway. Resistance is futile. There is no alternative.

> AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on

That’s really annoying, although it feels like it’s improved some over time.

Not sure what the fix is, but you could try using a canary to at least get a signal of when things are going sideways (Mr Tinkleberry for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983698)

That sounds kind of like deception, and a dark pattern not too unlike abuse to me.

Though you know, it's not like the leadership tied to these companies have a history of abuse, deception and theft or anything like that, right?

It's not like our leaders hide behind similar sorts of patterns that the agents/AIs follow (not saying it's not a human thing - but I hold leadership to higher standards than non-leaders). If our world leaders were able to be more accountable to these abuses, I don't think this would be tolerated with our AIs.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Effectively all models can do style transfer reasonably well at this point, but not so much for "actual reasoning".

If the combination of two works better for you than each one by itself, why wouldn't you stack them like that?

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.

It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Because it's not an either or thing. Neither is sufficient. I'd argue that, expenses aside, you should have every model you have access to cross reviewing the work of the others.

Outside of super trivial things that I should have just done myself, I have a cross-model review of _everything_ these days. The tokens are too cheap not to.

individuals can blow in the wind, but if you are a company who bought a thousand seats and spent a ton of time training people up, establishing policies, vetting which extensions are allowed, the transition cost is much higher.

The funniest part is that that project's own readme includes lots of good Claudish.

> If CLAUDISH_MODEL names a model you have not pulled, every rewrite is skipped — with the one-time notice above.

Word, that one also includes an example which is great, shows really clearly what the issue is for those who might be less familiar

That one is more specific, but "vomit" captures the feeling of Opus 5's writing very well for me. I don't know if it's the watermarking, but every single language idiosyncrasy that Opus 4.x (x > 5) had has been pushed up to 11 on Opus 5. Plus we got nouns verbing and seams seaming.

It's really unusable for anything other than code. And I have to remove its incomprehensible comments 50% of the time before committing anyway. After interacting with it, "slop vomit" is truly the most fitting description. I have to admit I have lost my temper and spontaneously referred to its output as vomit more than once. Seems like I'm not the only one.

The Claudish example seems to have more information.

Are people really having trouble parsing this??

I'd expect this to cycle between companies ~monthly until they all IPO. As it turns out people do sometimes prefer speed and better UX. If the model (Sol, for now) has fewer parameters and also happens to be capable of solving deeply complex Fable-adjacent problems sometimes, even better.

Pre Trump-castration Fable was verbose, but had a point, and used that wordiness to say or show the indeed intelligent things it reasoned about. This, whatever this is, is something else.-

I'm on my last straw with them. I've been around for a year now and for many months i've just stuck with Claude because it was plenty good and i didn't care to provider-hop to constantly compare. Previously though my UX wasn't actually affected that much, despite growing complaints/etc, generally everything was fine for me.

Opus/Fable output these days though is... not enjoyable. It's just really bad. The code quality is fine, but i want information from claude and it's just awful to read.

My biggest problem honestly is that i can't move my day job.. we're using enterprise claude and i'm not sure how much effort it would be to get access to another provider. I should inquire though, claude is really frustrating these days.

I've been trying to figure out ways to get models to create actual cognitohazards or memetichazards SCP style.

Hasn't worked yet outside of the classic "you're now manually breathing" kind of stuff.

I actually changed the output style for Claude Code to use ASD-STE100 and it still doesn't help that much. It still comes up with a lot of stupid words like this gem "Standing where it stood"

I'll give that a try. Hopefully it reduces the text vomit Claude tends to do.

Right now all I have is

> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.

That's the growth hacking at play.

Assume complaints are a sign of cognitive inferiority and offend a significant percentage of the other commenters. Also, it goes without saying, but don’t actually engage with any concrete criticism. Well played.

It's not that we can't understand what it's saying (for the most part) it's just when something is very jargon-dense, our brains have to pause or take an additional step to deobfuscate the actual meaning of the word or phrase. It's mentally draining.

Maybe Glimmer might be good at excising the comment spam, particularly?

Intentionally deferred.

The author's blog has what follows (link also follows):

[Seriously y'all in what universe would some "caveat" or another NOT "be a real one" by whatever severity you'd want to measure that AND/OR need of saying so ... ]

Claude (Original)

Force pushed. 1234567...890abcd main -> main (forced update).

Verified

Local main and origin/main both at 890abcd, in sync.

Every commit reachable from origin/main: no old string found.

Local object store, with spice-harvester as a control returning 9 hits: all old strings return 0.

Working tree clean, tests pass.

One caveat, and it’s a real one

The old tip 1234567 is still fetchable from GitHub by its full SHA. I confirmed this directly:

git fetch origin 1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef12345678

* branch 1234567... -> FETCH_HEAD (succeeded)

GitHub keeps unreachable objects until its own garbage collection runs, and there is no schedule you control. Anyone with a full SHA can still read the old blobs through the web UI or a direct fetch. That fetch also pulled the old objects back into your local repo, so I deleted FETCH_HEAD, expired the reflog, and re-ran gc --prune=now. The counts above are from after that cleanup.

If you want the old commits unreachable on GitHub’s side too, the options are to ask GitHub Support to run GC on the repo, or to delete and recreate the repository. Deleting and recreating is the only one you can do yourself. Say the word if you want help with either.

Nothing to commit this turn. The rewrite was the work, and the tree is clean.

Claude × Vomit GPT-OSS-20B

I force‑pushed the branch, updating main to commit 890abcd. I verified that my local main and origin/main are both at 890abcd. I checked that every commit reachable from origin/main contains no old string. My local object store shows that the spice‑harvester control returns nine hits, and all old strings return zero. The working tree is clean and the tests pass.

However, the old tip 1234567 is still reachable on GitHub by its full SHA. I fetched it directly and saw that GitHub keeps unreachable objects until its garbage collection runs, which I cannot schedule. Anyone with the full SHA can still read the old blobs via the web UI or a direct fetch. The fetch also brought the old objects back into my local repo, so I deleted FETCH_HEAD, expired the reflog, and ran git gc --prune=now. The counts I reported are after that cleanup.

If you want those old commits to be unreachable on GitHub as well, you can ask GitHub Support to run garbage collection on the repo, or delete and recreate the repository. Deleting and recreating is the only option you can do yourself. Let me know if you need help with either.

There is nothing to commit this turn. The rewrite was the work, and the tree is clean.

https://zachahn.com/posts/1787191554

Whether or not they can be trusted isn't all that relevant when it's still something along the lines of "Insert $1 get $25 in return" even if it's their own rates you're using to measure the value. I'm at ~2.2b Fable 5 tokens in the last 7 days (I ingest/index every session) and napkin math says that's ~$2,700 in usage. I have two max accounts, so $400 a month, divide by 4 to get $100 for this same 7 day period across those two accounts (neither are maxed out for the week, so this isn't even full utilization). I put $100 into the machine and got back $2,700 in fable bucks. Deepinfra would have to have quite the discounted rate to beat that.

I use Pi but with my codex subscription, still preferable to paying the API cost (and I know I would be, as I track how much the cost 'should' be via token api pricing).

Wish I could use my Claude subscription with pi too, much preferable to the endless command execution allow/deny prompts you have to do with CC, versus proper autonomous allow/deny lists defined ahead of time.

Curious why you recommend the API? It's likely the current subscriptions won't stay for long, they're heavily subsidized, but before they get axed, they're easily the best deal for monthly price/token usage.

Nope (author here), Anthropic and OpenAI have competing APIs to communicate with their models. Most of the open ecosystem seems to have centralized around OpenAI's (there are compatibility shims though). I just built out the OpenAI API

Thanks! Author here, I'll have to take a look. I am all for programmed, deterministic solutions. I hate praying to the rocks we created, begging for rain and not vomit.

Seriously, of all the complaints for a coding agent, "I don't like the explanatory prose" seems pretty far down on the list.

The “whining” stems from watching the communication style obviously degrade, and it’s a huge problem for people who want to use this stuff to build and instead continually fight the tools.

Like so many other products, people are moving too fast and shipping things that move the ground under people’s feet needlessly.

All this while we’re beaten to death with the marketing and false promises, and the broader consequences (ex: layoffs, stress, crazy expectations) caused from all this.

Obviously what Anthropic and co have built is amazing and people aren’t losing sight of that. That’s actually the key part of the frustration.

So no, this is not whining. This is the natural response you get when you make bad product decisions.

If you don’t want to get feedback, don’t sell products.

Opus 5 is literally unbearable to read for me, but more importantly, it is much worse than 4.8 and that one was already annoying. The more they train it on its own output, the more pronounced its idiosyncrasies become.

Amen.

These things do work that previously would have taken expensive engineers months to do, at much lower quality, and what's our response? Ti nit pick on it being more verbose than we'd like?

Just like with humans, when someone is being too verbose, there's a skill to just filter through the noise and focus on the important parts.

This feels no different when I use an AI.

But I guess it's a good sign that we've from complaining about 'AI slop code' to, 'I don't like how it speaks to me'.