"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

usui•about 1 hour ago

I've had to make the same request multiple times recently. Has anyone noticed it getting worse with the more recent models? It reminds me of when someone is trying to convince you of their intelligence by replacing simple and straightforward explanations with words pulled out of a thesaurus, so maybe that's the objective of these more recent iterations. Throwback to grade school.

rzk•about 2 hours ago

An interesting solution suggested in the replies (https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2081534245370314816):

    The fix for this is to say: only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

More info about it here: Simplified Technical English - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

dizhn•5 minutes ago

Nice. It sounds like doing a few passes on industrial product documentation with this might be beneficial.

chantepierre•about 3 hours ago

I've had "tractable beachhead" a bit earlier today. Like in "the tractable beachhead was the coupling between X and Y".

A bit of googling did not help me, I have no idea what this is even supposed to mean.

sdwr•about 2 hours ago

Tractable is solvable, the opposite of intractable, and a beachhead is a landing point for an invasion.

A tractable beachhead is a solvable first chunk of work that sets you up for the rest of the project

chantepierre•about 2 hours ago

Thanks. This is the first time I encounter the word "beachhead", and googling a bit made me indeed saw something related to an invasion. But I was so annoyed by the claudeisms that I closed the tab and just asked it to rephrase instead of trying to make another step towards its vocabulary.

ButlerianJihad•about 2 hours ago

The art of rhetoric and human communication involves knowing your audience, and when using idioms and metaphors, you choose those which are shared in common to be immediately recognizable and impactful.

When I was 19, I had a psychologist who employed a lot of baseball idioms. "We'll touch base next week..." and although I am not a baseball fan, my father is, and we're all Americans, and so the baseball references were well-understood by his audience of one.

When an LLM starts going off about a "tractable beachhead" that behavior indicates that it's unaware of its audience, and also ignorant of how to put together a human idiom. That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation, and also explainable by dudes on Hacker News, but that wasn't the point of the comment.

The point is that the LLM's audience wasn't a veteran of D-Day in WWII, and even with an understanding of what those words mean individually, neither he nor I recognized "tractable beachhead" as a meaningful idiom for speakers of standard English.

bennettnate5•about 2 hours ago

> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation

I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

veganmosfet•about 2 hours ago

Tangentially, Opus-5 is the first model to understand my (bad) jokes: "Site refuses non-curl user agents (joke 266 status)." [0]

[0] https://itmeetsot.eu/posts/2026-07-27-opus5/

rzk•about 3 hours ago

Damn, I've been telling the same thing to Claude, good to know I'm not alone. I've also noticed that Opus 5 is much worse in this regard than Fable.

It's as if the model is speaking Mentalese, or in some "bag of concepts" language.

nephihaha•about 3 hours ago

It reminds me of the PoMo jargon generator. See some results here:

https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

Havoc•about 2 hours ago

Looks like pure hallucinations just in a more poetic sophisticated register?

feverzsj•about 3 hours ago

They scan too many classical literature.

jappgar•about 2 hours ago

Or have too few programmers read classical literature?

TacticalCoder•about 2 hours ago

Do they scan too many classical literature or does classical literature happen to love metaphors and allegories, which are basically weights/patterns?

"Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."

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