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Read the room Anthropic. Maybe don’t use AI to reply to a thread complaining about how AI output is hard to read.
> it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it.
https://x.com/tszzl/status/2051045196260167790
Now that's a fascinating thought - an AI taking over companies by influencing hiring decisions. If the first filter on applications is run by an ambitious AI, such a takeover would be quite possible. Just picking people who tend to do what the AI tells them would, over time, be enough.
People have been thinking of a robot revolution or Skynet as being the threat. The real threat might simply be AIs slowly putting people in power who tend to do what AIs tell them.
Has anyone ever seen a science fiction story with that plot?
End of line.
Whether those orders are from a person, a radio/telegram message or an AI output wouldn't really matter.
Edit to add: Charlies Angels and Mission Impossible are two shows where the protagonists get instructions from a faceless controller. That could easily be a TTS from an AI.
I wonder if he manually directed CC to write a response, or if even that part is autonomous.
And what he wrote is that he could not reproduce the issue with short questions, and that he assigned it to the model team, since it's likely not caused by Claude Code.
i wonder what percent of the average anthropic employee's day is spent interacting with claude
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235#issuec...
Jesus Christ, this engineer wrote a two sentence response with Claude.
I bet the prompt is longer than that.
And as the product lead for Claude Code it also makes sense that he dogfoods the tool wherever possible, such as triaging and replying to issues.
They have absolutely no reason to take such complaints seriously when the complainers are so dependent on their product, they can't even complain without it. Think reading AI slop is unpleasant? Great, just stop generating more AI slop, it's easy. But that's not going to happen. These people probably need to ask Claude how to tie their shoelaces every morning.
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
I mean more and more training data you find on the web is generated by previous models. The only reliable way to find human-generated text is to find text written before 2022, and they've used up all of that already. And AFAIU, these companies are using more and more synthetic data or semi-synthetic data.
Injects a reminder to use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English which I picked up from a suggestion in another thread.
Honestly it’s working pretty well. Except for I need to check how often it’s actually firing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English
I feel like hooks aren’t utilized enough. Really nice for being the sort of auto steering as long as you can encode some pattern to detect the bad behaviour.
Prompts and skills just don’t cut it.
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.
[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
I actually converted it from the PDF into an explicit skill with the word list inline as well as the main rules.
Works a little bit, but give it a bit of context and the model’s training takes over and it starts talking like a dictionary-huffing crack addict again.
It’s a model problem and no amount of harness hacking seems to fix it.
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'm not convinced about that. I just asked Opus to explain a bullet point from its research for me. The bullet point in fact had a 1-sentence explanation that was in a referenced article. What it gave me instead was 8 paragraphs and a table. Maybe it's my fault because I just asked it to "clarify point XYZ" instead of being more precise.
I also have a writing steering file that makes Opus’ writing less insufferable. Otherwise it’s really bad.
I also have an interlocutor skill that makes it less epistemically arrogant (ie Less Wrong asshole tendencies). With this skill I can have a real discussion with it instead of it trying to one up me.
I regularly find it helpful to say things like "Write with ELI10 clear sentences and established technical terminology (e.g. API)" or sometimes just "Write it like you are explaining to a colleague" works well.
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".
Just with those two sentences above, there were about 10 different considerations that if typed out would have resulted in a jumbled mess.
> respond tersely in Simplified Technical English
to every prompt to deal w/claudes insanity:
https://github.com/bigskysoftware/be-terse*
`$: CLAUDE_CODE_BASALT_COVE=1 claude`
It just wants to talk jargon heavy and add unnecessary noise to the conversation.
I wonder it’s related to text watermarking somehow.
I still have some promotional credits and use them with Fable, and the answers are night and day in my particular use case.
Please for time being fix your code issues manually and let them concentrate on marketing and exchange listing.
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.
I've seen it in many companies. I don't think there's a vaccine yet.
https://github.com/backnotprop/bro/blob/main/skills/bro/SKIL...
> 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...
> The statement-list walk without the per-list pending-fiber flush
"Per-list pending-fiber flush?" Surely there's a clearer way to express this? Was it helpful necessary to describe "the statement-list walk" as a noun instead of talking about "walking the statement list"?
> A pure move: processStmtNodesInternalWithoutFlushingPendingFibers() becomes a delegating wrapper and the loop body is byte-identical
Did this need to be prefixed by "A pure move"? Why does the bytes of the text content of the loop body matter?
I found this too: https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854...
> Parked fibers are idle workers, not pending work - skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing.
"No-op fuel"? Really?
I don't think anyone can. At this point, I'm almost starting to believe it's an intentional move to discourage reviewing AI-generated commits by making them extremely unpleasant to read, in favor of just pushing straight to master without question.
my own little conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247784
The issue covers at least two reasons this doesn't work:
1. It literally doesn't work, Claude rapidly drifts back to this style even when instructed not to.
2. Writing style constraints push the model out of its training distribution and it's very unclear how much of an impact this has on work quality.
... to where, at some point, it might even begin to construct semantic loadings (heh) that are completely ininteligible to us while still superficially sounding like something we'd recognize.-
I am really really really trying to wrap my head around this. I am of course first discarding the obvious: "more tokens used is simply more tokens burned ..."
... read somewhere that it is partially a result of Claude now wanting to be ready for longer, more complex, mutli-step work. And this verbiage is the result.-
Whatever it is, they've got people begging for 4.6 back (wrt tone).-
How do they expect us to bring our capricious demands to fruition reliably?
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.
An observation from a year ago, people on RPG AI subreddits saying they had a lot of difficulty with Gemini role playing ambiguous characters and that almost always the characters would betray them or misread the human role player's motives. Someone pointed out this paper [1] that showed significant differences between the different LLMs strategic behavior playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, and speculatively that difference was emerging in RPG character behavior.
I wish they'd used bigger models (they used gemini-2.5-flash, gpt-4o-mini, claude-3-haiku-20240307). From the abstract: Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google's Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI's models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. ... Later, we see that Anthropic’s Claude is more cooperative still, but nonetheless outperforms OpenAI head-to-head
Obviously Opus 5 is wildly different than Haiku 3, but I'd expect Opus 5's fundamental suspicion of user intent, and anti-sycophancy via necessarily finding something to nitpick, is still present in your styleguided output.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02618
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)