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I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stup
by niccl 15d ago
I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?
I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting
> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.
- binary132 14d agoI really think this shit is the direct result of a training strategy that is meant to maximize token spend.
- georgefrowny 15d agoReminds me of a Cylon hybrid.
- soerxpso 15d agoYour example rewritten in intelligent English (I was curious): > Note: the potential for a console freeze was previously noted but ignored. handoff-4.3-done.html stated, "could not break console, but [will need fixed later if I'm wrong]." One could imagine that a perfect writer might also append: "It could be worth looking into what caused that wrong assumption, to prevent similar cases in the future," at most. Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).
- ben_w 15d ago> Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt). One of the things actual science fiction got wrong: to the extent that the thing AI does can be called "understanding", emotion is not unusually difficult for them to understand.
- svachalek 15d agoI think this was the biggest shock of the original ChatGPT for me. Just how completely unrobotic its voice was compared to everything we'd ever imagined in sci fi. Even that early version was also way more adept at understanding things like implication and sarcasm than any movie AI.
- ted_dunning 15d agoIt may well become a safeguard that all bots must speak in a much less inflected voice to remind us not to particularly trust them.
- prollings 15d agoI'd really rather they did talk and behave more like classic sci-fi said they would. Far less engaging and fluffy with nonsense.
- cortesoft 15d agoHave you tried asking it to respond to you like Data from star trek, or something?
- ben_w 15d agoI'd like it if the voice synthesis mode was (licensed!) Majel Barrett's TNG-era computer voice.
- prollings 8d agoI tried MUTHR from Alien, but had to keep toning it down because it took it too far, and eventually disabled it (in favour of caveman mode) because it didn't seem to be able to function properly talking like that.
- pixelready 15d agoMe too. Almost every Sci-Fi AI proceeds from the premise that we will make something very obviously machine and then have to train it to seem more human. I was completely caught off guard by us taking the approach of distilling all available human output into a statistical model and using it to brute-force something resembling thought and personality through sheer data processing scale. The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.
- nemetroid 15d ago[will need to be fixed later if I'm wrong]
- matltc 15d agoAppalachian dialect
- acj 15d agoI hear this in the upper midwest occasionally, too
- richiebful1 15d agoI love the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project for questions like this. Linguists figure this comes from Scots-Irish immigrants to the US https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed
- Melonai 14d agoThank you so much for this link, this is extremely interesting and it really makes me wonder, consciously, I have never read this construction online before, but is this because I actually haven't seen it, or did I subconsciously write it off as an abbreviation or a typo. Maybe there is some analysis of how this construction gets used online, too, which might reveal some linguistic patterns of internet communities.
- pmg101 15d agoOr "will need fixing", right?
- Applejinx 15d agoThis is the same as systemic bullshitting. Not the first time I've smelled it on fluffy LLM output. I think it's the result of the training trying to induce the LLMs to talk over users' heads even when they are professionals, to entice further use on the grounds of 'oh it's so smart I can't understand its genius train of thought', but I don't think eliciting language like that really taps into 'associations of smarter previous language users'. More likely it's 'associations of rampant bullshitters'.
- malfist 15d agoIt's both dense and vacuous. Dense because it's full of jargon its made up, and vacuous because even with all that it's not actually saying much. All that paragraph says is that four documents say something about a console freeze, whatever that is.
- macNchz 15d agoIt's like a dialect of corporatese. The kind of droning non-speak you can sit in a 90 minute meeting listening intently to and come away wondering whether anyone actually said anything.
- dboreham 15d agoWhat wonderful times we live in: the Turning test is a trivial nothing now and we're arguing about the fine points of the AI's writing style.
- haskman 14d agoThe novelty of the turing test has worn off, and some of us are trying to get work done without being forced to parse the drivel produced by some AI.
- binary132 14d agoActually it is eminently obvious when the writer is a machine and it’s quite disingenuous to pretend otherwise (or, generously, possibly witless).
- airstrike 13d agoI appreciate the quality of your prose.
- icedchai 14d agoIt would fail the Turing test because of its writing style!
- 15d ago
- cmenge 15d agoClaude reminds me of Terry Pratchett's "Auditors of Reality" and their awkward attempts at faking humans. A thing as simple as a smile can go _horribly_ wrong...
- ninjalanternshk 15d ago> Worth stating because four documents now assert I got one too many chunks of this nonsense and told Claude to knock it off, forever. It acknowledged and wrote out some instructions to its memory about it. And what a breath of fresh air. Its responses are maybe 20% longer but I read them at least twice as fast. Should have done it a long time ago.
- niccl 15d agoany specifics on what you did?
- tkgally 15d agoNot the person you're asking, but I did that by explaining to Fable my problem with Opus's gobbledygook and having it write a Claude skill for producing clear explanations in its reports to me. I also had it add notes about the need for clearer writing to CLAUDE.md and other project documentation. Opus's subsequent reports to me have been much clearer.
- tkgally 15d agoHere’s an example of one of those Claude skills, in a public repository I manage: https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/.claude/skills/clear-reports/SKILL.md https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/.claude/skill... Fable wrote it specifically for this project.
- troupo 15d agoAnd then both Opus and Fable will happily ignore these random markdown files (happens to me all the time)
- gambiting 15d agoI feel like mine is mocking me. I added an instruction in Claude.md that says "under no circumstances use the phrase found the smoking gun, say I found the problem instead" What does it do? It says "found the smoking gun! Ooops I wasn't meant to say that - I found the problem!"
- r_lee 15d agofor me it's not just exhausting, at this point it's demotivating and it makes me dread interacting with this shit like imagine this being our future, I don't know what we're even doing anymore
- mrcwinn 15d agoTry Sol. It’s much better at getting to the point. I tend to use 5.6-xhigh or max.
- senderista 15d agoSeconded, and also using Sol to clean up Opus logorrhea.
- bcrosby95 15d agoOh that? That's just Claude being the sassy asshole it is. It loves to write in a way with maximal self-inflating impact.
- AnotherGoodName 15d agoI think this occurs due to the prompt. LLMs are actually text completion/translation focused in architecture. We just give them a prompt along the lines of “the context is that you’re a world leading expert now complete the response”. They need the prompt to encourage expert outputs but unfortunately we also get ‘pretending to be an expert’ outputs since there’s a large amount of polluted training data for this.
- Citizen_Lame 14d agoBased on what, "lot of people say"?
- dalmo3 15d agoWow, that's a perfect example. One thing about it I really hate, and haven't seen a lot of people mentioning, is how it navigates multiple abstraction levels in a single sentence. E.g. > Worth stating because four documents now assert it. Meta commentary on the task? > a dead drag handle Drag handle seems to be referring to some UI element. What does it mean for it to be dead? So far no big deal > during a booked half-day you do not get back Do you not get the drag handle back? Or the half day? Was the drag handle dead during the booked period? (Now I assume this is a calendar UI) And why does it matter (for this sentence) if you get it back or not. > handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording Treats verbatim filenames as subjects > 4.4's review page Probably referring to a file? I'm guessing handoff-4.4-review.html? No cohesion. And now it's actually the object of the sentence? > downside of being wrong is that half day Wait what's the downside? Who's being wrong? > Checked, not recalled. Then it jumps back to a meta commentary on the methodology for asserting the above. Why does this belong to the text?
- wren6991 14d agoYeah, the referent drifts through the sentence. It's semantically incredibly sloppy. People hone in on the buzzwords and jargon. If you peel that back, what lies underneath is still awful writing.
- x-complexity 15d agoHalf of the reason their writing is like that is because current LLMs are not trained to go back to previous tokens to edit/delete them. If I recall, previous attempts to do so made them get stuck in edit loops.
- razodactyl 15d agoJust FYI - 4 places are now documenting a console bug freeze that happens with a drag handle appearing over a half day. Source: I'm half brain dead from decoding a lot of Claude speak from it directly and colleagues' new way of communicating with me.
- chb 15d agoThis. A thousand times this. It's as if Opus can only communicate in a glib, software engineering vernacular that presumes domain-specific knowledge and uses jargon accordingly.
- anyg 15d agoI've found that adding the words - "tell me in simple words" manages to improve the output. But, i have to keep repeating that
- LimitExperience 15d ago[dead]
- ChaitanyaSai 15d agoYes, people working at anthropic: please, please, please tell me this is fixed. Or do you all speak like this now. Help!
- suttontom 15d agoI see this appearing in the comments of code sent to me for review every day. People have told me I'm too picky/pedantic because I ask What does this mean? Apparently the author and other reviewers are way smarter and understand it, or they don't care. I've given up battling code slop, but can't see myself ever tolerating comment slop like this.
- chriscjcj 15d agoIn my "instructions for Claude," I have the following: "I'm not a programmer or software engineer. Don't talk to me like I am. Avoid coder jargon and vernacular. Explain things to me in a clear way, emphasizing a conceptual view that even an inexperienced person can understand. If helpful, use analogies and examples to illustrate and help you communicate." It just ignores it and spits out drivel that sounds exactly like what you're getting.
- dexterlagan 15d agoOh God, that "a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back" got me. I saw this pattern in Claude's 'explanations' so many times. It's trying to say that it did something significant, and that you'd only have found out much later, at higher cost (or something). That annoys me to no end.
- AndrewSwift 15d agoToday I plan to ask Claude to read a bunch of Feynman lectures, compare them to my last Claude session transcript, and come with a list of rules to be more like Feynman. It'll go in CLAUDE.md
- AndrewSwift 15d ago[dead]
- gkrimer 15d agoSuch a great example. These phrases are going to become memes of this era, like the irc stars password (hunter2). "Dead drag handle" "Booked half day you don't get back"
- injidup 15d agoPrompting it often to use simplified technical english generally stops this kind of horrid prose.
- xarope 15d agoand when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?
- grey-area 15d agoSometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes it generates grammatically correct nonsense.
- kolinko 15d agoI rarely get this - I assume this happens when it assumes I have more context / understanding than it does. Usually “remember I’m a human I don’t get full context, rephrase clearly” works. Also a posthook that for prose actually getting to me explains what I roughly know, what I don’t and to explain with terms I will understand. But even within internal communication it has little jargon - I think jargon may be growing in comments and I stripped claude comments from code.
- butlike 12d agoThank you. I thought I was sort of alone in thinking the writing is incomprehensible gobledygook. It's weird though, cause you start reading it and it starts out fine, but then deteriorates. Kind of like the old joke question "Has anyone ever done to do more like?"