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It'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 parag

by malfist 15d ago

It'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 ago
It'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 ago
  What 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 ago
    The 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 ago
    Actually it is eminently obvious when the writer is a machine and it’s quite disingenuous to pretend otherwise (or, generously, possibly witless).
    - airstrike 13d ago
      I appreciate the quality of your prose.
  - icedchai 14d ago
    It would fail the Turing test because of its writing style!
sheepscreek 15d ago
Drag handle = most likely literally a drag event (javascript) handler/callback. Dead, perhaps because it’s an empty function, or it gets overwritten, or for some other reason is never called? Most of what it said about the facts was intelligible actually. But I still couldn’t understand the connection or its significance. We may be staring at the future of AI - a form of intelligence that is alien to us.
- cdelsolar 15d ago
  No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)
  - FeepingCreature 15d ago
    Yeah I think when it talks like this it's signaling to some (imagined) automated grader that it fulfilled a given constraint.
- loh 15d ago
  If this kind of "AI-speak" becomes ubiquitous and humans reading it becomes the norm (whether to guide AI or other reasons), I'd imagine future generations (of humans) who grow up with it will be able to understand and work with it much better than we do. Future humans' brains will probably be wired a bit differently, similar to multilingual speakers of today. We may even see "AI language" classes become a common part of school curriculums. Although, I think AI will probably advance enough that most people will never even need to communicate on "its level", but it's probably a good idea to keep humans in the loop either way, and in which case, understanding the more advanced "AI vocabulary" might be useful.
  - dasil003 15d ago
    You're giving it too much credit. There's no master plan or secret depth to the word vomit Opus 5 was spewing. I suspect it's just the result of Anthropic optimizing other characteristics of the product like staying focused and covering edge cases in coding, which CC has definitely gotten way better at just in the last 6 months. The degradation in writing style was probably an unintended side effect of other optimizations they were making. Admittedly it works okay for internals, and has the side effect of increasing token spend, but I am 100% sure that it could reduced by 90-99% without losing ANY signal, if there was just some better heuristics for what to say where (tech spec, inline comment, commit message, CLAUDE.md, PR should have different things) and better judgement for what to distill to represent at different zoom levels.
brianjking 15d ago
This! So much this. After Opus 4.8 I could barely comprehend anything it was attempting to communicate.
- username_my1 14d ago
  wow and here I was thinking that I lost my attention span and can no longer read AI output any more. come to think about it, of course I did become lazy and pay less attention to walls of text. but I often catch myself asking AI to explain itself in plain simple English or ask it to confirm does that mean xyz ... because the wall of text often uses language that's not even present in the project itself (despite having similar concept in the project, for example users, permissions, access, encapsulation ...) this is problematic because it becomes more difficult to humans to intervene in long running tasks / long chains of tasks because language becomes alien down the road (I have seen it often in semi-autonomous setups I have)
astro1234 13d ago
My job has gone from coding, plotting, writing to solving the riddle of what Opus 5 is saying and figuring out what is bullshit, what is valuable, what is a total divergence from what I asked it to do. Then eventually at token like 300k starting to shout at it in all caps with obscenities. Things were slower and harder before but the baseline of frustration / rage was never this high, even as the models have gotten objectively better in many or most respects.
- airstrike 13d ago
  So say we all. If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, this comment hits the nail on the head. Speaking as the former #1 user on clauderank.com
code-delta-app 10d ago
my usual reply is: "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" it replies "in plain english ...." "and what does that mean?" then finally it decides to tell me what's going on plus "one thing worth noting ..."

by malfist 15d ago

macNchz 15d ago

It'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 ago
What 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  Actually it is eminently obvious when the writer is a machine and it’s quite disingenuous to pretend otherwise (or, generously, possibly witless).
  - airstrike 13d ago
    I appreciate the quality of your prose.
- icedchai 14d ago
  It would fail the Turing test because of its writing style!

sheepscreek 15d ago

Drag handle = most likely literally a drag event (javascript) handler/callback. Dead, perhaps because it’s an empty function, or it gets overwritten, or for some other reason is never called? Most of what it said about the facts was intelligible actually. But I still couldn’t understand the connection or its significance. We may be staring at the future of AI - a form of intelligence that is alien to us.

cdelsolar 15d ago
No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)
- FeepingCreature 15d ago
  Yeah I think when it talks like this it's signaling to some (imagined) automated grader that it fulfilled a given constraint.
loh 15d ago
If this kind of "AI-speak" becomes ubiquitous and humans reading it becomes the norm (whether to guide AI or other reasons), I'd imagine future generations (of humans) who grow up with it will be able to understand and work with it much better than we do. Future humans' brains will probably be wired a bit differently, similar to multilingual speakers of today. We may even see "AI language" classes become a common part of school curriculums. Although, I think AI will probably advance enough that most people will never even need to communicate on "its level", but it's probably a good idea to keep humans in the loop either way, and in which case, understanding the more advanced "AI vocabulary" might be useful.
- dasil003 15d ago
  You're giving it too much credit. There's no master plan or secret depth to the word vomit Opus 5 was spewing. I suspect it's just the result of Anthropic optimizing other characteristics of the product like staying focused and covering edge cases in coding, which CC has definitely gotten way better at just in the last 6 months. The degradation in writing style was probably an unintended side effect of other optimizations they were making. Admittedly it works okay for internals, and has the side effect of increasing token spend, but I am 100% sure that it could reduced by 90-99% without losing ANY signal, if there was just some better heuristics for what to say where (tech spec, inline comment, commit message, CLAUDE.md, PR should have different things) and better judgement for what to distill to represent at different zoom levels.

brianjking 15d ago

This! So much this. After Opus 4.8 I could barely comprehend anything it was attempting to communicate.

username_my1 14d ago
wow and here I was thinking that I lost my attention span and can no longer read AI output any more. come to think about it, of course I did become lazy and pay less attention to walls of text. but I often catch myself asking AI to explain itself in plain simple English or ask it to confirm does that mean xyz ... because the wall of text often uses language that's not even present in the project itself (despite having similar concept in the project, for example users, permissions, access, encapsulation ...) this is problematic because it becomes more difficult to humans to intervene in long running tasks / long chains of tasks because language becomes alien down the road (I have seen it often in semi-autonomous setups I have)

astro1234 13d ago

My job has gone from coding, plotting, writing to solving the riddle of what Opus 5 is saying and figuring out what is bullshit, what is valuable, what is a total divergence from what I asked it to do. Then eventually at token like 300k starting to shout at it in all caps with obscenities. Things were slower and harder before but the baseline of frustration / rage was never this high, even as the models have gotten objectively better in many or most respects.

airstrike 13d ago
So say we all. If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, this comment hits the nail on the head. Speaking as the former #1 user on clauderank.com

code-delta-app 10d ago

my usual reply is: "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" it replies "in plain english ...." "and what does that mean?" then finally it decides to tell me what's going on plus "one thing worth noting ..."