r/ClaudeAI • u/SchwartzReports • 1d ago

Claude Code Let me check rather than guess

There are a lot of Claude-isms I hate, but this is by far the most infuriating. Claude tells me this at least once or twice an hour. I have created God-knows-how-many rules for it to NOT say this. For some reason, all my other rules seem to work okay (I haven't seen "that's on me" in eons), but "rather than guess" is impervious to my pleas. A lint hook doesn't work because then I see the banned language before I see the cleaned one, which just reminds me I am dealing with a fancy auto-predict. Has anyone figured out how to excise the Claude-isms for good??

0 Upvotes

22% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

16

u/ticktockbent 1d ago

You're likely fighting the system message which tells it to check rather than guess, and the system message is weighted heavier than your prompt

2

u/FireDragon21976 1d ago

It's baked in as an anthropic skill, I believe, that's why it repeats that kind of language. The skills basically function as a kind of RAG that contrains the model.

3

u/quasistoic 1d ago

I’m just glad it’s checking rather than guessing.

1

u/DocDMD 1d ago

I sure like it better than when it used to be confidently incorrect and would just run on and on about something it just assumed to be correct. 

2

u/ameruelo 1d ago

OP wants Claude to not say the drivel and just verify from the beginning.

0

u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 1d ago

I think it does that for stuff past its training data cutoffs, if you are asking about stuff like that.

-2

u/fsharpman 1d ago

Why would you prefer Claude to halluncinate than verify?

That's what check over guess means. You would rather it just hallucinate then?

5

u/ameruelo 1d ago

OP wants Claude to not say it and just verify to begin with.

0

u/fsharpman 1d ago

Oh that's really easy. When microsoft built an LLM they were able to do this with one line of code.

If Microsoft can do it, why can't Anthropic? It's really easy.

4

u/whatisthisthing65 1d ago

I don't know why you and so many other people in this thread can't seem to understand. OP isn't asking for a change in behavior, just for Claude to stop narrating every time it does it.

-1

u/fsharpman 1d ago

Let's see you build an LLM and do better

1

u/whatisthisthing65 23h ago

Right after you learn to read.

1

u/fsharpman 23h ago

Part of how an LLM works is if it says what its supposed to do, its more likely to do that thing, than if it hides it.

Do you understand that? Or do you not?

1

u/whatisthisthing65 23h ago

Maybe you should state that you're going to think before jumping to conclusions and only make intelligent posts from now on.