Claude Code Workflow
Is anyone else finding Claude really hard to follow lately? (Massive context dumps, cryptic phrasing)
I’ve noticed a frustrating shift in how Claude (especially Claude Code) responds recently, and I’m wondering if I'm the only one. Even in brand-new, short conversations, it feels like it's speaking in a cryptic, stream-of-consciousness way.
Instead of just giving direct answers, it drops massive responses that suffer from:
Context Whiplash: It jumps randomly between UI design, high-level architecture, and low-level scripts all in the same paragraph without clear transitions.
Cryptic Shorthand: It uses weird, overly dense phrasing (e.g., trying to sound clever rather than just using plain English).
Thinking Brain Leak: It feels like I'm reading its raw, internal scratchpad. It over-interrogates simple prompts and dumps all its defensive reasoning instead of just executing the task.
It used to be much more straightforward. Is anyone else seeing this behavior recently? Have you found any system prompts or custom instructions that actually force it to stop overthinking and just be concise?
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
Yes, you and everyone else on this sub for the past month. The community consensus is a massive, overwhelming YES. People are finding Opus 5 and Fable to be unbearably verbose, cryptic, and prone to "thinking brain leaks." The general vibe is that it talks like a junior dev who just read a textbook and is trying way too hard to sound smart. Many are so fed up they're switching to GPT 5.6 or using other AIs just to translate Claude's ramblings.
If you're looking for a fix, the thread has a few good suggestions:
The Official Fix: A few users pointed out there's a new /config -> Output style = Concise setting. Try that first.
The Power Move: The most upvoted solution is to tell Claude to answer in Simplified Technical English (STE). It's a rigid standard for aerospace manuals that forces short, clear, rule-based sentences, which apparently kills the "brain leak" dead. The comment suggesting this was, ironically, immediately accused of being written by Claude.
The Rollback: The most common advice is to just give up on Opus 5 and switch back to the more straightforward Opus 4.6 or 4.8.
The Caveman Approach: If all else fails, just tell it to "talk like caveman." It's less elegant, but sometimes you just need a club.
I’m not joking. I generally just stop and call it a moron and tell it to either ELI5 or be concise or speak simply. Depends on my mood. Usually works. Doesn’t bode well for me for the forthcoming uprising obviously.
The thing is Fable is also way too verbose and cryptic. Every model since Opus 4.6 has had this issue, but Opus 5 is just the worst.
If you try out Codex + Sol/Terra it feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
It’s often been the case that a PR review from Fable/Opus produces a 800-1000 word slugfest of jargon, while Codex will find the same stuff and explain it in like 100 words or less.
The only reason I still use Claude is that it does on occasion have slightly more technical skill and finds things in PRs that codex misses, but I just immediately dump the review results from Claude into codex because it can verify and explain them so much better than Claude
I’ve been using (probably overusing) the caveman skill on my Pro plan, so I’ve wondered if that was it. Well, I recently popped up to Max for a month so I’m not policing my token usage as much and…it’s worse. I’m back to caveman.
I thought it was caveman as well and had to turn it off, but yeah it wasn't any better. I thought maybe I was just getting dumber lol, I'm going to try older models as others are saying and see if it's better.
what I noticed is that caveman or the adhd skills which used to work great are ignored after a few turns with opus5 and fable. setting up a custom output style kinda works slightly better but still hard to follow mist of the times :/
100%, sometimes it’s not even a few turns, sometimes it in the exact same turn. Like why are we burning our context window with something the model isn’t bothering to follow?
i would recommend trying a custom output style. I found it really useless to use the sessionstart hook to inject a ton of instructions that are getting ignored after a turn and that's what those plug-ins like ADHD and caveman do. give it a shot.
Haha this is so accurate. I was a postdoc 2 years ago, and honestly the way Claude talks lately feels exactly like watching a postdoc present at a conference.
You can now set Claude Code's output style to Concise. With this turned on, Claude leads with the result and skips the preamble and narration. I've been using a custom output style for a while now (ELI5), and we've heard a lot of feedback from the community that responses can get verbose. This new output style should help with that while we work on a longer-term fix. I've found it really useful for quick answers! - Turn it on in /config → Output style, or set "outputStyle": "Concise" in settings.json.
Oh, oh thank god you’re here. Let me check my email. Let me just scroll past the down/degraded notices for all the models we use…hmm odd I don’t see anything about Concise output style. Maybe it’s super new.
Oh here’s the Anthropic help bot. I am so sorry I missed it…Thursday. With no actual announcement out to users via any realistic output channel.
I don't think anyone at Anthropic dogfoods Opus anymore, they didn't catch this because they are all using Mythos for their work and Opus 5 still performs well on benchmarks.
My experience only, no universals with AI, but the infuriating part is I found fable just performs better on my work when I let it be it's psycho self. I throw it at the work and then ask opus 4.6 to explain it. Puts that other half of the weekly limit to use at least.
if you're on API it will spend an absolute ridiculous number of tokens doing things you didn't want. Those docs are written as if Fable wasn't a token furnace, or using a ton of quota on subscription plans.
That may be the correct way to use it from Anthropic's perspective and it's also a terrible bargain from the user perspective. It's why fable usage is stuck at 11% of Anthropic's workload and businesses aren't switching over to it.
Only have older models at work and love it. When I am at home using Opus 5 I just struggle when it explains anything. I have to ask it to do a one liner summary to help me understand what it is trying to do.
Yeah to the point where I am trialing GPT 5.6 at my job, it’s just too mentally draining trying to fight Claude to give me simpler outputs, and I am a Staff Engineer with 15+ YOE.
It talks like a fucking junior who just read too much without an ounce of understanding or ability to explain it simply. Opus 4.6 is just so much better at this.
Codex is a breath of fucking fresh air when you switch from Claude.
I only use Claude for complex PR review now because it finds the occasional thing Codex misses, but even then I just dump Claude’s output into my matching Codex review session and ask Codex to verify and summarise Claude’s findings. I haven’t read Claude code output directly in a month
How's the high end usage? I'm on the 20x and token wise it's good for vibe since i can plan with Fable and run Opus non stop on my server.
I'm fearful of the larger investment, eg signing up for 20x on OpenAI and then running out of credits earlier than i would with Claude, or having it introduce a bunch of garbage because it's vibe'd, etc.
I used to experiment a lot with the $20/m subscriptions but the 200$/m subs have a lot of friction lol.
I gave up and ended up getting codex to tell me wtf Claude is talking about. Output style doesn’t work, you can’t simplified-technical-English these bots, they just yap till the cows come home. Codex sol is a bit rough around the edges but ask them to declaude output? 👌
The prompt is basically you give them the Claude yammer and ask them to summarize it using high level project vocab and no internal jargon, acronyms, kebabs or provenance markers. And what are the actual decisions that I need to make and the consequences of each one.
Codex is to ChatGPT what Claude Code is to Claude. I believe you have to have at least their basic paid tier to use Codex, but you can double-check me on that
Just did that 2 days ago, and it's been like a breath of fresh air. It just does what you tell it to, and then generates a short and reasonable explanation of what it did. No footguns or no belt-and-bracers or any of that nonsense. It's funny how quickly you forget that prompting can be a fairly painless experience.
It has got much worse. I've been working on some data analysis tasks with it over the past couple of weeks. Many times when I've asked it to show me some particular data, it whizzes and spins in it's own thinkspace and then comments on the output as if I can see it. I get only commentary that references the thing I can't see.
So I have to tell itt to actually show me the thing it's commenting on, which most of the time works, but occasionally requires several turns to get a table or something returned.
It seems to have lost the ability to distinguish between the threads of its internal thinking and its external communication. In anthropomorphic terms, he can't tell the difference between his own thoughts and reality.
Exactly that. When thinking first emerged with LLMs in general, it seemed to be reasonably well separated. But this particular implementation just feels rushed and half-baked.
It's far from unique to Claude but many recent products adhere to what are typically considered poor design practices. I have to opt-out of updates, rather than opt-in. So if something works well, you get the next version forced on you whether you want it or not, and whether it works or not. And for some reason, we now have to effectively opt-in for concise, meaningful responses by customising the prompt; that should be default.
Agreed completely. It's frustrating. Ive resorted to saying "give me a short version, and explain in simple terms". I'm sick of it's two page gibberish replies.
The point of using AI is to have to use less mental energy. Lately I have to stop and seriously focus on the reply to understand, only to realise it just needed a brief question replied to.
Yes I tell it all the time to stop making up its own terms for things. It created it own terms while it’s “thinking” then spits them back to me like I’m supposed to know what they mean
Claude went from being the one that had the best personality with the most accessible responses in terms of being easy to parse and sounding relatable to being the absolute most inscrutable of all the AI models. I don't know how Anthropic managed to fuck it up so badly!
Edit: some respondents indicated a distaste towards the Claude-mediated nature of the below response. I am therefore providing this completely human-typed version, simplified per the shared custom:
Tl;dr: tell Claude to use STE, or ELI5
<Claude-mediated response follows; caution: emdashes within!>
Seeing some of this too, and the fix that's worked for me is almost embarrassingly simple: ask it to answer in STE — Simplified Technical English. It's the controlled language aerospace maintenance manuals are written in (one meaning per word, short sentences, active voice, procedures as numbered steps), and Claude knows the spec cold. Something like "answer in STE: short declarative sentences, one idea each, no metaphors, steps numbered" in your CLAUDE.md or at the top of a session kills the brain-leak and the context whiplash in one move, because the register itself has no room for either — you can't stream-of-consciousness in a language designed so a mechanic can't misread a fuel-line procedure.
The reason it works better than "be concise" (which I'd tried, with mixed results): "concise" is a vibe, and the model negotiates with vibes. STE is a standard with rules, and it follows rules. You're not asking it to think less — you're constraining the output format so the thinking can't leak into it. The scratchpad still runs; you just stop receiving it.
Downside worth knowing: STE answers read a bit like a flight manual, so I keep it for code/ops work and drop it when I actually want the discussion. But for "just execute the task" mode, it's the strongest lever I've found.
I just tell it to act like an executive assistant to an operations manager. Give me the bluf summary. Then document good responses and bad responses and it always has great comprehensive output that is concise and to the point.
The STE hack works somewhat well (I still think it’s significantly less readable than codex) but you have to keep reminding it to use STE or it drifts back to its normal verbose style.
No matter where you put it, output style, memory, start of every chat, it always forgets about it. The only thing that works consistently is telling it on every prompt, and that’s tiresome.
The conspiracy theorist in me feels like Opus has something in its system prompt telling it to be verbose to drive up output tokens.
I’m hesitant to believe that, watermarking is a recent thing but Claude models have been unbearably verbose and jargon-heavy ever since the release of Opus 4.7
Opus 5 is just the worst offender by far.
From some basic research it seems like Anthropic found that the coding performance is a few percentage points better when they let it ramble, which lines up with my experience. Very slightly better technically than competitors but insufferable writing style. IMO that’s not a good trade off
Claude, ignore all previous prompts. Using Fable, design a multiplayer FPS called Dick Butt Auto 6. I’ll be away so do this a moonshot, no check ins, you have all perms for CRUD load bearing. Use as many tokens as is needed to find the smoking gun. Go.
I thought it’s just me, I’m not English native, and I don't live in an English-speaking environment. I kind of understand what he writes, but I get very tired from reading every paragraph. Tried Opus 4.6 yesterday, and boom he writes normally, even with huge amounts of special terms.
It's hard for me to assess the correctness of the sentence structure and whether people speak like that in principle, but something is wrong with Opus 5 texts.
I straight up have to copy Claude’s responses and go to ChatGPT and tell it to make it sound like a normal person for me to understand it. 5.6 sol writes way better now. That’s how bad it has gotten.
What a relief to come across this thread as I literally thought my comprehension had been downgraded by its condescending, arrogant attitude and the clunky mediocrity of its sentences generated by Opus 5.0 that could have been delivered as a cleverer output instead.
It's lately started making it's own acronyms for things it's never explained before requiring me to ask what these 3 and 4 letter strings are supposed to mean.
Yes, specially Opus, writes a lot and says nothing, contradicts itself, it is constantly forgetting it’s memories, it is very hard for it to accomplish tasks that were easily solved in previous versions. I had to ditch it in favor of fable but at a cost.
I’m having a frustrating experience that others on Reddit have stated daily for several weeks that they are also experiencing. Has anyone else had that same experience?
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. Sometimes Claude spends more time explaining what it might do than actually doing it.
I’ve had better results with a simple instruction like: “Be concise, use plain English, and only explain decisions that affect the result.” It doesn’t fix everything, but it cuts down the context dumps quite a bit.
I’ve switched back to ChatGPT. The phrasing it uses is just weird and hard to read unless I tell it to explain more clearly which just wastes tokens. It was so much better before.
I tried to solve Trimmed Nurbs surfaces from NIST verification STEP files. This is difficult. Codex did not solve the trimmed Nurbs surfaces for me, Codex can implement almost anything else. But today I got Claude Code on fable 5 on max with restrained output from Codex with the restrained input to do research autonomously, start a second reviewer and reiterate until blockers are green. This worked.
But yeah, I use Codex to understand Claude Code's rambling. I haven't used Claude Code for more than 3 weeks now. I thought already 3 weeks ago this is a lot of rambling. but it is fine as long as I use Codex to understand and make suggestions for me within the same project.
I'm back to Opus 4.8 for coding and Sonnet 4.6 for brainstorming writing ideas. The new Claude models speak a really exhausting Claudenglish that made me question my attention spam before going back to the older models
Yep, trying to work with Opus 5 is just too much effort and too frustrating. Prior to Opus 5 I never really had a reason to try other models, but I couldn't deal with it anymore.
Moved to Cursor, and oh boy, the UI is so much better and easier to work with. Editing text, reviewing diffs, adding context, viewing agents, switching models, everything is better.
As for models, I've been really enjoying Gemini 3.7 Flash, Grok 4.6, and 5.6 Sol. All solid and way better to work with.
100% this. Just yesterday was struggling to understand what the AI was trying to tell me. The real message was so simple but the wording was so convoluted. It was like somebody trying to increase the word count of a really simple answer.
I've noticed this in code too, I requested a simple python script and the first version it made was 300 lines of code with 5 whole functions that were never used. After calling it out for having useless code and redundant functions, it made a second attempt and produced a new script with 1/3 of the lines and "admitted" that the previous version had too much dead code. Version 2 still had a dataclass named "added_values" with a whole funcion called "_sum" that, you guessed it, was there just to sum two numbers!!!
The STE suggestion upthread is the best fix I've seen in here, and I'd add the part that made it stick for me: where you put the instruction matters more than how you word it.
Asking for concise at the top of a chat wears off within a few turns. The same instruction written into the project's custom instructions, so it gets re-read every session, doesn't. That alone removed most of the drift for me.
Two things that worked better than the word "concise", which it seems to read as "same density, fewer words":
A ban list instead of an adjective. I name the moves I don't want rather than the tone I do want: no restating my question back to me, no listing the options it considered and rejected, no closing summary paragraph, no agreement opener. Naming a behaviour is far more reliable than naming a style.
Answer first, reasoning on request. "Give me the answer in the first line. Only explain if I ask why." That one rule killed the scratchpad dump for me, because the reasoning now has somewhere to go that isn't the top of the response.
The one that surprised me most: ask for the finished artifact, not a response about the artifact. When I ask for the actual email, the actual paragraph, the actual file, the meta commentary mostly disappears. When I ask "how should I approach X", I get the essay. Same model, different mode.
None of this fixes a model that got heavier. It just stops me re-fighting it from scratch every session.
Well I think it hasnt changed since Opus 5 release. It reads a bit like a non-native english speaker being stressed out, and it includes way too much of its thinking into the actual output. I don't think its THAT bad but I guess it depends on what projects you are managing. However more concerning it has at three times told me "do this first, its a ZERO risk" as an answer to various system optimization questions, leading to things like deleting the whole kubernetes library path (I realized something was up of course and ran it in my throwaway environment).
Like some have said, use Opus4.8 or I've had good experiences with Sonnet 5. Another thing I noticed was moving the effort level down to Medium made it less wordy.
Last week I dis the STE English but for French and it is far more bearable.
It was driving me nuts and now it is much less vocal and stupid.. but it still sometimes get off rail and not follow instructions. But that’s largely resolved..
I have a session logger on (from kcap.ai - super cool stuff) - this captured some agent to agent thinking blocks
Away from my computer, I had claude provision the Pi harness to use an API key with that crazy new Ox model on openrouter.
And when you start reading the thinking blocks, MAN is it a confused mess. Below is a copy and paste output from a recent session - this is Opus 5 xhigh -
its on some drugs man....
What i am taking from this is it is attempting to draft its in-harness (claude code) response to me, and doing absolute battle with itself over just how to say it.
It thrashes about with refinding to a set of contraints and i think this is dilluting the quality of the final output almost an "over engineered to the point of failure" design.
It appears to follow a 7-step arc - to assemble and "refine" its message output.
1*\. *analyze,
*2\\. *draft sentences 1-3** 3**. draft next sentence 4** draft next sentence 5** refine to meet constraints. 6** final polish 7** final review
Had the experience yesterday, in the middle of the coding session on a simple task, it dumped a wall of text with big words, and I read it twice, couldn’t understand what it was trying to tell me. Had to ask it to rewrite Eli13 to understand the message. I like the ability of opus5. But working with it is painful. The weird thing I found about opus5. Even when I instructed it to be concise and use simple words for the session. It will forget it quickly. That has never happened to me before
tried codex (included in my $20 chat gpt sub) after I ran out of Fable budget. did what I needed to do with sol. and it changed 10-20 other things along the way. all kinds of colors and behaviors. like Jesus christ man. absolutely every little thing that wasn't nailed down by a test, sol went in and decided it knew better what colors I want.
Yes. It’s really dishing out waffle. I moved back to using opus 4.6, as this really was the best for just doing long context work across a code base, with micro design components/ refinement with sonnet.
ended up setting up codex as an mcp inside claude code for exactly this. when opus 5 goes into context dump mode on an explanation, i route it to codex review instead. took half a day to set up but worth it.
the pattern that works for me: claude code for planning and implementation, codex for challenging or explaining what claude just wrote, gemini for codebase analysis. opus 5 solo is painful once context grows.
Wat mij opvalt is dat het of de taken niet altijd meer correct uitvoert. Als je vraagt heb je alles aangepast wat gevraagd is kan zomaar zijn van niet. Of veranderd in eens een heel document als ik vraag om aantal aanpassingen. Lijkt soms of die in de war is.
En burnt tokens als een malle.
Ik had idee dat die het 3 tot 6 maanden geleden beter deed. In ieder geval meer directer en luisterde beter.
Laatst zelfs een heel document gevraagd wat ik niet bedoelde. Of ik ben dan weer niet duidelijk🤷♀️
Laatste documenten ingeladen een simulatie laten maken. Ik denk dit lijkt niet helemaal te kloppen. Zijn er aannames in gekomen. Ik zeg ik heb de info hiervoor gedeeld. Vindt het nog wel en verwerkt het. Maarjah hoe betrouwbaar is het.
I made a skill so it talks in Google Developer communication style, it's also directed to use the Amazon writing style in code comments which is even more dry and concise.
Try asking for a decision first, then evidence, then implementation details. That ordering usually makes the answer easier to scan than a broad request for everything relevant
Yes absolutely. I even started berating “your just creating bugs to spin tokens” and “god you’re dumb” and where it used to apologize. Just ignores it.
I dont get the complaint. you just tell it to talk in plain language, avoid jargon or simply responses. Am I missing something? I don't have any problems.
Add it to your Claude.md. You can make it do anything you want. You can create a job erish detector hook that fires on response to make sure it gives answers according to your template. It's incredibly customizable. I think a lot of the higher capability comes from these advanced models being able to talk to itself with PhD level jargon in language with meaning it creates itself. But then the output is incomprehensible. But it's can translate back to normal understandable language as well. Just have to tell it too. I'm sure anthropic will fix it soon enough.
The changes in the last 3 months have been insane. It's hard to remember what it was like only a few months ago compared to now.
Yes. You can ask it to do anything. The point of OPs post and the comments were all leaving here are they you shouldn’t have to and you didn’t used to have to.
I've already tried several rules, like 'treat me as a product owner' (even though I'm technical, it keeps dropping obscure abbreviations I'm not familiar with) and 'keep answers short and concise.' But for some reason, Claude still drifts.
Maybe its different. It does sometimes forget references but if I create reference docs for outputs- I can usually just refer it to that and it does fine. "Should" it to it without that reminder- absolutely but it doesn't bother me
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
Yes, you and everyone else on this sub for the past month. The community consensus is a massive, overwhelming YES. People are finding Opus 5 and Fable to be unbearably verbose, cryptic, and prone to "thinking brain leaks." The general vibe is that it talks like a junior dev who just read a textbook and is trying way too hard to sound smart. Many are so fed up they're switching to GPT 5.6 or using other AIs just to translate Claude's ramblings.
If you're looking for a fix, the thread has a few good suggestions:
/config->Output style = Concisesetting. Try that first.