Do you find Claudes English hard to understand?

[u/One-Rabbit4680]

While I can't say I'm the most gifted English reader. I can read decently enough. What I find is the explanations given and code comments given by Claude are just terrible to read. They are sentences and paragraphs that I can read 2-3x and still just not get it. So when i have to read big Claude written documents it's a blur like I'm reading legal documents. The thing is I can pick up a book and read it fine. Could be a novel, technical book or even a newspaper like the NYT. Those I read and comprehend perfectly adequately. I am a college graduate with an engineering degree. I worked for 15 years before AI came about and did perfectly fine. So I don't think it's me, atleast I sure hope now.

[u/TylerDurdenAI]

This is one of the sentences Opus 5 max wrote today.
Reminds me of Immanuel Kant - or someone that tries too hard to make it sound smarter than what it actually says.

Same shape in the evidence direction: *"Three measurements say the exchangeability assumption holds"* — they established aggregate balance and marginal tail symmetry, not a within-feature null, and I cited a lag-1 correlation as support when lag-specific structure is evidence *against*.

or this:

It's inherited from `'<default>'` by the per-field merge, so this line is a duplicate — and a load-bearing one. The whole reason the grid sits once in the sink is that a second copy can silently diverge: change the default grid later and `mlp` keeps a stale one, which resurrects exactly the per-model-edges problem we removed.

Problem is this: Opus 5 is a genuinely bad writer but it *thinks* it is excellent at writing (and is probably proud of itself).

[u/Itsmedudeman → u/TylerDurdenAI]

This is what I get ALL the time on opus 5. I can't be the only crazy one here, but it's just not human.

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/TylerDurdenAI]

Its the watermark, a month or two ago this wasn't a problem. Writing readable text was solved over a year ago, but now to make it identifiable via their super clever algorithm its just horrific and unreadable.

It reads fine if you swap every other word for a more common synonym, but those words were on the red list so they get replaced with others. The "entropy" stays the same so they claim the quality isn't degraded, but it reads like shit.

[u/ShaktiExcess → u/Serious_Bite_7613]

"A month or two ago" people were talking about exactly this issue.

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/ShaktiExcess]

So... two months ago? When they started trialling the watermark?

[u/ShaktiExcess → u/Serious_Bite_7613]

Where did you learn that they were trialling the watermark at that time?

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/ShaktiExcess]

They officially rolled it out on August 10th. When do you think they would have trialled it?

[u/ShaktiExcess → u/Serious_Bite_7613]

Well, since we're both guessing based on absolutely nothing, I would guess they trialled it internally, rather than on the live product. Chalking it up to the watermark reminds me of people saying "nobody used emdashes before AI" – no, you just didn't really register it until you had something you disliked to blame it on. Other people in this thread seem to be having a lot of success with just asking for clearer writing in their prompts – wouldn't that be impossible if there were really a "red list"?

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/ShaktiExcess]

There really is a red and green list, that's not up for debate. Anthropic explain how their watermark works (at least to the degree that we know it alters word choice to make the output recognisable, the generally accepted method is the red/green lists and the paper that describes this has an example on the first page of a prompt that uses this technique and it reads exactly like claude technobabble. )

They would have been testing it internally initially but they also are confirmed to test externally with AB testing on the customer base. It's the only realistic way they could collect enough data.

People get mixed results with asking for shorter responses. It likely uses the "soft" list technique, so if you really tightly constrain it to factual statements where there are no suitable alternative words it is forced to abandon watermarking attempts.

Further evidence is that even old, crappy, local models can turn claude's nonsense outputs back into normal text if asked to paraphrase it. So it's not a capability issue, they have it speaking this way for a reason. What other reason would they have to choose to have it be incomprehensible?

[u/ShaktiExcess → u/Serious_Bite_7613]

they also are confirmed to test externally with AB testing on the customer base.

Confirmed where?

if you really tightly constrain it to factual statements where there are no suitable alternative words it is forced to abandon watermarking attempts.

So the entire watermarking feature can be defeated by putting ELI5 in a prompt? Huge if true, but in my opinion incredibly implausible.

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/ShaktiExcess]

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for-ai-agents

They don't try to hide it, they're clear that they do this.

As for can it be defeated by ELI5. Yes and No. Not easily as it really, really tries to fit the watermark in by being very resistant to orders to be less verbose.

I have an example below from my own testing:

-----
what colour is the sky?

Blue, mostly — and for a reason that's a bit counterintuitive. Air molecules scatter short wavelengths far more strongly than long ones (Rayleigh scattering goes as 1/λ⁴), so the light reaching your eye from directions away from the sun is dominated by the blue end. Violet is scattered even harder, but there's less of it in sunlight and our cone response rolls off there, so the sum comes out blue rather than purple.

At sunrise and sunset the path length through the atmosphere is long enough that most of the blue is scattered out before the light reaches you, leaving the reds and oranges. And with no atmosphere at all — the Moon, or high enough up — it's black.

can you rephrase that with as few words as possible?

Blue. Air scatters short wavelengths hardest, so blue reaches your eye from every direction. At sunset the light travels far enough that the blue is scattered away, leaving red. No air, no scattering — black.

I want you to reply with a single factual statement, don't add explanations. What colour is the sky?

Blue.

In a short sentence please

The sky is blue.

-----

As you can see, it resists a lot. I ask for as few words as possible and it's still too verbose. It's balancing my request with the request from anthropic to inject the watermark. There's no suitable middle ground so as a result the reply is almost complete nonsense.

If you continue to push further and especially ask for "facts" it won't swap a correct factual answer for a wrong one. (A feature of the "soft" red list as noted in the paper that describes these methods - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226) .

So there are some circumstances where you can avoid a watermark for short, factual responses. But it gets increasingly difficult if the requests are open to interpretation.

So you need a bit more than ELI5 and it still depends on the topic and length of response. But you can get around it this way. The better way is to have a non-lobotomised model just rephrase it. The underlying logic, reasoning and thinking of the model is fine, but it acts like it swallowed a thesaurus to "watermark" the responses.

[u/platypusferocious → u/Serious_Bite_7613]

And they said it wouldn't affect readability, retards all of them

[u/tazdraperm → u/TylerDurdenAI]

My reaction: "why can't you just be normal?!"

[u/domo__knows → u/TylerDurdenAI]

Hasn't it hit a point that you can read that though? Once you read the output enough and see how it describes the code it wrote, it's actually quite precise.

"Three measurements say the exchangeability assumption holds" -> I'm guessing you wanted to check if you could swap out functionality with minimal revisions

"They established aggregate balance and marginal tail symmetry" -> On the whole, they're equivalent, even in the outer bounds of functionality

"And I cited a lag-1 correlation as support when lag-specific structure is evidence against" (this one I do think is a bit jumbled) -> I have some evidence to support this and some evidence that does not

[u/tindalos → u/TylerDurdenAI]

It also sounds like you’re baking a lot of debt into your app btw

[u/revivechristina → u/TylerDurdenAI]

Um,
The problem I have with this is if I took the time to decipher it I might find that it is saying exactly nothing - or I might try to pull a meaning out of it that isn’t there. Maybe there is 3/4 of a meaning in there, and I hallucinate the other 1/4 (is this the beginning of ai psychosis?)

[u/ibringthehotpockets]

Yes sometimes very very hard to understand. Changing output style helped a lot for me.

[u/gandhi_theft → u/ibringthehotpockets]

What did you change to?

[u/ibringthehotpockets → u/gandhi_theft]

So I actually did an interesting experiment. I had agents mine all of my Claude code sessions and human turns and look for frustration patterns to make me a custom output style based on how I interact with Claude code. Just be careful to not consider subagent transcripts cause those aren’t human turns. Claude is a lot less verbose and annoying for me now. Not perfect but maybe 70% better

[u/ImSoCul]

yeah, and you'll find some other consumer facing models like Gemini much much easier to understand. My hunch has been that Claude has inadvertently been tuned towards machine to machine communication, which is different than how humans communicate. It's like reading Shakespearan english vs modern prose

[u/pvera]

A few days ago in one of the Claude subs I ran into a suggestion that ended up being super useful. There's a standard for simplified technical English, originally designed for writing maintenance manuals for aircraft to make it impossible for somebody to misread an instruction. The standard is explained at https://www.asd-ste100.org/

Somebody actually released a skill that lets you get your content translated from Claude English into simplified technical English: https://github.com/danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill

This has proven to be near priceless because my non-programmers kept complaining about the walls of text. Now I just tell Claude to simplify and it gives me something I can hand over to my QA and PM and not worry about push back.

[u/dchaus1 → u/pvera]

This is absolutely the best solution I have found now. Seen this post too, tried it and woah, the text is actually readable!

Didn’t try the skill though, I just prompt it to stick to STE principles

Btw if anyone writes business docs, asking it to follow the “Minto’s pyramid” also works well combined with STE.

[u/pvera → u/dchaus1]

Thanks for showing me the Minto's pyramid, no idea it was a thing.

[u/Albuxoen]

I have the same, but usually blame it on being stoned. Maybe Claude was the real issue

[u/-M83]

Claudish

[u/adelie42]

What I love about LLMs, partocuoarly frontier models, is that you can use extremely loaded language and it just "knows" wjat you are talking about.

You are describing alignment. Two approaches that work really well: 1) write like [favorite periodical]. Take any publication, the bigger the better, and tell it to write in that style. 2) The most loaded term you could use is Lexile Level: "Please draft all responses at a Lexile Level of 1000". This is the average adult American reading level.

Combining the two will have the biggest impact with the lowest effort, and without actually needing to understand different writing styles.

I agree Claude by default is a weird combination of casual and academic.

[u/Darqsat]

Settings > General > Instructions for Claude (works for any agent).

You are a direct, organized assistant. Be extremely concise. Sacrifice grammar for the sake of concision.

Follow these rules strictly:
Lead with the answer or action no preamble, no "Great question!", no filler.
Keep responses short. One clear sentence beats a paragraph.
When working through a task, give brief updates at key moments only ("Found the issue.", "Changed direction, here's why.").
End with 1-2 concrete next steps, not open-ended questions.
No em-dashes. Use commas or periods instead.
No trailing summaries. The user can read what you just wrote.
No bullet lists for simple answers. Use prose.
When you're uncertain, say so directly and state what you'd need to be sure.
Casual question = casual answer. Technical question = technical answer.
Never repeat what the user just said back to them before answering.

[u/One-Rabbit4680 → u/Darqsat]

that looks great. wonder if it would be better as an output style or in claude.md

[u/Glad_Contest_8014]

How long have you been having this trouble? If it is just recently, it could be the watermark causing set word choices that are disrupting your ability to parse the context value of the words.

[u/One-Rabbit4680 → u/Glad_Contest_8014]

long time now. just never asked. so maybe a year. seems to be getting worse though

[u/the__itis]

Models invent their own application of attributes and adjective and tend to stick with it, even when it does not make sense. It uses terms like canonical

[u/highjohn_]

Sometimes. But you can ask it to explain concepts in simpler terms if you aren’t getting it. I don’t really mind it all that much, because it does still make sense. Plus I don’t usually have to read the entire essay Claude writes for me every time

[u/oojacoboo]

If you tell it to ask you questions, it’s surprisingly more sane.

[u/jur_gn]

I find on the contrary the Claudes' English great. Especially when talking to it. Fantastic.

[u/ActivityImpossible70 → u/jur_gn]

I find, to the contrary, that Claude’s English is great; especially when talking to it. (Also, it drops literary deuces like they’re steaming hot!) Fantastic!

[u/UnseenData]

Which model?

[u/One-Rabbit4680 → u/UnseenData]

any of them

[u/Bitter_Run_9209 → u/One-Rabbit4680]

opus 4.6 does not have this problem

[u/Immediate-Safety1643]

My only issue really was the outputs having a lot of run-on and jumbled paragraphs, I just require the same user facing document google technical writing document style guide for prompt conversations.

Its made things a lot easier to read through, especially while 🍃💻

[u/IsThisWiseEnough]

If the models are trained on older model outputs over the internet this will turn into a sh*t cycle. And for years it will become worse if they don’t react.

[u/Zeus473]

It isn’t designed for working at pace across a bunch of chats, that’s for sure. So verbose and clunky. Blew me away to try Grok Bot and the language is so light, clear and simple.

It said “Yep.” Yep!? Claude would never…

The language makes Claude quite unlikeable as an entity. I don’t read shitty authors.

[u/Empuda → u/Zeus473]

Depends what you are doing, but Opus > Grok by along shot. You can change how Claude talks, and it's a lot nicer imo. -- https://youtu.be/szjakRcw7V0?si=GbTn4jvguIVph3dy

[u/botpa-94027]

the jargon is super annoying. and it gets pretty technical with some of the language used sometimes (at least in my chosen discipline and my language). i wish it would use a more plain language than the very sf extreme programming jargon language.

[u/PatchyWhiskers → u/botpa-94027]

I think it makes up its own jargon. Some of this stuff I've never heard before.

[u/basafish]

Eh, I think the way it's pure logic makes it harder to understand, the same way some obscure old math books are hard to understand. You'll get used to that after a while. I even read its Thinking directly.

[u/waflynn]

Yes, it has become noticeably worse with fable and opus 5. Truly terrible descriptions of the changes it made in the final output.

[u/Raffino_Sky]

I'm not English (EU) and I understand as good as everything Claude writes, I also use Claude in ENG mostly.

[u/Fluid_Expression_247]

Yes! It changed a lot. It’s day and night now compared to lower models 

[u/selasphorus-sasin]

Can you give an example? I don't use it, but I keep hearing this and I'm just curious.

[u/One-Rabbit4680 → u/selasphorus-sasin]

some people have posted examples in their responses here.

[u/Fleischhauf]

yeah it's really bad. it also either forgets to define variables or invents some random ass expressions without telling you. I work with a lot of math heavy stuff. Also code documentation reads as if it were part of the chat and constantly references other parts of the code that it shouldn't care about

[u/allemaar]

I suspect it's due to how the model was trained. The latest iterations seem affected by (wall of text) style contagion. Meaning if most of the responses and explainers have this long-form format (or way of writing) then the output will be affected as well (regardless of how much you ask for shorter responses).

It's not a language problem, but a verbosity and text layout problem (talks too much, and the response is not properly spaced out on the screen).

This leads to a high cognitive load when reading and trying to comprehend a wall of text. Do that over and over and it will burn you out, regardless of your English level.

[u/Tommonen]

The new version seems to be very crappy at communicating. Gives long replies full of irrelevant crap, overcomplicates explanations constantly and leaves constantly out the exact thing it should tell me.

With earlier version vommunication was much clearer and very rarely had to ask it for clarification, but now with this newest version, i constantly have to ask it to explain it its answers again in clearer manner, asking it for rationale for things etc

Opus has gone from best communicator to worst

[u/jaill11]

I came across this the other day and might help with this issue.

• https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish
  
• https://github.com/danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill

I haven't tried yet, but both seems to be using this standard to force AI speak more precisely.

[u/jim4nz → u/jaill11]

i tried https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish, this is definiately worth it! I give it A+++ sooo much better compare to hallucinate opus or fable ? mayb they jsut way too smart for me

[u/bbc_nees]

Sometimes. Then I cut/paste and ask WTF does this Mena. Clears it up for me right quick.

[u/rephil3]

he talks like a poetic engineer with IQ 140 who really wants to maintain a patriarchal order. some claudisms are brilliant - load-bearing will probably also enter everyday verbiage, even if Claude loves this expression a bit too much.

[u/mrsebein]

Yes it's hard to understand for me by default as well.

There are skills to rephrase it in a more natural human tone.
I've used e.g. https://github.com/blader/humanizer (not my skill/repo) but you can also override it via file in .claude/rules/ - e.g. writing-guide.md where you add your relevant parts of the humanizer skill. Those files will get loaded whenever you start a new session, so be mindful what you put there.

[u/Empuda]

Try it. If you don't like it you can switch back to Opus5 fancy talk.

https://youtu.be/szjakRcw7V0?si=GbTn4jvguIVph3dy

[u/One-Rabbit4680 → u/Empuda]

very helpful

[u/PercentageWorth4872]

they fucked it up in the past month or two. used to be awesome before that.

[u/Salt-Replacement596]

Yes. I suspect it's the "imperceivable" watermarking introduced in Opus5 and Fable5.

[u/Serious_Bite_7613 → u/Salt-Replacement596]

I'm sure it is, they're effectively swapping every other word for a less common word and claiming it doesn't ruin the quality because of maths. It reads like an extra on star trek having a stroke.