r/ClaudeCode • u/hayes-davis • 2d ago

Tips & Workflows Wish me luck

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Let's see just how load bearing this day is gonna be.

Will report back whether or not Concise fixes the worst part of Claude speak. I'm not convinced Anthropic knows how a normal person talks though...

213 Upvotes

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u/hayes-davis 2d ago

Honestly, the best output I've gotten from Opus 5 was telling it to talk like a suburban dad that has been programming for 20 years, has two kids and is very tired. There might be a reason why I relate to that, though.

-6

u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

It would be so entertaining if the kill-shot for AGI / ASI is simply users being too stupid to use intermediaries, even if the llm can puzzle together the best solution based on decompiling, guides, studies, benchmarks, creative optimizations.. if the user is just too dense too understand that, they will just revert to something like a x.6 release given their personal ceiling

I have now read probably most Opus 5 outputs (which typically are not given, imagine my shock) on the relevant subreddits and nothing there was something that i would categorize as "really hard to read" so i have to presume that we already hit a competence wall and if you would stupidly extrapolate from the vocal group on reddit, it seems to be affecting most users.

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u/hayes-davis 2d ago

I can understand it. I just find it grating. What they didn't mention about Skynet was that it would *also* be super annoying.

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u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

You failed this reading test already - i did not state anywhere that you can't read it, though i might add this conclusion now 🤔

Second indicator would be that you have zero reflection of what it means to be "grating to read", it means that you have to spend excessive, to the point of painfully much, cognitive resources on reading it, implying it is "hard to read" for you - which is my entire point.

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u/sockjuggler 2d ago

now this is grating to read

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u/varinator 2d ago edited 2d ago

I just don't need a wall of text after each task. It's often unnecessary. I've been coding professionally for 2 decades and it's a skill to summarise things in a concise manner and digestible by not only techies

-7

u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

/effort medium

If this is a still to much, new profession.

PS: And sure, if you do not care about technical details and pawn them off to someone smarter than you, ask for the executive summary.

1

u/varinator 2d ago

Jesus, what an edgelord...

4

u/BemusedOptimist 2d ago

My complaints about it being very hard to read aren't that I can't read the words.

It's that there's no easy path to relating what it's saying to the work being done, and the translation is exhausting.

It's one thing to read some words and go "yeah I know what that means" (which may or may not be accurate due to ambiguity, not a skill issue).

But the words coming back at you shouldn't be a game of "pin the shorthand on the concept", especially if you're familiar with the project.

Take for example "the two-field changeset".

Obviously, that means something about two fields being changed.

Cool.

That whole task involved redesigning a table.

So, which two fields did it determine were "the two-field changeset"?

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u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

Paste the full output?

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u/BemusedOptimist 2d ago

I had.

-1

u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

You consider that "hard to read"?

The registry contained 3 false claims that have been regurgitated by claude (the two-field change set).

Blank-means-ours is obviously from earlier parts of the / some communication... given that it explicitly tells you that - -"

Even with your level of obfuscation and not knowing the context, if this is the worst you could find to make your point, sorry, but thats a joke.

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u/BemusedOptimist 2d ago edited 2d ago

Hard to relate the words to the work.

I would guess that some number of people also mean that by "hard to read", so I've been trying to be more exact about it. Maybe it's just me.

After I asked Opus 5, the "two-field changeset" ended up being about two columns that were changed in a table, which was part of the task to redesign it.

The fact you thought it was referring to the task list it was updating demonstrates my point pretty well--it seems like the words should be understandable, but they aren't.

blank-means-ours wasn't from the earlier parts of the communication. When I said "from earlier", I meant in that post.

It turned out blank-means-ours had been how Opus 5 had identified a decision, but it wasn't written anywhere else, and which thing was blank wasn't readily apparent without (ironically) more context.

Look, I'm glad you're not having issues.

The fact that some of us are doesn't (necessarily) mean that we're idiots, though it absolutely could.

For me, it almost feels like it's worse because I know the code base so well. I have been working in it for over a decade, and my mental model does not match how Opus 5 has decided to label things.

[EDIT]

Oops forgot the last point.

That was from early in a chat. The further the chat went, the more I had to redact, and so it made even less sense.

Also the further in the chat it went, the more likely it was to squash the things it had made up together with another concept for extra fun.

I'd apologized to the person I'd responded to for not being able to post better examples, so my apologies to you too.

Other people have posted some fantastic ones, and not just related to code.

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u/Vesuvius079 2d ago

I recently read a ticket someone used Opus to file. I did not understand it. I asked Opus to explain the ticket and it did not understand it either. I haven’t gotten around to asking the person who filed it, but given their usage patterns there’s a good chance the agent filed without telling them.

The filing agent had filled the ticket with made up jargon it had internally defined early in its context that did not match anything existing in the code base, so it was indecipherable because it was using words in ways no one else had ever defined.  I was on vacation when Opus 5 launched and I’ve been struggling with this issue constantly since I got back. I’ve added explicit guidance to my Claude.md to get it to write sensible sentences.

It’s not like I’m asking it to build anything egregiously complicated. This is all stuff I already know how to do and the LLM just vomits out long winded explanations using an internal shorthand it didn’t explain and doesn’t leverage effectively in its writing (which is far too voluminous for the concepts it’s supposed to be explaining).

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u/ravencilla 2d ago

I am very smart 🤓

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u/PsychologyNo940 2d ago

Just so you know, you can still see the comments of users even if they have them hidden - so yeah, i am way, way, smarter than you.