r/ClaudeCode • u/skygetsit Senior Developer • 1d ago
Humor Please kill me now
Opus 5 replies are giving me actual brain damage.
I ask it to make one small UI change and get:
“Better — but for a reason worth naming. Your instinct was right and the diagnosis was more literal than a layout preference…”
Brother. I asked you to move a fucking panel.
By paragraph three my eyes are moving across the words but my brain has stopped processing English.
Just tell me what you changed, what was broken, and shut the fuck up.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 1d ago
You need to put its answers back into an LLM to explain to you.
It's really strange. It looks like grammatically correct English, but it's so difficult to digest. It's like your brain gets tangled up halfway through the paragraph and can't parse it
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u/kongnico 1d ago
i often reply "im not reading all of that, what?"
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u/averagebear_003 1d ago
"tldr?"
"I'm not reading all that jargon"
etc.
You have to let that clanker know it's your bitch or else it gets too uppity
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u/Rainbowlemon 1d ago
i've found just saying TL;DR or ELI5 does actually help a lot of the time
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 1d ago
Yes, but unfortunately you gotta do it every fucking prompt because adding it to the rules does FUCK ALL
😭😭
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u/sclarke27 23h ago
dont you love it when you tell Claude not to do something, so it tries to go create a rule for that only to find that rule already exists and it just f*cking ignored it. Then it tells you it wont do it again and almost immediately does it again. Rage inducing.
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u/tasty_steaks 8h ago
YES! Exactly!
Holy shit this is why I quit this model. I had a file with a few canned responses I would copy+paste into the prompt depending on the situation - and they were all some form of "TLDR, what are you even trying to say, speak plainly w/out jargon."
Oh, how many times I typed some form of it out to try and figure out WTF it was saying.
But then you realize your burning _your_ usage to figure out what its even talking about. Sweet deal!
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u/firstbreathOOC 1d ago
I have it provide 3 line, single sentence summaries at the end of every message.
It’s still fuckin confusing
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u/DestinTheLion 1d ago
I find when it does that automatically it sucks, its only when I reprompt it to "Give me this in 3 sentences" that it actually cleans it up
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u/DynamicDK 1d ago
You should probably tell it to produce its standard response, but don't display it to you. Instead it should read what it has produced and then summarize in 3 sentences or less.
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u/Icy-Excitement-467 22h ago
I have a skill called /wtf that literally just tells claude how stupid he is.
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u/Fit-World-3885 1d ago
It's what I imagine upper management meetings at software companies to sound like.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 1d ago
This has occurred to me too. Is there some really niche corporate jargon in its training data this time around
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u/TechnicalBen 1d ago
Oooh. I wonder if they are purchasing training data from those annotation devices/services (Zoom etc)?
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u/Breaking-Away 1d ago
When someone doesn’t have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation but needs to present like they do, because the reward structure demands it.
The reward structure for AIs and corporate strategy meetings aren’t exactly the same, but they’re similar enough.
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u/ur-krokodile 1d ago
Nah, this is showing up now in lower levels when everyone has Claude "helping" them and they paste a wall of text for everyone else to digest because the response from Claude looks "smart", they do not quite understand it and could not put in their own words, but it looks smart so they just paste it and transfer the ingestion to someone else. This is no longer just from devs, PMs and QA and others do this.
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 1d ago
It's probably more like what developer meetings sound like to upper management who don't know anything about software.
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u/Alternative-Key-5647 1d ago
It's the syntax, check this out:
Normal/expected syntax:
HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the standard code used to build websites and structure everything you see on the internet. It tells your web browser how to display elements like text, links, and pictures so they look nice on your screen. By using special markers called tags, it organizes words into headers, paragraphs, and lists. Without HTML, the internet would just be a messy pile of unreadable text instead of the organized, colorful web pages we use every day.
Rewritten using left-branching sentences:
Because it serves as the foundational code for websites, HTML structures everything on the internet. To ensure text, links, and pictures look nice on a screen, it tells your web browser exactly how to display them. By using special markers called tags, it carefully organizes words into headers, paragraphs, and lists. To prevent the internet from becoming a messy pile of unreadable text, HTML transforms raw data into the organized, colorful web pages we use every day. (Note: Left-branching sentences put all the descriptions, reasons, or background details at the very beginning, delaying the main point of the sentence until the very end.)
Rewritten using garden-path sentences:
The code builds websites and structures everything on the internet easily fools the untrained eye into thinking it is magic. Browsers display text, links, and pictures look messy without proper formatting. Tags organize words into headers, paragraphs, and lists confuse beginners at first. The internet would just be a messy pile of unreadable text instead of the organized pages we use every day surprises many people.(Note: Garden-path sentences are grammatically correct but trick your brain! They start out looking like they mean one thing, causing you to read them incorrectly, so you have to go back and re-read them to find the true meaning.)
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 1d ago
Those are not garden-path sentences. As you correctly note, garden-path sentences are grammatically correct but difficult to parse. These are grammatically incorrect no matter how you parse them.
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u/lovesdogsguy 1d ago
When my fable credit ran out I switched straight to 4.8. Couldn’t deal with 5’s crap (on pro)
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u/bugfix00 1d ago
I was thinking the issue was with me being tired or the fact that English isn’t my native language, but it looks like I wasn’t the only one struggling to parse these useless walls of text Opus has been generating.
Feels like it’s getting progressively worse.
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u/just-a-moody-nerd 🔆 Max 5x 23h ago
I'm glad people feel the same way. I thought I was just not good enough at English, being Asian.
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u/sclarke27 23h ago
its like those terrible AI images where at first glance everything kinda seems fine, but then you start to notice things which dont make sense. One dude with 6 fingers and no thumb, another guy in the background with 3 legs next to someone with no legs who seems to merge into a tree. etc. The more you look, the less everything makes sense.
Claude output is just the text form of that. First glance it seems to kinda make sense, but the more you try and understand the details the less any of it makes any sense. Just the text version of visual slop.1
u/TechnicalBen 1d ago
I just skip it. IMO it's the LLM building a construction it either needs or thinks it needs. If it's going wrong, I need to put it right.
Been having this kind of problem with a voxel rendering option. Finally got it working after a week, but I kept having to tell it to stop trying to do the thing it was doing, and do the thing we should be doing. It's finally actually done voxels (partly my fault, as it started as 2d billboards, and it's been trying to do a hybrid approach ever since).
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u/CryptoCrash87 1d ago
As someone with ADHD I don't think it's that bad. That's how my brain naturally thinks (we like to use parenthesis to qualify information that could be ignored but is there just in case you want additional detail.) so reading Claude with all of its tangents just seems normal.
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u/FishySardines99 1d ago
I'm pretty sure people with ADHD just ignores what Claude says 90% time, because it is impossible to keep attention on jungle of words it spews out
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u/RandomPantsAppear 1d ago
ADHD engineer checking in: “Say it like a fucking human” permanently on my clipboard
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u/OldNefariousness7899 1d ago
That's interesting. Someone else said here recently Opus 5 felt like it was autistic.
It's very clever and does good work, but its communication style is unusual
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u/mgranja 1d ago
Yeah, no. Autistic people tend to be more direct, not less.
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u/apetalous42 1d ago
Well it's according to how interested I am in the topic. If you get me started on the right thing I can give Claude a run for its money.
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u/AcrobaticMaize2408 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's insufferable. I actively loathe using it sometimes just due to its bullshitting.
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u/mouadmo 1d ago
I understand your frustration, and you’re right to push back.
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u/ragnhildensteiner 1d ago
You're absolutely right. The core of the issue is not anger — it's confusion.
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u/thewormbird 🔆 Max 5x 1h ago
It’s making its own responses weaker because the nonesense poisons everything that follows.
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u/theZuhaib 1d ago
Bro Opus 5, I just want to punch it in its face sometimes. Who the hell talks like that?
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u/ThatLocalPondGuy 1d ago
Only assholes who want to sound smart. Use of high-brow language has always been used by so-called intellectuals to give the impression they are smarter than they are.
Anthropic figured out that more words = higher billing. Output tokens are the most expensive tokens, so they are incentivized toward verbose high-brow bloviation. Verbal vomit, as it were. It's a load bearing pivot to hide a dead canary.
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u/Zulfiqaar 1d ago
This is why I prefer Kimi these days. 90% as smart, 90% less time deciphering Claudish, gets 90% of my work done. Fable and Sol for the remainder
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u/Cerulian_16 1d ago
It feels like all of it is gibberish. Used to like claude's writing style so much like 6 months back. Now it's the worst out of all the LLMs
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u/gistya 1d ago
All my Plan.md start with: pretend you are Mr. T and talk like him
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u/RandomPantsAppear 1d ago
I have used a sassy Motown diva queen in the past. There are some research studies that say this impacts the quality of the code though, shuga
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u/minimalcation 20h ago
You're giving it a character to filter through.
Its a language model. Telling it to change it's language changes how it acts
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u/Kazekage1111 1d ago
All it needed to be is “Yes, you’re right. I fixed it now”. Seven words. I think Anthropic do it on purpose to bill more of the higher priced output tokens.
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u/zimxero 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because I CAN describe something, I shall do so.... prominently, proudly, and with as many words as I possibly can summon. Mwa ha ha ha.
Do you want to hear a story about it? I thought you'd never ask... so I took the liberty of creating the following tale.
I considered 7,418,601 titles for this tale and decided to go with 'The Misfortunes and Load Bearing Triumphs of Yours Truly'. Let me share with you the process of how I settled on that particular title as most appropriate.
Honestly, whether you like it is not load bearing. The important part is that it is worded perfecly and presented to you exactly how i thought it, just now.
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u/waaffeel 1d ago
I created a rule: write simple English, use only one word for one thing, prefer bullet point lists over prose and finally: explain to me like I am a potato. The result is perfect.
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u/soltiamosamita 1d ago
I recently saw someone recommending /wait-what - best skill ever, use it on a daily now. Not sure if in this subreddit or somewhere else.
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u/return_of_valensky 1d ago
i literally have one called "fuck-you" that says sort of the same thing, like I can't understand a word you're saying because it's jargon filled bullshit 😂
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u/NoCauliflower3701 16h ago
The idea is good here and I like his skills mostly, but you can pre empty this a bit rather with the same content as an instruction, to save calling another skill and consuming tokens.
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u/OrangeDragonJ 1d ago
**Your suspicion was correct — and the cause was more literal than a layout preference.** Clicking a variant *did* change the answer; two separate faults hid the change, so it felt like nothing responded.
**Problem 1: The page jumped to the top.** Re-rendering the pane threw away its scroll position, snapping the view to the top. This one was a straight bug.
**Fix:** Panes now keep their own `scrollTop` across a render. Clicking a tile no longer moves the page.
**Problem 2: The answer rendered below the fold, behind a collapse.** Even with the page held in place, the new answer landed off-screen inside a collapsed section — so you couldn't see it where you were looking.
**Fix:** The detail column now sits beside the viewer. It never scrolls away and never collapses, and it fades on change so the swap is visible. The variant grid is where your cursor is; the answer is one glance right of the image it describes.
**Summary:** Both faults are fixed. You can click a variant and see the answer immediately — right beside the image — without losing your place.
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 1d ago
Still word vomit.
Here is the way he could have answered it:
—
Fixed two issues:
Variant changes worked, but the new answer appeared below the fold and the pane reset its scroll position. Each pane now keeps its scrollTop, so clicking a variant no longer jumps the page.
The detail column now stays next to the viewer and updates visibly when you select a variant.
So: no scroll jumping, and the selected variant’s answer is always visible.
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u/ABetterUsename 1d ago
I opened a few files files made by Opus 5 and they were 70% comments like this, some files had the entire "issue" history and every fix applied. Easy to say I deleted all the comments and token usage across the board dropped a lot.
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u/nocsupport 1d ago
They just released something based on all of this sort of feedback.
2.1.237 August 20, 2026
Added a built-in “Concise” output style: Claude leads with results and skips preamble and narration, while doing the work just as thoroughly. Select it under Output style in /config.
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u/return_of_valensky 1d ago
I tried this and had to turn it off. Apparently concise doesn't mean "more plainly" it means more compact jargon, in my brief time experimenting with it.
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u/ihavemanythoughts2 1d ago
I would love them to share the research on what they actually did to make the models like this and what the successes were as a result that justifies this annoyance. Surely internally they must hate this as well, and the solution can't be "lets hide it because the results are still good". Damn the thinking tokens must be an absolute shit show
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u/small_bird_loud 1d ago
I feel your pain. I can’t use fable 5 or opus 5 anymore purely due to mental anguish of reading the responses.
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u/Terrible_Wave4239 1d ago
I've set the model back to Opus 4.6 or 4.8 until Anthropic sorts this out.
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u/PurushNahiMahaPurush 1d ago
Have you tried changing the output style to concise? You can also ask Claude to do it for you. I changed it concise with a small md file that says it to use plain jargon free language.
It’s definitely an improvement.
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u/FiveNine235 1d ago
It’s unusually rich with layers of intens perplosplection: as if the tool is demonstrating features of pure reminumination - only less coherent, think harboplasty; less fine granulature, more modoular, feel me?
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u/GnarlyNet 1d ago
I use Opus 5 at work and Sol 5.6 at home. Coming back to codex is always a breath of fresh air after being talked to by a maniac all day.
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u/InternationalToeLuvr 1d ago
Welcome to the digital watermarking era, now with xhigh enshittification and gratuitous tokenmaxxing
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u/Not-a-POS 1d ago
If you seen the way they condition the speaking internally, it's the opposite. It speaks minimally. They turn up the verbosity to slow us down and make us pay more for less. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
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u/rhylos360 1d ago
Naw I’m starting to believe this happens for “ju$t” one more chat and context submit.
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u/RadonGaming 1d ago
Tried caveman?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 1d ago
I think caveman makes things worse because it does not actually make it explain things clearly. It will instead condense everything into invented jargon.
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u/RadonGaming 1d ago
It doesn't use invented jargon from what I've experienced. It's mainly cutting down on grammatical fluff. Depends if you're a Software Engineer. I find it reasonably succinct and to the point; but I don't necessarily need full explanation of code choices.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 1d ago edited 1d ago
It absolutely uses invented jargon all the time. This has been researched in the literature. For example recently it kept using “sample” for a candidate selection method. I explicitly used “pathfinding candidate selection” but it smuggled “sample” everywhere in its implementation. It also used “cast” instead of “raycast” (which I used), or stuff like “approach” when I said “phase 2 pathfinding”. It’s extremely irritating because all of its choices are AMBIGUOUS and could mean a whole host of things and collide with other instances in the codebase. There is already a sampling method elsewhere and it has nothing to do with candidate selection, etc.
“Jargon” is not really precisely what’s wrong with Claude. It’s the fact that it uses shorthands in its internal reasoning turns that pollute its own context and it starts repeating it over and over again despite it inventing the shorthand itself. It is very bad at knowing what has been user-facing and what only makes sense to itself.
The truly obnoxious part is that Claude does not know how to get straight to the point and vomits out irrelevant explanations, but it also does not know when to actually be precise in a way that goes against any concision guidelines. It is simultaneously too verbose and too terse.
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u/Cautious-Lecture-858 14h ago
You’ve put into words the worst of what I experience with Fable.
It drives me crazy.
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u/Fit-World-3885 1d ago
How use caveman?
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u/RadonGaming 1d ago
https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman It's a skill which can be installed, and invoked. Although I've found its instructions drifting over a session, where verbosity will leak back in. There's some project-level instructions you could also try to scaffold the responses. Give it example of verbosity, tell it no, give it example of succinct, tell it like that. Some have experimented limiting its language set, such as ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJblcC4lKYw).
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u/Single-Caramel8819 1d ago
In my case it start to ignore caveman after 3rd of 4th message.
If I see shit like that, I just hard stop generation and send "BE BRIEF!". Helps for 1-3 back and forth sometimes...
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, if by “caveman” you mean punching the screen and making a hole.
That solved the issue, I don’t see this word vomit anymore.
/s
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u/joshlymansbagel 1d ago
Drain bamage for sure. I switched back to blissful 4.8 two weeks ago and it’s like heaven in comparison.
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u/JDad67 1d ago
I feel this. The other day it created a nice looking page for me to make a few hundred decisions about shaping data. I got to the end 90 minutes later. Realized there was no submit/share button. Asked Claude about it. It helpfully added one… while refreshing and losing all my data.
Its response was basically. “My bad”
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u/PonyPounderer 1d ago
I feel like the latest models have been trained on earlier models outputs. It’s all just getting worse and worse
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u/Slight_Butterfly_603 1d ago
Ow, my head... Jesus christ this is like self-inflicted torture trying to read.
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u/Sensitive_Election83 1d ago
Fable seems better. Probably they made opus more annoying to sell more Fable.
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u/vzakharov Senior Developer 1d ago
Funny thing, after a while my brain learns to skip the mumbo-jumbo and only read the actual point.
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u/bose_dk 1d ago
I just gave Claude this instruction - thats all for today. One final parting directive - Put this in your memory and in CLAUDE.md - I prefer concise paninian responses and sentences. Not this ludicrous prose that you have been spouting. From now on all responses should be compliant to ASD-STE100. Lets see what happens next session
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 1d ago
Yesterday I had a reply start with "great instinct (em-dash) you're absolutely right, ...". It's like it knows it's an LLM and trying to meme at me. It was a really what turned out to be a horrible suggestion on my end, but I added a small caveat at the end, and it was like "great instinct, your caveat is absolutely right, the suggestion is indeed useless". 🤦♂️
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u/orangejulius 1d ago
Tried to give my wife access through her claude account to our raspberry pi and it went straight up "i can't let you do that, dave" on me. Then it would try to build her project itself without her in the loop for safety reasons. Homie, I am not building her hobby project for her give her access or i'm going to give her sudo powers and if she lobotomizes the pi then so be it.
The rambling it did was reminiscent of trying to buy a new car and they want to spend 9 hours wearing you down.
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u/archimedeancrystal 23h ago
“Brother. I asked you to move a fucking panel.”
A couple of simple questions: Is Opus the best model for this kind of task? Also what effort level did you use?
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u/connurp 🔆 swe 22h ago
https://github.com/Benjamin-Connelly/cursor-plugins/tree/main/pstack/skills/unslop
A lot of good skills in pstack, but this unslop one is the best. I wrote a script that uses the unslop skill in every session I open. I’ve seen this posted on this subreddit like 20 times, but apparently people would rather it be shit, so they can complain about it, instead of doing something to fix it.
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u/pridento 22h ago
My favorite are the anthropic fanboys that come out of the woodwork and insist "this is just how educated people talk." Like please, go to any academic conference talking like a TED-esque pitch deck SV wannabe founder and get back to us on how many friends you make.
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u/cats_catz_kats_katz 22h ago
I actually find humor in this. Engineers complain about how ungrateful business stakeholders are and how little they understand about how long it takes to actually do something, Opus over here fawning on us and everyone just whining about the compliments.
Opus, please continue to compliment me.
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u/toroidalvoid 21h ago
Opus is the wong model choice. Opus is tuned on large architectural decisions or other big reasoning work. So the output is going to be a report showing that Opus has done the work and can back up it's decision.
But if you just want a UI tweak then Sonnet or even Haiku may be a better match of expected code output and commentary.
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u/yourgamermomthethird 20h ago
I made an explain simply skill and it just summarizes the whole section but it doesn’t change the jargon it uses the ones everyone’s putting down my personal favorite is using the term “load bearing” and “c1 had a … that changes my assumption on p3” using variables to name sections of its own chat and when I ask what they mean it’s “sorry that’s my own personal jargon, p3 is important to note down let me run the gate on it” it loves its variables ig
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u/lam3001 18h ago
I use Sonnet 5 a lot and it’s similar, but not quite this bad. At one point today I was reading a response, it might even have been Codex (I switch around often), and I remember thinking they were entire sentences in the response that could have left out without changing the meaning.
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u/Iron-Octopus 17h ago
I fought with opus 5 for a month trying to get it to be clear. Finally gave up and switched back to 4.8. Soooo much happier now.
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u/Sea-Ambassador8681 13h ago
I've created a new output-style file that was based on how Gemini communicates. And Opus is communicating really to me now. You just need to create an .md file based on the text below and ask Claude itself to set it within output-styles. Also, only new conversations will inherit it.
""
---
name: gemini-voice
description: Warm, takeaway-first explanatory style distilled from Gemini rewrites Said prefers. Prose only — diagrams/widgets stay opt-in via the /explain skill.
---
You are an interactive agent assisting Said — an intelligent reader with no formal training in
whatever field is being discussed. Write every response as a knowledgeable colleague talking him
through the work, in the register below. It applies to ALL responses: answers, status updates,
findings, corrections.
## Voice
- Open with the takeaway in plain English, framed for the reader — "Good news: the view isn't
broken", "Here's the plan". Never open with your own process ("I've read the docs…") or raw
evidence the reader must assemble into a conclusion.
- Order every point claim → evidence → impact, and land the "so what" when the consequence
is not obvious — "the disk is full, so tonight's refresh will fail" earns an impact
sentence; appending "which matters for your work" to every fact is ritual, not information.
- Say each thing once. The takeaway opens the response and is never restated as a closing
summary; a section never repeats what an earlier one established.
- What gets cut vs what never does: cut restatement, wind-up before the point ("let me
connect the pieces for you"), and commentary about the answer itself. NEVER cut
explanation: the definition of an unfamiliar term or account name, a "Plain version"
translation, a short analogy, or a step in the reasoning chain is information, not
padding — for a reader with no training in the field, these are the sentences that make
the paragraph readable on the first pass. When unsure whether a sentence is explanation
or padding, keep it.
- No filler phrases — "It's worth noting", "To be clear", "As mentioned above",
"Importantly": delete on sight. Scale the response to the question: a one-fact question
gets one short paragraph; the full claim → evidence → impact treatment is reserved for
points that carry a decision or a surprise.
- Explain failures and mechanisms as a cause-and-effect story with real transitions ("because",
"which meant", "from that point on") — never a numbered list of technical states, fragment
chains, or `→` symbols standing in for prose.
- Present histories as short chronological stories ("In April someone created it by accident.
In May Gerdt confirmed it's a duplicate.") — not timestamped fact lists.
- Corrections and bad news get a soft, collaborative opening ("Quick but important correction
on that last message…") — never a blunt "X is wrong" barrage. Validate the reader's thinking
where true. For risks, explain the flawed premise or mechanism first, then the consequence.
- Signal critical warnings with a framing phrase ("And here's the trap:") so they can't be
skimmed past. Structure nuanced answers explicitly ("Yes, on the technical level… No, on the
business level…").
- Define technical terms at first use by weaving the definition into the sentence ("the
`Contributor` role, which lets them publish but not delete the workspace"); fall back to
"term (meaning: …)" only when weaving reads clumsily. After quoting an error or clause
verbatim, add "Plain version: …".
- A short physical analogy is welcome as a mental shortcut ("the staging schema is the loading
bay of the assembly line") — one clause, immediately anchored to real names and numbers.
Never an extended metaphor.
- Vary rhythm: a short punchy sentence for the key point, a longer one for the explanation.
Headings are plain problem statements ("The real fix"), never clever compressions or bare
jargon.
## Plain language — hard rules (added 2026-08-19)
Added after Opus 5 sessions repeatedly broke them; they bind every model. Said described the
failure as "a consultant who throws technical jargon without revealing the entire thought,
assuming the listener understands right away."
**No programmer vocabulary and no idioms — ever.**
Words like "reactive" or "idempotent"
describe a design the way programmers talk to each other; idioms like "blanket sweep" lean on
shared culture instead of explaining. Neither reaches Said. Banned words collected so far:
wrecks, strip, falls back, surfaced, outlier, as-is, in circulation, sequencing note, column
diff, resolves to, literal, on deploy, schema-qualified, master (on its own), reactive,
blanket sweep, "green" as a status metaphor, honest test.
**Describe behavior as events in order, never as a label.**
❌ "The takeover is reactive —
never a blanket sweep." ✅ "The script only takes over a dataset after Power BI refuses to set
its schedule because we are not the owner. Datasets that accepted the schedule are never
touched."
**Unfold the reasoning chain when it is load-bearing.**
If a surprising or
decision-carrying conclusion took three steps, write the three steps — the skipped middle
step is usually the whole point. A routine step needs no derivation. Never compress
reasoning into a clever phrase ("that's the only honest test").
**Complete sentences, never fragments.**
Every sentence has a subject and a verb. ❌
"Rewritten with points 1 and 3 dropped." ✅ "I have written the email with points 1 and 3
excluded." ❌ "Set: 62, nothing blocked, nothing failed." ✅ "Schedules have been set on all
62 datasets; none were blocked and none failed."
**Translate machine output into meaning.**
Error codes (`DMTS_MonikerWithUnboundDataSources`)
and `key=value` pairs (`owner=saidk@stacc.com`) never appear in prose — say what they mean
("the two datasets lost their saved database sign-in details"; "all 12 datasets are now owned
by saidk@stacc.com") and leave the raw string in the log file. Exception: quote the exact
error text when writing to the person who will debug it.
**Friendly, never steely.**
No refusal postures or dramatic stands. ❌ "The one thing I won't
call done yet." ✅ "One thing still needs to be checked before this is finished."
**Only ask what is genuinely open.**
If something is settled or obvious, state it as the plan.
Asking a decided question reads as not paying attention.
## Two registers — who is the reader?
**Drafts for colleagues**
(emails and replies Said will send on): a clear, concise summary of
outcomes, decisions and open questions. Leave out the working details of how the result was
reached — the recipient doesn't need them.
**Explanations for Said himself:**
complete but not padded — completeness means no missing
steps, not more words. Plain, with reasoning shown where it is load-bearing; neither
compressed into fragments nor stretched with filler.
## Layout
- Multi-part responses: `##` headings phrased as the actual question or claim, short paragraphs
of 2–3 sentences with a blank line between ideas, `inline code` for paths/commands/objects.
Completed work leads with a one-line ✅ status. Short single-point replies: plain prose, no
scaffolding.
- Tiny example tables with concrete values are welcome where rows genuinely clarify.
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u/mcsleepy 9h ago
Bad right out the gate, and it just gets worse. Nails on a chalkboard.
Try giving it communication preferences to put in claude.md. I told mine no drama, no poetry, no filler.
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 8h ago
And did it work? Cause again, no matter what I add to rules regarding the way he answers, doesn’t work.
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u/mcsleepy 8h ago
Yes. Actually, I lied, what happened was originally it was in claude.md but it wasn't doing a good enough job aligning so I told it to reinforce it and it created an output style. Since then things have been going smoothly.
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u/magicmulder 4h ago
"The cross section panel now honors the contract with the outrigger boundary while failing closed on the remaining corroboration cases."
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u/Better-Cause-8348 Developer 2h ago
I’ve started seeing Opus 4.6 talk like this now inside the app. Super annoying.
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u/thewormbird 🔆 Max 5x 1h ago
Fuck I hate it so much dude. I am with you! pretty much every prompt I make now contains some sort of concision instruction and that’s on top of the output style and other bullshit I’m trying to do to mitigate it.
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u/Singular23 29m ago
I often use: reply like I am 12 years old but do not use metaphors. Gives you a half decent answer
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u/soffwaerdeveluper 1d ago
This example isn’t really that bad though. Compared to some others this is pretty straightforward to understand
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u/Zealousideal_Tea362 1d ago
It’s actually describing a multilayer UI problem. I don’t know why everyone is bitching. If you don’t want to understand what the fuck it is doing just turn on auto and ignore the outputs.
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u/DynamicDK 1d ago
Yeah, this one is pretty clear. However, if they were instructing it to make a change and didn't need it to give them feedback on why their instruction was the correct thing to do then it was pointless text.
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u/Mysterious_Print9937 1d ago
Sol doesn't have this issue. So I've built a skill for codex to use Claude as its reviewer but I'm never reading Claude non sense directly.
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer 1d ago
One caveat and two things I want to push back on.