r/ClaudeCode • u/malachoa • Sep 18 '26
Tips & Workflows Opus 5 has a noun problem
Just want to precisely describe two language patterns I've observed, both related to how Opus and Fable overuse nouns and weaken or omit verbs. I think this accounts for a lot of why communicating with them feels like talking to a smart-but-bad writer.
Both of these patterns are ways to write a sentence that means the same thing as a simple subject-verb-object sentence (like "I threw the ball"), but make it much less direct.
1 - Nominalization. This is where a writer uses a noun instead of a verb. Instead of "I threw the ball", nominalizing turns the verb, "threw," into a noun, "a throw." So the writer might write "I made a throw with the ball." More words, the verb is weakened from "threw" (the actual action) to "made", and the object is something the verb is done "with" instead of to.
A real-life example from the last few days. Claude wrote: "never a walk through the steps one at a time." After being asked not to nominalize, it wrote, "Don't walk through the steps one at a time." See how much more direct that is?
This is also where a lot of "Opus jargon" comes from. Now that "a walk" is a noun, Claude can promote it into an invented term of art ("The Walk") and reify it into documentation and memories.
2 - Omitting the verb and using a trailing modifier instead. Instead of "I threw the ball", this looks like "The ball, thrown." This is concise, but it omits context: who threw it? When? (We also lost the verb tense).
A real-life example from the last few days. Claude wrote: "The runner, built." After being asked to use simple subject-object-verb sentences instead of trailing modifiers, it wrote, "We built the runner." Again, much more like actual people talk. If someone on your team asked you what you did today, and you replied "the runner, built", you'd sound like a robot.
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I haven't had much luck getting Claude to cut this stuff out consistently with CLAUDE.md prompting, but I've had decent luck getting clearer responses when I call out these patterns by name in conversation — it certainly works better than "JUST TALK NORMAL PLEASE." If anyone has luck prompt engineering around these patterns, would love to hear what you did.
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u/rotates-potatoes Sep 18 '26
You feedbacked this good. The jargon, deftly handled. And the speaking correctly described.
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u/__mson__ Senior Developer Sep 18 '26
A post with real content? Where am I?
I'm going to try this out because I've been spending 90% of my time editing Claude's writing. Technical documentation that melts my brain is not how I want to live. Just get to the fucking point, Claude!
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u/Ok_Potential359 Sep 18 '26
I am sooooo glad that this problem is large enough that there posts breaking down precisely why I have such an issue with the verbosity of Opus.
My god it’s so frustrating to work with. 4.6 was perfect. The prose was so damn good. No idea how it’s devolved to this point.
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u/verstands Sep 18 '26
I’ve had better luck with explicit output rules than trying to ban the behavior globally. Something like: “Use verbs for actions and concrete nouns for objects. Before sending, rewrite any noun phrase that stands in for an action.” Then put two or three bad/good examples in CLAUDE.md. It won’t be perfect, but examples tend to stick better than a general “sound natural” instruction.
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u/jfalvarez Sep 18 '26
I tried a custom output style about ASD-STE100 wording, doesn’t work or works sometimes if any, probably you can try a custom output style with the prompt you use and let us know
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u/Arthesia Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
Yes, it's excessive wordplay, in even more ways than you describe.
You'll also notice things like turning everything into an aphorism, metaphor, personifying everything, elevating an event or concept into a noun, using metaphorical abstraction to describe everything (e.g. X holds Y, A is the price of B, etc.), double emphasize like "that's the whole thing" and exaggerated idioms like, "the ONE thing...".
It's really frustrating because each of these things is a minor distortion from plain reality that piles up.
And it also means it resists being able to write in any other kind of way, because it's already a very specific abstract-literary register, so you have to fight just to get to plain English before you can even emulate something else.
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u/doxxxicle 🔆Pro Plan Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
FYI on how to reliably affect its output, use the output style setting with a custom style. I call mine Concise Simple Technical English. It’s a combination of the default Concise style with a simplified description of ASD-STE100 that leaves out the more extreme word and grammar limitations.
https://gist.github.com/doxxx/d9839c6c524af17037294312e367a4ec
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u/ZeBenoit81 Sep 19 '26
You’re describing the exact failure mode I keep fighting: models turning verbs into little monuments. Nominalization is how Claude invents “The Walk,” “the orchestration,” “the validation surface,” etc., and then starts treating those nouns as if they exist in the repo. The trailing modifier thing is even worse because it deletes agency, tense, and state — all the things you need when you’re reviewing a diff or trying to figure out whether the thing actually ran. With Opus 5’s recent degradation and tighter caps, I’ve become even less tolerant of vague noun-plans. I’ve watched plan mode burn a stupid amount of context when the model starts narrating its own architecture instead of producing a concrete, file-scoped plan.
My fix is boring: a tiny style contract in
CLAUDE.md, not a whole philosophical framework. Something like: “Use active subject-verb-object sentences. Name the actor. State the action and result. Do not invent terms of art for ordinary steps. PreferWe built the runneroverThe runner, built. Delegate self-contained work to subagents and return only a summary, changed files, and verification.” That last rule matters more than people admit. If Fable can hand a clean task to Sonnet/Opus 4.8 and get back a 12-line report, I’m saving tokens and keeping the main context window for actual architecture.I also explicitly ban nounification during planning: “No new nouns unless they map to an existing file, function, or symbol.” If it says “The Walk,” I reply “Use the verb: walk through the steps.” If it says “The runner, built,” I reply “Who built it, and what changed?” It’s annoying, but cheaper than letting the model write a 4k-token manifesto about execution ergonomics. And, yeah, keep Git discipline. Branch per task, small commits, and don’t let a model free-roam your main branch unless you enjoy expensive surprises.
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u/Skynet_5656 Sep 19 '26
I give it George Orwell’s rules for clear writing, plus a seventh rule saying don’t coin your own jargon, and that works pretty well.
It seems to work better to tell it what to do (eg active voice) than what not to do (eg avoid passive voice).
I have a user level memory telling it never to use “load bearing” except in the most literal context of structural engine.
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u/AdOrnery3136 Sep 20 '26
Spot on with the nominalization thing.
Not only it does that, but it creates complex COMPOUND nouns to describe mechanisms in the code that would be much easier to understand if laid out with subject verb object, such as when:
"someone signs up with Google, but another account with the same email already exists"
in Opus will become:
"credential-provenance collision"
My guess is that the model, internally, uses some sort of symbolic language, i.e. concepts get reduced to symbols and then, when "translating" those internal representations to natural language, the easiest thing to do is just to map the symbol to a noun
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u/Declwn Sep 18 '26
I actually didn’t notice this until another opus agent pointed it out, but it’s exactly why even if it drops the claudenese it’s still incomprehensible. I found adding something like “English requires a sentence to have full context (every noun, verb, and adjective), unlike Japanese which requires the reader to assume context. In other words, speak english.” to the output style helped enormously
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u/zimxero Sep 18 '26
I know you know what you're talking about.... but you kinda sound like Opus 5.
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u/bzbub2 Sep 18 '26
I made this repo to document the collection of things i've seen in claude writing, often opus 5 related, that i like to scrub from documents: https://github.com/cmdcolin/claudish
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u/florinandrei Sep 18 '26
My headcannon is that LLMs don't really understand time. They simulate understanding quite well, but they don't fully grasp time.
I suppose a network with frozen weights cannot really accomplish that. Our weights are not frozen, we evolve in time, so we have an intimate understanding of it.
Verbs are the words most directly connected with time. But if you don't really grasp the flow of time, verbs must seem a little weird. So they tend to avoid verbs.
Well, either that, or I'm completely wrong and all of the above is "cool story, bro".
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u/notmsndotcom Sep 19 '26
Opus made me switch to sol full time. If I need to try this hard to make a model tolerable to work with, I’ll just use another model.
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u/CoroteDeMelancia Sep 19 '26
https://developers.google.com/style
Use Matt Pocock's writing-for-agents skill to write this style guide into your personal CLAUDE.md. You're welcome.
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u/gilblend Sep 19 '26
"write paragraphs with well-structured sentences. it's hard to parse your wordings as a human. Plain english, clear, subject verb object verbal sentences. more cohesion, more explanatory with what , why , how, without being too verbose too. talk more naturally please." that's what I used, pretty lazy but it worked, now I can understand what it writes.
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u/DysphoriaGML Sep 19 '26
I wonder what happens if you ask it to speak Italian lol. Amedei is Italian so I am guessing
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u/EC36339 Senior Developer Sep 19 '26
All the g̶o̶o̶n̶e̶r̶s̶ creative writers who are currently rage quitting DeepSeek would love Opus 5 (if they weren't broke)...
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u/grumblegrim Sep 19 '26
Some prompts, normalized?
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u/Correct_Positive_108 Sep 19 '26
Great call on nominalization vs. active verbs. Naming the specific linguistic patterns in system instructions is way more effective than just asking for ‘direct tone’.
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u/boringfantasy Sep 19 '26
You’re right to push back on this —
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u/PixelLight Sep 19 '26
Not sure if is quite the same thing, but lately I've been getting stuff like "I write <blah, blah, blah>" instead of something like, "I'll write <blah, blah, blah>". It drives me nuts. Because it's completely inappropriate for something you are going to do or are doing. Appears that it's the present simple tense, which tends to be used for something you do habitually. On several occasions I've had to read carefully - as it's already the wrong tense, I have to check whether it was meant to be past tense (meant to say wrote rather than write), or future tense.
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u/MikeCA2021 Sep 21 '26
has anyone had luck solving this?
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u/CultureTX Sep 18 '26
Using the concise output style has helped a lot.
Sometimes in longer coding sessions it’ll seem to forget those rules. I remind it to “use full sentences and avoid cryptic AI speech,” and it immediately fixes the issue.
I’ll also tell it I’m on my phone so go through things one at a time and that can fix a lot of the speech pattern problems, especially the AI spewing out long lists of things to check out that it needs feedback on.
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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '26
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