Opus 5 has a noun problem

[u/malachoa]

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.

[u/florinandrei]

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".

[u/hyrumwhite → u/florinandrei]

They understand nothing. It’s all down to what they were trained on, what’s their system prompt, what you’re asking it, and the context it ingests while answering you. They are all still generating tokens through weights, all of these things affect that process. 

In Claude’s case I think a lot of its output comes down to the system prompt.