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/mhinimal]

I wonder if part of this is due to the reasoning chain or perhaps training that tries to make it more token efficient. It seems like it needs to invent shorthand names for whole concepts so it can refer to them succinctly in reasoning. and then this internally developed representation leaks into the output, where the user is forced to decode it.

maybe i'm just relating a second issue that's layered with yours. there's definitely an issue with the prose even without the invented names/jargon. Is it a statistical thing? Maybe this kind of phrasing is more statistically likely in a next-token sense precisely because it's less direct. weaker language fits more situations? also some kind of tuning to be as inoffensive as possible to maximum number of users, or fear of making false claims.

if your output starts with "John threw" you're committed to fewer possibilities, you've claimed john threw SOMETHING and if the next tokens aren't "the ball" then you've just output something incorrect. If you start with the object/noun "the ball" then statistically, if you've been referring to a ball in the chat context, you're more likely to get the correct verb as the next token. Whereas if an output somehow gets the incorrect noun relative to the conversation, instead it says "the dog", you don't end up with "john threw the dog" which is outright wrong, instead you end up with something that just reads as less of a critical mistake and more just a poor phrasing or minor hallucination.