alt Hacker NewsI've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.
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I was describing this exact feeling today. I haven't quite been able to put it into words but I do get slightly physically ill. Almost similar to mild trypophobia?
`arc land` is burnt into my brain by Phabricator, so I'm aware that the term predates LLMs, but it still drives me nuts.
It's impossible to undo some of these linguistic wobbles. Even if you could filter out 100% of LLM input, the humans themselves are learning to say "land" at a higher frequency now.
Voice really matters in writing. If everyone uses Opus to write without editing, then it all sounds the same regardless of who it came from.
It's kind of offputting how much Anthropic models these days keep repeating "real", "genuine" and "honest". They've RL'd that way over the top.
I had to tell it never to say "hand-wavey" ever again to me. But I agree, I hate the way LLMs phrase sentences.