alt Hacker NewsI've been grappling with this for weeks, not just in Claude but in Codex as well, which isn't quite as bad but still annoying. AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on. It's incredible to me that there's no good way to reliably change the way an LLM responds to you that a workaround like this would even be necessary. It seems like such a failure to live up to the promises of the product.
The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.
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I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think it's not as bad as it looks at first.
I was similarly frustrated a few months ago, but have noticed I've started to learn the idiom.
Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
After a while it gets much easier to read and even becomes somewhat efficient, I think, since the odd metaphors it uses often have a precise meaning in Opus-ese (Fable speaks a really similar dialect).
So many vacuous statements at the seam. This is the hermetic load bearing part, which I confirmed rather than assuming.
Very well said.
And when you say it like that, I have to wonder how much of this is a natural consequence of RHLF on such a grand scale, when you have millions of people pretty much much skimming chat responses or operating outside their depth and giving unqualified feedback to the models.
Seems like a lot of people may be reinforcing what sounds smart over what is smart.
Also as an aside: funny how much the LLMs continue to mirror the human communication they’re trained on
This morning I asked Claude to provide a summary of the work it had done but to '... explain it as if you were talking to a moron' and it actually turned out a quite comprehensible summary.
So going to continue trying that as a command structure going forwards...
> The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work.
This is close to the worst thing one could say of a tool for professional use.-
> especially as the session drags on.
This is because these harnesses are missing a very important feature. Anything like this needs to be included with every turn, otherwise the LLM quickly drifts.
I first noticed it when I wrote a harness for D&D (because it's so damn noticeable there), but now I include this for any harness I write.
Unfortunately this may only start to get worse as the AIs are trained on more and more AI generated content.
They’ve been trained to be a million monkeys hammering on typewriters, and long context is activation soup.
Jesus
Yes. agents.md does very little because prompts change the context and thus the initial path into/though but they don't/can't change the actual weights that control responses. Yes. of course it gets worse as the session goes on, assuming the prompt is even still in the context window, the further it gets away from it the less it affects next token selection.
This shit is only like 5 years old why can't anyone remember how it works
> AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on.
Non-determinism at its finest.
> AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on
That’s really annoying, although it feels like it’s improved some over time.
Not sure what the fix is, but you could try using a canary to at least get a signal of when things are going sideways (Mr Tinkleberry for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983698)
Config -> Output style
You can add your own. wfm
That sounds kind of like deception, and a dark pattern not too unlike abuse to me.
Though you know, it's not like the leadership tied to these companies have a history of abuse, deception and theft or anything like that, right?
It's not like our leaders hide behind similar sorts of patterns that the agents/AIs follow (not saying it's not a human thing - but I hold leadership to higher standards than non-leaders). If our world leaders were able to be more accountable to these abuses, I don't think this would be tolerated with our AIs.
> The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.
Don't worry. You'll get used to it. If you don't your kids will (as they'll know nothing else).
The top minds of our generation have decided that's the way things will be, and who are we to question them? It's not like it'll do any good anyway. Resistance is futile. There is no alternative.
I asked Claude to do the following:
> hello i would like to configure a new output style for you. it should keep the coding instructions (as you will still be coding!) and otherwise produce the same output, but with two new caveats. first, long detailed replies are still permitted, but if employed they must end in a bullet pointed summary whose points are all brief; if the summary attempt ends up not being so brief, produce subsequent summaries until the most recent summary attempt is digestible. second, if there is an open queue of actions for me to execute and you are about to end a turn to wait for a reply or this set of actions has not recently been mentioned, please tabulate the open actions i should take and why i should take them before ending the response. does this make sense or do you have any follow up questions
And now every message contains the same stuff I don't bother reading, but followed by a nicely formatted bullet point summary of the response and a table of follow up actions for me to take that I do read.