alt Hacker NewsI'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).
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One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.
Claude is the Deepak Chopra of computer programming. Reviewing PR's created by it is 90% digesting the meaningless word salads in the comments, and the rest is figuring out that it has nothing to do with the code it is commenting.
“Filters, including no filters. The request carries whatever filter object the page already has.
…
No step here involves choosing based on meaning. It is a filter, a sort, and a slice.”
This is from Opus five minutes ago. I can certainly derive meaning from these kinds of statements in isolation, but paragraph upon paragraph of this is unintelligibly dense when trying to work with Claude to come up with a plan.
The worst part is that it can’t even make its responses make sense when asked to summarize in simple English or < 200 words. It simply cannot be steered to make its prose legible.
I decided not to get used to its communication style. It encourages it to invent terminology and drift away from simple and proper engineering in my opinion. Also, it is pretty simple to change as long as you’re not using the Claude code CLI or desktop app.
> Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
This dialect is idiosyncratic to you and Claude based on your session history and memory.
I've noticed Claude's output mimics my writing style.
> Registers the board implements but whose behaviour is not modelled
Right down to my preferred spellings.
As several comments I've read on HN suggest, this jargon which can be so precise in the mind of one person, tends to rapidly fall apart when multiple people try handling it.
> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it
Same experience. It’s not very “human” but once you have agents talking to each other the shared dialect and verbosity makes things much smoother in my experience. Fighting against the default feels like an uphill battle with no meaningful benefit.
I agree to some extent about the jargon (Claude has a bigger vocabulary that me, if it knows a useful word I don't I'm fine with learning it), but often times the way information is laid out across sentences just doesn't make any reasonable sense. At least its consistent in the ways its atrocious, sure, but like...
> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.
Some might, I didn't - it just filled me with a sense of frustration and rage, alongside disgust because there is no good reason for that slop writing to drag everything down. You don't need that to write software or talk about any topic. That's what pushed me to Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 - still not ideal, but better.
the only thing that still kind of annoys me is constantly being told what something is not, but even that statement is load-bearing (see what I did there) because it records how it ended up with this decision, because it's not that other choice that it mentions.
FWIW, I also think the constant chorus about how new models are worse than old models is a human hallucination. They're certainly not perfect but every one becomes more steerable in terms of actually completing more and more complex work.
> you get used to it
And once everyone gets used to it, we'll chide people for writing things themselves, like we're chiding them for writing with AI now, and the ouroboros of life will continue.
I’m starting to think this is why Opus suddenly started making 4-5 line comment blocks. They justify why a change was made and gives the next agent something to go on. I delete them and move on, but no amount of “don’t over comment” “match comment style” makes it persistent.
I am definitely guilty of wondering why past me made such a harebrained decision, and why past me didn’t think to write any notes, but does it matter? It’s in the commit history and we can bisect or revert if we find a regression.