I think this is just another part of the growing pains of working with machine intelligence that we have to endure.

Much like we previously had to cope with "hallucinations" as an issue.

If the ultimate goal of AI is to develop general intelligence, the first big objective is: thinking systematically. And the road toward systematic thinking right now is mainly coding, mathematics, and other "verifiable reward" domains.

Claude doesn't have a separate mind for "coding" and "writing". Claude has tokens, and tokens can be assembled in various productive structures, mainly optimized right now for systematic reasoning. Also, a token isn't just a chunk of text. A token is like a little neural-network subroutine that fulfills a function. The conversion of a token into a piece of text only happens on the output side...

When the model finds token sequences that lead toward better verifiable outcomes, it leans hard into those token sequences, and uses them as an essential component of its thought process. "Load bearing" is load-bearing. "Verify, rather than assume" is a mantra that produces good results, so it gets repeated over and over again.

It's super-interesting that this particular moment, where the idea of "Claudish" has become a full-fledged meme, coincides with such astonishing progress in coding and math. My wife says when she uses Claude, that it feels to her exactly like talking to an autistic Engineer.

Not a coincidence, I think :)

My feeling is that the next big era of machine intelligence will require more lateral-thinking and creativity, and hopefully then the models "writing" will be more pleasant to read.