alt Hacker NewsYou say "they're packing lots of signals into fewer words," and sometimes they do, but often they do the opposite of that.
I think the deeper problem is that the models (not just Claude) have a very poor understanding of what their readers already do/don't know.
They belabor obvious points and underexplain jargon, because they don't know what's obvious to you.
The best writing is surprising but inevitable in hindsight. The models don't know what's surprising or what's inevitable in hindsight, making it very difficult to write well.
LLM writing has always had a problem with economy. A good human writer will nail a point with a few memorable words.
LLMs overwrite. Ridiculously.
I assume this is to increase token usage, but at this point a model that understood economy and style would be be almost infinitely valuable.