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superjantoday at 5:12 PM1 replyview on HN

What I notice about Claudish is that it has its preferred cliche’s and overstretched methaphores, it packs too many ideas in a sentence, and to achieve the latter it makes up adjectives.

I should try adding these tips to my system prompt. Is there a shorthand to describe such language use? I am not a native English speaker.


Replies

svachalektoday at 5:44 PM

Look up the output-style setting, which is a bit stronger than putting it in the system prompt. The new "concise" setting is better than the default but in practice, Claude is a very stubborn model when it comes to these patterns and they're really hard to eliminate, mostly you can only hope to mitigate.

As for the wording of the prompt, you're pretty on point, I created a custom output style targeting mostly the first two you have there. Some people have wording that demands a certain technical standard or uses fancy words to describe what to avoid, but I haven't seen evidence those work better than asking plainly and I suspect the opposite: LLMs mimic the user to a degree so talking to it in terms of technical specifications and fancy words is an invitation to get them back.