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by Arathorn 18 days ago
I've been keeping a record of the increasingly opinionated vocab it fixates on:

* Projection (it seems to love to describe one data structure as a projection of another)

* Strand (if some data gets isolated/stuck, it's "on a strand" or simply "a strand")

* Load-bearing (obviously)

* Frontier (the leaf on a tree)

* Quiescence (waiting for an algorithm to settle - I guess this one is legit)

* Honest (obviously)

* Residuals (any kind of data which hasn't been consumed by an algorithm)

* Rescission (something which has been rescinded; rather than saying "a rescinded offer" it enthusiastically calls it A Rescission!)

* Supersession (it's not a session which is a superset of another session... it's the word supercession; something that supercedes; similar to preferring the participle form of rescind).

I wonder how much of this is due to it mirroring proximate things to my code's own weird vocab though.

My favourite so far has been that I accused it at one point of playing whackamole by patching issues rather than getting to the bottom of a problem, and a few hours later it started to say things like "and i found mole 2 in CI" etc. For one minute I thought it was talking about the avogadro constant or backdoors or something until I realised it had committed to start calling newly discovered bugs 'moles' in its ongoing game of whackamole...

4 comments

I notice there's a whole tech bro speak it gets into anytime it approaches web related tasks around auth, to the point where it stops using complete sentences, making them ambiguous and borderline nonsense. I have to periodically tell it "Speak professionally and use complete sentences." so I can understand what it's even saying. I've even pasted the output to another session to see if it was me, but Claude can't even understand what tech bro web auth Claude writes.
I have added a skill to make Opus 4.8 use Opus 4 6 to translate its answers into teadable English, sine it had much higher quality prose. Im seriously considering switching from Claude 20x to Codex because I just cant read more of of Opus or Fable's walls of text
In my case, since "new session" Claude couldn't understand it either, I assume it means it's going to contribute significantly to context rot. In your case, it probably results in a lower quality context.

Hey Anthropic, give agents/skills the ability to modify previous context! This could be used to truly clean reasoning and task definition mistakes, corrected by the user, and strip output to more fundamentals, which should strengthen/purify the context!

CLAUDE_REWRITE_HISTORY=true ;)

Editing agents, and my own, messages is still how I get the best results for high reasoning planning, in chat clients. I remove the mistakes, because I naively assume that if your context has mistakes, now your next token prediction will be biased to a space where the AI makes mistakes! It would be interesting to write some benchmarks around this, but I've seen significant differences when I do this for less capable models.

I haven't been impressed by 5.6 SOL extra. Typically I asked to do a summary of our session, and it went to do a summary of the repo. Tried different things and I just gave up.

Opus 4.8 did the same at first and after it blended better the repo knowledge with the session one.

I have both $20 as I am less a power user these days and I can't justify a 100 let alone 200 but each model as its irks.

I stopped reading Claude's ridiculous distracting nonsense walls of text months ago. Honestly, I prefer Codex being boring and basically ignoring any human utterances I make which are unrelated the work to be done.
In one of the repos I work on we have a very particular set of things we refer to as "quality gates", and only in that repo Claude likes to misuse that term in a general sense. It's very much a "fellow kids" type feeling when you KNOW it read that phrase in a doc and so it's just reusing that term out of context, which makes me trust it less.
I'm more irked by the sentence-structure patterns it continually uses... here's my list:

https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/3d099dbf86da9/claude...

Honest caveat