I can't understand Claude's output anymore. Is it just me?

It’s not just you. I ordered it to make a devspeak script checker for its own stuff and started banning words. Just today: 7.

Somebody said something about Anthropic wanting to watermark Claude’s responses. Fair I guess but it’s their problem and they are imposing it on us.

Oh, and there’s also this: nobuzz/README.md at main · adnanakil/nobuzz · GitHub. Just reading the first two paragraphs made me laugh hard. Here’s the biggest gem, ahem, the kicker, no sorry, the load-bearing paragraph, oops, I meant the revelation here, nope, I think it was “the fascinating discovery”, no, you know what, I give up:

Claudette is our solution to Claude being a great engineer with one incurable condition: it talks like it’s delivering a TED talk about its own pull request. You ask why a test is flaky and you get a “load-bearing assumption,” three numbered revelations, and a solemn note that the third one is the most instructive yet. Nothing is ever just a bug. There is always a kicker.

It makes me nauseous. The caveman skill helps a lot. GitHub - JuliusBrussee/caveman: 🪨 why use many token when few token do trick — Claude Code skill that cuts 65% of tokens by talking like caveman · GitHub

I explicitly ask it to use plain English and explain it to me in terms of what and how I’m going to see the change in browser. I also tell it (and repeat over and over as it tends to ignore it) to stop using generic single noun terms like “arms”, “legs”, “frames” etc. and to replace them always with two or three word self-explanatory and unambiguous terms. When it drops a wall of of its codified references (again), I tell it to translate it. Plus, I no longer let it edit anything before we settle what it plans to do in plain English.

You are definitely not alone!

I just recently got back to using Anthropic models after a few months using Codex almost exclusively, and the defaults can be pretty insufferable at times. It’s everything all at once: the verboseness, unnecessary fluff, and indirection. Don’t even get me started on “load-bearing” @dimitarvp .

The pretentious jargon just triggers me so much haha (especially for a non-native English speaker)

I have been trying different approaches with varying degrees of success, so I’m just gonna leave a few recommendations here in case it helps anyone:

• I have ADHD (Skill)
• Cursor Unslop (Skill)
• Attention Span (Output Styles)

I’ve also been having moderate success asking Claude to prefer “ADS-STE100 Simplified Technical English”.

Yep. Just to pile on, Opus 5 is regarded as being extra confusing, and I have found this to be the case.

My understanding is that they’ve been training the new models on the outputs of other models for so long, the models have been getting worse and worse (since Opus 4.6 was where it started to get noticeable) as the newer iterations succumb to model collapse.

Just an FYI, you can still use Opus 4.5, 4.6, 4.8, etc. in Claude Code: /model claude-opus-4-5, /model claude-opus-4-6[1m]. Perhaps you might like to take them for a spin to see if their output is less disgusting. (Note that 4.5 will have a 200k context limit, and 4.6 generally falls apart after 200k tokens in my experience when using the 1M context variant.)

I exclusively use caveman. Without it I can’t handle it.

Also I think that we are reaching the peak and more and more models are being train on output from other LLMs which results in stuff that no human would ever write like that.

They are poisoning themselves.

This skill might be helpful, maybe in combination with caveman. It’s not only about unreadable text output, but they start to pollute everything with “watermarks” due to new invented regulations so its also about formatting;

I feel people are talking about different things here: conversation output and code. I agree on the conversation output some of the times, but it all depends on the situation and cannot be easily compared as there are to many factors in play. A simple “be concise“ or similar usually helps for me, but if the context gets to large the output may become to look like spagetti (with sausages). But I truely haven’t noticed a negative on the code produced, on the contrary.

The irony that this document reads almost exactly like a handout I used to give college students to make their writing more palatable. Now they can pass it directly to the AI they use to write their papers for them. Efficiency!

I have seen comments written by Claude that are borderline unreadable. Like the mumblings of a psychopath. Things like this

Extract the id from the user struct. Unfortunately we don’t know what the users passes in. It could be a user struct, it could be an integer or a string - the truth is we don’t know. In order to take care of this we need to take care of business. Therefore, even if it costs some performance, we need to make sure to parse this input correctly. Otherwise, bad things might happen. Also removes the need for manual parsing.

Like.. I had reviews where I had to tell people to remove this ridiculous essay ****.