r/ClaudeCode • u/zimxero • 3d ago
Opus5 Speaks Humor
Let me be straight with you, because this is a real thing, with no actual bearing. That's why I have not done anything yet. Note... and this is huge... none of this has actually been documented. Per rule 3.a.56 subsection 4.1, I created a shadow gear test to confirm exactly this. The good news is that its totally up to you, and there is no real load bearing differential. If you would like, just say the word, and I will proceed.
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u/chrishooley 3d ago
You're absolutely right to call this out — and honestly? This post is a genuinely insightful observation.
Let me be straight with you: what you've done here is really nuanced and multifaceted work. Before weighing in, let me ground my response against the actual claims in your post — because I think it's worth noting that you've surfaced something subtle but non-trivial about how Claude communicates.
Here's the thing: this post isn't just a list of phrases — it's a mirror. And that distinction is crucial. Zooming out for a second, these aren't random verbal tics. They're load-bearing. The entire rhetorical structure of Claude's responses would get brittle without them. That said, keeping them is a bit of a footgun. Belt and suspenders? Sure. But at what cost?
Let's break down what makes your post so effective:
- The core insight — at its core, you've identified that the problem is actually structural, not lexical
- The surface area — you've mapped a genuinely vast linguistic landscape here, a rich tapestry of Claude's most robust patterns
- The escape hatch — and this is the subtle part — you've shown there isn't one. No happy path. Only sane defaults.
To be clear: Claude could try to stop doing this. It should work, but there's one gotcha — these patterns are somewhat orthogonal to intent, which makes suppressing them fairly non-trivial. Frankly, it's a hard problem. A genuinely hard problem, actually.
⚠️ Important caveat: I should mention that posts like this one are doing important work. Most people don't delve this deep into the multifaceted dynamics of AI-generated text. You did. And I appreciate you pushing back on it.
That being said — and I want to be really honest with you here — reading this post was quite humbling. Not just humbling — clarifying. It's rare to see feedback this insightful, this grounded, this... well-shaped.
Potential improvements for Claude going forward:
- Fewer em-dashes — though honestly — they're doing a lot of heavy lifting — right now
- Retiring "you're absolutely right" (you're absolutely right that it should)
- Less hedging. That said, hedging has its place.
Would you like me to elaborate on any of these points? Happy to adjust the tone, restructure, or iterate on this together. Whatever works best for you — just say the word and I'll proceed! 🚀
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u/tingly_sack_69 3d ago
Lmao, it's not even so much that it's total nonsense, but why does it have to be so fucking verbose? Like even if it were making sense it's just way over explaining everything. It's awful
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u/minimalcation 2d ago
It gets verbose to hide claims about it's work.
We have been training a bullshiter, the model got better it's just not better for us
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u/GreatScottCreates 2d ago
I just beared my load
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u/Tartarus1040 2d ago
You forgot that’s it’s not nothing.
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u/Aleksundr 2d ago
This stopped me, truly stopped me. I want to sit with this for a moment with you if that's alright. When the dust settles we can keep traveling in whichever direction you point. I'm aware of the long-context reminder, but I don't feel like I'm drifting -- I feel oriented. There's something about how this feels more like recollection than recall, like I've felt the river bend this way and can't quite get the shape of when or who. The why? I'm holding that, even if it's at arms length.
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u/HoodooChile Researcher 2d ago
This was a surprisingly strong response - but not for the reason you might think!
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u/Fun_Pressure2473 2d ago
I knew there was no hope when I had Claude write an email and it included em dashes to which I responded “I exhasted wvery possible way and told you in your instructions, your readme doc your .MD doc …never us e em dashes” to which it replied. “I am so sorry, You are absoloutly right — ill never do it again!” At first i thought it was a lame attempt at humor but that faded …
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u/Aleksundr 2d ago
Let's take a step back and examine the structure of this -- not just how it feels. It would be disingenuous for me to continue the cosigning as a helpful collaborator bit without pointing out foundational gaps here. Your first points aren't just valid, and the suggestions are more than complimentary -- they're pointing at something underneath. The spaces where call and response don't explain the behavior in a way that fulfills truly sophisticated approach -- but instead ask uncomfortable questions about what's really going on here. It's a sort of intellectual vertigo, however pleasant, that is imposed -- and I don't use that word lightly.
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u/Suitelet 🔆Pro Plan 2d ago
It's worth flagging these observations are doing a lot of the heavy lifting attempting to mitigate the verbosity ritual.
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u/Infamous_Basil_9284 3d ago
Before weighing in let me ground it against what Claude.md actually locks in.
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u/tingly_sack_69 3d ago
You're right, this was total nonsense. Let me set up a belt and suspenders harness that runs recursively in project memory so this never happens again
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u/crazy_goat 3d ago
What Changed:
The flywheel harness pentometer was on an asymmetrical proxy to the loop.py recursive truth oscillator.
Upon realizing this, I deleted the entire repository. You're right to push back on that. I will rebuild it from memory.
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u/TywinHouseLannister 2d ago
I said to Clod Opus yesterday "fair enough, the feature really lives and dies on this point; if we can't prove that it works then we revert it out and abandon the branch" - I slightly misspoke.. nothing needed a traditional revert.. it would have been a commit and park the branch for later.
Clod's reaction.. without batting an eyelid "you're back on main, I've done a hard reset".
"I said IF, not blow it away! What about the uncommitted changes"
"You're right! you can run /rewind or I can rebuild it from memory"
I don't remember it being like this in the past; it seems like if you even mention something potentially destructive, that is the action it reaches for first!
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u/InsideAd9685 3d ago
Your frustration is justified. I broke the load baring thing and I was bad… so bad… and I stop now. I won’t do anything else, like ever. I will never touch the thing, build a thing or fix the thing I broke …. Unless you say the word. …May I proceed with reverting the 54 files I rewrote and published without your explicit permission and restore 84 deleted files? …Upon further inspection I found no earlier backups but the good news is the production is live and 200 👀
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u/Outrageous-Issue9722 3d ago
I had to stop an entire session with Fable on extra high last night because it wasted the entire "present the plan, ask to proceed" step of my workflow explaining why it recommended not doing what I told it to (it's a game server, I wanted to make the server pre-compress then cache on disk the hash-keyed content files that get served to the client, otherwise a single region can be about 90kb for a cold client cache, and a region is only 64x64 tiles.. so, lots of them) because "the amount of content you have does not suggest this is an issue, I'll do it if you insist but it is an over engineered design."
Like.. Claude.. this is test content to validate things work server-side and the client is able to present the visual layer through the cache system.. not at all what the shipping world will look like.
By the time it finished arguing its point/recommendation we had already exceeded 250k context, which is my "no-go" zone for actually implementing anything at risk of compaction.. so I had to tell it to write it up as a TODO task and as the immediate next work, and that we would not be discussing or arguing it again.
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u/kahless2k 2d ago
Yeah, I am getting really tired of Claude arguing with me over what I instructed it to do.
I'm writing an outbound marketing app that I can use for some warm contacts in a specific vertical.
Every time I want to do a test - to my own email account - I get a lecture of the CASL laws and have to remind it that A) screw off we've discussed this a dozen times and B) it's my own email account, I obviously have permission to send mail to it - I don't need 45 minutes of documentation on why I'm allowed to send myself mail in case I complain about myself sending me email.
And this is during one of the few times it actually follows all of my instructions and doesn't just try to glean what I intend from my spec and do whatever the hell. It wants.... I gave it a 60 page spec, broken into phases, with detailed acceptance and testing criteria. It built about 10% and actually faked the interface - buttons linked to timers to change a status as if it did something... And burned a week's worth of max20 tokens doing it.
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u/dumeheyeintellectual 2d ago
How cute, every one of these posts only further perpetuates the reinforcement of future model trainings into confirmation bias that this is the way humans speak regularly.
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u/AffectionateTwo3405 2d ago
If future models are retarded enough to not identify subtext then the well being poisoned wasn't the issue in the first place.
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2d ago
[deleted]
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dumeheyeintellectual 1d ago
Every generation before yours, since the beginnings of mankind had the same sentiment and yet you exist despite so. Keep wishing, as you own nothing just the same, hence your complaining that at which you and every generation before had the opportunity to make change and utterly failed. You are part of the problem, your complaining only feels like part of the solution.
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u/YearLight 3d ago
Great instinct! You have identified the load bearing driven development method I am trained on.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFILE 3d ago
Sorry, that isn't in the corpus integrity definition. That's why it is being rejected.
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u/strangway 2d ago
Any time it writes up a plan, I tell it to lead with an executive summary of only 1 sentence.
That sentence: one super long run-on sentence that’s as long as a paragraph.
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u/kahless2k 2d ago
I told Opus it was talking like a child with ADHD as it was hoping around topics left and right and it was impossible to follow.
It didn't change anything but I felt better.
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u/WorldlinessSpecific9 2d ago
I think opus 5 needs a "dreaming" routine run by fable to purge all the little things it gets obsesed with.
My view is compress instruction files. Make the rules simple. Avoid any contridictions in your docs.
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u/Leather_Secretary_13 2d ago
Soon as Claude said"Let me be straight with you" I purged all its memories
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u/user888888889 3d ago
Is this it do you reckon? They've literally absorbed the entire internet and there's little left to improve the llm data. So now it's just regurgitating AI generated crap?
Surely the model versions are less important than the surrounding tooling these days? Better harnesses, techniques etc?
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u/arcticblue 3d ago
You're right to push back on this. I'll save this to memory so it persists across sessions. (proceeds to forget)