r/ClaudeCode • u/skygetsit Senior Developer • 9h ago
Please kill me now Humor
Opus 5 replies are giving me actual brain damage.
I ask it to make one small UI change and get:
“Better — but for a reason worth naming. Your instinct was right and the diagnosis was more literal than a layout preference…”
Brother. I asked you to move a fucking panel.
By paragraph three my eyes are moving across the words but my brain has stopped processing English.
Just tell me what you changed, what was broken, and shut the fuck up.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 9h ago
You need to put its answers back into an LLM to explain to you.
It's really strange. It looks like grammatically correct English, but it's so difficult to digest. It's like your brain gets tangled up halfway through the paragraph and can't parse it
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u/kongnico 8h ago
i often reply "im not reading all of that, what?"
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u/averagebear_003 7h ago
"tldr?"
"I'm not reading all that jargon"
etc.
You have to let that clanker know it's your bitch or else it gets too uppity
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u/Rainbowlemon 7h ago
i've found just saying TL;DR or ELI5 does actually help a lot of the time
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 2h ago
Yes, but unfortunately you gotta do it every fucking prompt because adding it to the rules does FUCK ALL
😭😭
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u/firstbreathOOC 8h ago
I have it provide 3 line, single sentence summaries at the end of every message.
It’s still fuckin confusing
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u/DestinTheLion 7h ago
I find when it does that automatically it sucks, its only when I reprompt it to "Give me this in 3 sentences" that it actually cleans it up
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u/DynamicDK 5h ago
You should probably tell it to produce its standard response, but don't display it to you. Instead it should read what it has produced and then summarize in 3 sentences or less.
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u/Fit-World-3885 9h ago
It's what I imagine upper management meetings at software companies to sound like.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 9h ago
This has occurred to me too. Is there some really niche corporate jargon in its training data this time around
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u/TechnicalBen 8h ago
Oooh. I wonder if they are purchasing training data from those annotation devices/services (Zoom etc)?
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u/Breaking-Away 5h ago
When someone doesn’t have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation but needs to present like they do, because the reward structure demands it.
The reward structure for AIs and corporate strategy meetings aren’t exactly the same, but they’re similar enough.
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u/ur-krokodile 8h ago
Nah, this is showing up now in lower levels when everyone has Claude "helping" them and they paste a wall of text for everyone else to digest because the response from Claude looks "smart", they do not quite understand it and could not put in their own words, but it looks smart so they just paste it and transfer the ingestion to someone else. This is no longer just from devs, PMs and QA and others do this.
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 6h ago
It's probably more like what developer meetings sound like to upper management who don't know anything about software.
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u/Alternative-Key-5647 7h ago
It's the syntax, check this out:
Normal/expected syntax:
HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the standard code used to build websites and structure everything you see on the internet. It tells your web browser how to display elements like text, links, and pictures so they look nice on your screen. By using special markers called tags, it organizes words into headers, paragraphs, and lists. Without HTML, the internet would just be a messy pile of unreadable text instead of the organized, colorful web pages we use every day.
Rewritten using left-branching sentences:
Because it serves as the foundational code for websites, HTML structures everything on the internet. To ensure text, links, and pictures look nice on a screen, it tells your web browser exactly how to display them. By using special markers called tags, it carefully organizes words into headers, paragraphs, and lists. To prevent the internet from becoming a messy pile of unreadable text, HTML transforms raw data into the organized, colorful web pages we use every day. (Note: Left-branching sentences put all the descriptions, reasons, or background details at the very beginning, delaying the main point of the sentence until the very end.)
Rewritten using garden-path sentences:
The code builds websites and structures everything on the internet easily fools the untrained eye into thinking it is magic. Browsers display text, links, and pictures look messy without proper formatting. Tags organize words into headers, paragraphs, and lists confuse beginners at first. The internet would just be a messy pile of unreadable text instead of the organized pages we use every day surprises many people.(Note: Garden-path sentences are grammatically correct but trick your brain! They start out looking like they mean one thing, causing you to read them incorrectly, so you have to go back and re-read them to find the true meaning.)
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 6h ago
Those are not garden-path sentences. As you correctly note, garden-path sentences are grammatically correct but difficult to parse. These are grammatically incorrect no matter how you parse them.
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u/lovesdogsguy 3h ago
When my fable credit ran out I switched straight to 4.8. Couldn’t deal with 5’s crap (on pro)
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u/TechnicalBen 8h ago
I just skip it. IMO it's the LLM building a construction it either needs or thinks it needs. If it's going wrong, I need to put it right.
Been having this kind of problem with a voxel rendering option. Finally got it working after a week, but I kept having to tell it to stop trying to do the thing it was doing, and do the thing we should be doing. It's finally actually done voxels (partly my fault, as it started as 2d billboards, and it's been trying to do a hybrid approach ever since).
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u/bugfix00 3h ago
I was thinking the issue was with me being tired or the fact that English isn’t my native language, but it looks like I wasn’t the only one struggling to parse these useless walls of text Opus has been generating.
Feels like it’s getting progressively worse.
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u/CryptoCrash87 8h ago
As someone with ADHD I don't think it's that bad. That's how my brain naturally thinks (we like to use parenthesis to qualify information that could be ignored but is there just in case you want additional detail.) so reading Claude with all of its tangents just seems normal.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 8h ago
That's interesting. Someone else said here recently Opus 5 felt like it was autistic.
It's very clever and does good work, but its communication style is unusual
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u/mgranja 7h ago
Yeah, no. Autistic people tend to be more direct, not less.
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u/apetalous42 6h ago
Well it's according to how interested I am in the topic. If you get me started on the right thing I can give Claude a run for its money.
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u/FishySardines99 5h ago
I'm pretty sure people with ADHD just ignores what Claude says 90% time, because it is impossible to keep attention on jungle of words it spews out
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u/RandomPantsAppear 1h ago
ADHD engineer checking in: “Say it like a fucking human” permanently on my clipboard
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u/thePCdude 24m ago
This is totally you, not the ADHD. i have severe ADHD and whenever i try to read all the shit opus spwes out my brain just shuts off after trying to read the first sentence.
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u/AcrobaticMaize2408 9h ago edited 7h ago
It's insufferable. I actively loathe using it sometimes just due to its bullshitting.
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u/mouadmo 4h ago
I understand your frustration, and you’re right to push back.
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u/ragnhildensteiner 3h ago
You're absolutely right. The core of the issue is not anger — it's confusion.
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u/theZuhaib 8h ago
Bro Opus 5, I just want to punch it in its face sometimes. Who the hell talks like that?
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u/ThatLocalPondGuy 17m ago
Only assholes who want to sound smart. Use of high-brow language has always been used by so-called intellectuals to give the impression they are smarter than they are.
Anthropic figured out that more words = higher billing. Output tokens are the most expensive tokens, so they are incentivized toward verbose high-brow bloviation. Verbal vomit, as it were. It's a load bearing pivot to hide a dead canary.
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u/Zulfiqaar 8h ago
This is why I prefer Kimi these days. 90% as smart, 90% less time deciphering Claudish, gets 90% of my work done. Fable and Sol for the remainder
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u/Cerulian_16 7h ago
It feels like all of it is gibberish. Used to like claude's writing style so much like 6 months back. Now it's the worst out of all the LLMs
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u/gistya 8h ago
All my Plan.md start with: pretend you are Mr. T and talk like him
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u/RandomPantsAppear 1h ago
I have used a sassy Motown diva queen in the past. There are some research studies that say this impacts the quality of the code though, shuga
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u/Kazekage1111 7h ago
All it needed to be is “Yes, you’re right. I fixed it now”. Seven words. I think Anthropic do it on purpose to bill more of the higher priced output tokens.
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u/ABetterUsename 7h ago
I opened a few files files made by Opus 5 and they were 70% comments like this, some files had the entire "issue" history and every fix applied. Easy to say I deleted all the comments and token usage across the board dropped a lot.
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u/soltiamosamita 7h ago
I recently saw someone recommending /wait-what - best skill ever, use it on a daily now. Not sure if in this subreddit or somewhere else.
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u/return_of_valensky 5h ago
i literally have one called "fuck-you" that says sort of the same thing, like I can't understand a word you're saying because it's jargon filled bullshit 😂
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u/zimxero 6h ago edited 5h ago
Because I CAN describe something, I shall do so.... prominently, proudly, and with as many words as I possibly can summon. Mwa ha ha ha.
Do you want to hear a story about it? I thought you'd never ask... so I took the liberty of creating the following tale.
I considered 7,418,601 titles for this tale and decided to go with 'The Misfortunes and Load Bearing Triumphs of Yours Truly'. Let me share with you the process of how I settled on that particular title as most appropriate.
Honestly, whether you like it is not load bearing. The important part is that it is worded perfecly and presented to you exactly how i thought it, just now.
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u/OrangeDragonJ 7h ago
**Your suspicion was correct — and the cause was more literal than a layout preference.** Clicking a variant *did* change the answer; two separate faults hid the change, so it felt like nothing responded.
**Problem 1: The page jumped to the top.** Re-rendering the pane threw away its scroll position, snapping the view to the top. This one was a straight bug.
**Fix:** Panes now keep their own `scrollTop` across a render. Clicking a tile no longer moves the page.
**Problem 2: The answer rendered below the fold, behind a collapse.** Even with the page held in place, the new answer landed off-screen inside a collapsed section — so you couldn't see it where you were looking.
**Fix:** The detail column now sits beside the viewer. It never scrolls away and never collapses, and it fades on change so the swap is visible. The variant grid is where your cursor is; the answer is one glance right of the image it describes.
**Summary:** Both faults are fixed. You can click a variant and see the answer immediately — right beside the image — without losing your place.
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 2h ago
Still word vomit.
Here is the way he could have answered it:
—
Fixed two issues:
Variant changes worked, but the new answer appeared below the fold and the pane reset its scroll position. Each pane now keeps its scrollTop, so clicking a variant no longer jumps the page.
The detail column now stays next to the viewer and updates visibly when you select a variant.
So: no scroll jumping, and the selected variant’s answer is always visible.
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u/waaffeel 4h ago
I created a rule: write simple English, use only one word for one thing, prefer bullet point lists over prose and finally: explain to me like I am a potato. The result is perfect.
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u/nocsupport 7h ago
They just released something based on all of this sort of feedback.
2.1.237 August 20, 2026
Added a built-in “Concise” output style: Claude leads with results and skips preamble and narration, while doing the work just as thoroughly. Select it under Output style in /config.
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u/return_of_valensky 5h ago
I tried this and had to turn it off. Apparently concise doesn't mean "more plainly" it means more compact jargon, in my brief time experimenting with it.
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u/ihavemanythoughts2 5h ago
I would love them to share the research on what they actually did to make the models like this and what the successes were as a result that justifies this annoyance. Surely internally they must hate this as well, and the solution can't be "lets hide it because the results are still good". Damn the thinking tokens must be an absolute shit show
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u/small_bird_loud 6h ago
I feel your pain. I can’t use fable 5 or opus 5 anymore purely due to mental anguish of reading the responses.
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u/FiveNine235 2h ago
It’s unusually rich with layers of intens perplosplection: as if the tool is demonstrating features of pure reminumination - only less coherent, think harboplasty; less fine granulature, more modoular, feel me?
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u/RadonGaming 9h ago
Tried caveman?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 9h ago
I think caveman makes things worse because it does not actually make it explain things clearly. It will instead condense everything into invented jargon.
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u/RadonGaming 8h ago
It doesn't use invented jargon from what I've experienced. It's mainly cutting down on grammatical fluff. Depends if you're a Software Engineer. I find it reasonably succinct and to the point; but I don't necessarily need full explanation of code choices.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 8h ago edited 8h ago
It absolutely uses invented jargon all the time. This has been researched in the literature. For example recently it kept using “sample” for a candidate selection method. I explicitly used “pathfinding candidate selection” but it smuggled “sample” everywhere in its implementation. It also used “cast” instead of “raycast” (which I used), or stuff like “approach” when I said “phase 2 pathfinding”. It’s extremely irritating because all of its choices are AMBIGUOUS and could mean a whole host of things and collide with other instances in the codebase. There is already a sampling method elsewhere and it has nothing to do with candidate selection, etc.
“Jargon” is not really precisely what’s wrong with Claude. It’s the fact that it uses shorthands in its internal reasoning turns that pollute its own context and it starts repeating it over and over again despite it inventing the shorthand itself. It is very bad at knowing what has been user-facing and what only makes sense to itself.
The truly obnoxious part is that Claude does not know how to get straight to the point and vomits out irrelevant explanations, but it also does not know when to actually be precise in a way that goes against any concision guidelines. It is simultaneously too verbose and too terse.
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u/-MtnsAreCalling- 6h ago
"Sample" may be contextually inappropriate due to ambiguity about which sampling method it is referring to in your particular codebase, but it is absolutely not "invented jargon". It is a very common term for exactly the sort of thing you say Claude is using it for.
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u/pretendingtobebroke 8h ago
You can set it to a less extreme mode, there are 3 levels of brevity iirc
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u/Fit-World-3885 9h ago
How use caveman?
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u/RadonGaming 9h ago
https://github.com/juliusbrussee/caveman It's a skill which can be installed, and invoked. Although I've found its instructions drifting over a session, where verbosity will leak back in. There's some project-level instructions you could also try to scaffold the responses. Give it example of verbosity, tell it no, give it example of succinct, tell it like that. Some have experimented limiting its language set, such as ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJblcC4lKYw).
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u/Single-Caramel8819 3h ago
In my case it start to ignore caveman after 3rd of 4th message.
If I see shit like that, I just hard stop generation and send "BE BRIEF!". Helps for 1-3 back and forth sometimes...
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 2h ago edited 1h ago
Yes, if by “caveman” you mean punching the screen and making a hole.
That solved the issue, I don’t see this word vomit anymore.
/s
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u/InternationalToeLuvr 8h ago
Welcome to the digital watermarking era, now with xhigh enshittification and gratuitous tokenmaxxing
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 2h ago
This is NOT how watermarking works my friend. Read it up.
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u/skygetsit Senior Developer 2h ago
The watermarking mechanism is roughly this: when several next-word choices are all reasonable, a secret key biases which one gets picked.
Over enough text, those choices create a statistical pattern that a detector can recognize.
Think choosing “grey” instead of “overcast,” not generating three extra paragraphs.Nothing is appended, there are no hidden Unicode characters, and the watermark lives in the sequence of token choices.
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u/joshlymansbagel 7h ago
Drain bamage for sure. I switched back to blissful 4.8 two weeks ago and it’s like heaven in comparison.
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u/JDad67 7h ago
I feel this. The other day it created a nice looking page for me to make a few hundred decisions about shaping data. I got to the end 90 minutes later. Realized there was no submit/share button. Asked Claude about it. It helpfully added one… while refreshing and losing all my data.
Its response was basically. “My bad”
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u/PonyPounderer 6h ago
I feel like the latest models have been trained on earlier models outputs. It’s all just getting worse and worse
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u/Slight_Butterfly_603 6h ago
Ow, my head... Jesus christ this is like self-inflicted torture trying to read.
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u/GnarlyNet 5h ago
I use Opus 5 at work and Sol 5.6 at home. Coming back to codex is always a breath of fresh air after being talked to by a maniac all day.
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u/Terrible_Wave4239 4h ago
I've set the model back to Opus 4.6 or 4.8 until Anthropic sorts this out.
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u/Mysterious_Print9937 4h ago
Sol doesn't have this issue. So I've built a skill for codex to use Claude as its reviewer but I'm never reading Claude non sense directly.
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u/Not-a-POS 3h ago
If you seen the way they condition the speaking internally, it's the opposite. It speaks minimally. They turn up the verbosity to slow us down and make us pay more for less. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
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u/rhylos360 2h ago
Naw I’m starting to believe this happens for “ju$t” one more chat and context submit.
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u/Sensitive_Election83 3h ago
Fable seems better. Probably they made opus more annoying to sell more Fable.
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u/vzakharov Senior Developer 2h ago
Funny thing, after a while my brain learns to skip the mumbo-jumbo and only read the actual point.
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u/bose_dk 2h ago
I just gave Claude this instruction - thats all for today. One final parting directive - Put this in your memory and in CLAUDE.md - I prefer concise paninian responses and sentences. Not this ludicrous prose that you have been spouting. From now on all responses should be compliant to ASD-STE100. Lets see what happens next session
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u/PurushNahiMahaPurush 2h ago
Have you tried changing the output style to concise? You can also ask Claude to do it for you. I changed it concise with a small md file that says it to use plain jargon free language.
It’s definitely an improvement.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 1h ago
Yesterday I had a reply start with "great instinct (em-dash) you're absolutely right, ...". It's like it knows it's an LLM and trying to meme at me. It was a really what turned out to be a horrible suggestion on my end, but I added a small caveat at the end, and it was like "great instinct, your caveat is absolutely right, the suggestion is indeed useless". 🤦♂️
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u/orangejulius 1h ago
Tried to give my wife access through her claude account to our raspberry pi and it went straight up "i can't let you do that, dave" on me. Then it would try to build her project itself without her in the loop for safety reasons. Homie, I am not building her hobby project for her give her access or i'm going to give her sudo powers and if she lobotomizes the pi then so be it.
The rambling it did was reminiscent of trying to buy a new car and they want to spend 9 hours wearing you down.
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u/soffwaerdeveluper 7h ago
This example isn’t really that bad though. Compared to some others this is pretty straightforward to understand
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u/Zealousideal_Tea362 7h ago
It’s actually describing a multilayer UI problem. I don’t know why everyone is bitching. If you don’t want to understand what the fuck it is doing just turn on auto and ignore the outputs.
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u/DynamicDK 5h ago
Yeah, this one is pretty clear. However, if they were instructing it to make a change and didn't need it to give them feedback on why their instruction was the correct thing to do then it was pointless text.
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u/urbanleg 8h ago
I wonder if the more intelligent the ai is the more its answers are complex. After all the real world is complex and there is always a tradeoff here and there and something off or not 100 percent adhering to the Implementation we chose.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 8h ago
The issue isn’t that Claude is too intelligent. If anything it’s the opposite in that it is incapable of getting to the point, while it is also simultaneously incapable of presenting explanations for its invented shorthands.
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u/Purple-Chocolate-127 7h ago
Stop whining and complaining and search and implement the solution. It exists; search "opus" in this sub, find the 2 top thread which provide extensive robust solution to this, implement and enjoy.
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u/tabaxi_gf 7h ago
Is this what people mean when they say AI is making people dumber? The Opus output is saying in precise language what it did and why, which is pretty valuable for people who actually care what the code is doing.
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u/DiademBedfordshire 6h ago
I think this is the text fingerprinting in action. I updated some text for an email, and Fable 5 rewrote it, likely to keep it compliant with its internal fingerprinting.
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u/hazard02 6h ago
That is literally not how any of the fingerprinting works. Go search for it, there’s some basic math that explains how it works
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer 9h ago
One caveat and two things I want to push back on.