65 pointsby zdw11 hours ago12 comments
  • salvozappa5 hours ago
    Anthropic's public writing style is very different from Claude's because it's written by humans. Even in their job ads they ask candidates to not use AI for any writing (or at least they used to).
    • hirako20003 hours ago
      Makes sense. Steve jobs didn't let his kid touch apple devices.
  • simonw5 hours ago
    Anthropic's guide for job applicants on how you should use Claude when applying for a job there is relevant here: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance
    • names_are_hard5 hours ago
      I find the language of "collaborating with Claude" off-putting. I don't collaborate with Claude, I use Claude. It's a tool in my hands, not a colleague or a friend.
      • michaelt4 hours ago
        AI companies seem eager to perpetuate the fantasy that all users carefully review all LLM output, and supervise all tool calls.

        Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.

        • einszwei4 hours ago
          I think the opposite. AI Companies use the term collaborate to increase the trust in the LLM output.

          I trust the output of colleagues I am collaborating with and have an assumption of some shared responsibility. But if I use a tool like numpy/matplotlib then I am accountable for the conclusions I come up with. I can't make an excuse that "matplotlib" created a plot so my decisions were incorrect and not due to my own negligence.

        • cyanydeez4 hours ago
          If that were true, they'd cut their token gen speed and reduce all prices to th level their users could actually read what it produces.
      • DuperPower2 hours ago
        dont you collaborate with your toaster to make breakfast
      • nisegami3 hours ago
        I have the opposite view point, "collaborating with Claude" is I think how I would best describe that experience.
        • butlike26 minutes ago
          Do you collaborate with your keyboard on the spreadsheet? The prosaic prompting is an I/O device to a machine.
    • JSR_FDED5 hours ago
      I’ve read the link, but I don’t get how it’s relevant to the OP’s point that Anthropic public communications don’t sound like Claude. Can you enlighten me?
      • simonw4 hours ago
        Because it's the most clear indication Anthropic have given of policies around AI writing with respect to their own company.

        Things like:

        > Not allowed: Prompt: "Write my answers to the application questions for an AI safety researcher position at Anthropic." Result: Generic content with experiences you haven't actually had

        I haven't seen other policy documents from them that are as relevant to the question anywhere else.

      • gjvc5 hours ago
        why do you care?
        • JSR_FDED4 hours ago
          Because Simon usually posts interesting comments.

          Do I need a different reason?

  • toasty2285 hours ago
    Same reason the tech execs kids aren't using the tools created by their parents
    • stavros3 hours ago
      You think Tim Cook's kids don't use iPhones? Or that Larry Ellison's kids don't use Oracle Financial Services Adaptive Intelligence Foundation for Anti Money Laundering Application?
      • lemming3 hours ago
        Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.
        • xdertz3 hours ago
          I wouldn't let kids use a sharp kitchen knife either, but it is still something that everyone benefits from owning.
        • stavros3 hours ago
          Let's not conflate "this technology isn't for kids" with "this technology is bad", though. I wouldn't want my kids using a tablet, but I wouldn't want anyone using a gun.
        • PunchyHamster2 hours ago
          don't use != not allowed to use, pretty sure they use them now
  • miranaproarrow5 hours ago
    Ive given up trying to fight claudes language, and Im afraid Im getting used to it and can even understand what claude is saying faster or should I say I can parse it faster now.
    • miranaproarrow5 hours ago
      gate= some sort of a guard or test

      name= a variable name or fields

      load bearing= coupled dependencies that can break other things if you change it

      • alex435784 hours ago
        While these are clunky, was this phraseology that much of a problem for people? I don't like reading it, but I didn't find that I couldn't read it.
        • hombre_fatal3 hours ago
          But slowing down to decipher text instead of single pass simple reading is the problem.

          Random example from a session I have open:

          > *One new failure mode the doubling opens, and how it is closed.* A ring never shrinks. With two 8-byte index words per record instead of one, the ring's doubling comes inside the budget's reach in the blank regime: a doubling taken [...]

          It takes extra deciphering cycles to see "the doubling", "budget's reach", "the blank regime", etc. and figure out what it's referring to. I had to read that opening sentence multiple times. At first I parsed it like "One cat the table yawns".

          Sometimes it's so encumbered I can't tell what it's saying at the directional level: good or bad, fast or slow? "Your blank regime negated the pre-armed run's dilemma but clawed back the overall metrics."

          It's not how I'd phrase things if I were trying to be easily understood, though Claudese is probably great for LLMs due to ad hoc jargon usage.

          • alex435783 hours ago
            Oh yeah, those examples are gibberish. Mine hasn't been that bad. More like the comment I responded to, where it's just being a bit clunky. Your examples read like Claude's gone a bit schizo.
        • SkyPuncher35 minutes ago
          I get tripped up on the intensity of its us and the ambiguity it tends to apply them with.

          Minor inconvenience != load bearing, yet Claude consistently uses it while missing actual loading bearing things.

          Likewise, it tends to jump to terminology that’s technically correct but practically meaningless.

        • PunchyHamster2 hours ago
          just seeing it too often I'd imagine. I don't really mind it
      • StilesCrisis2 hours ago
        pinned = forced in some way

        tree is green = tests built and ran without error

        landed = surprisingly, not "made a commit" but rather "finished the code." It might be confused because we're using Perforce and not git.

      • knollimar3 hours ago
        Load bearing irks me having a construction background.

        Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.

      • thih92 hours ago
        invariant = constant

        you were right to push back = previous response was wrong

      • ricardobeat4 hours ago
        [dead]
  • JSR_FDED5 hours ago
    Other than the specific phrases like load-bearing etc, I find the biggest tell of all just to be repetition.

    Every damn Claude article does the “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em” routine.

    • BoredomIsFun4 hours ago
      Stiff, repetive style is often a result of very small, less than 0.5 sampling temperature, very small top-k, very high min-p etc. Most of "normies" (wrt to /r/localllama and /r/sillytavernai) never tweak the samplers.
      • weird-eye-issue36 minutes ago
        You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k

        The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters

        • BoredomIsFun3 minutes ago
          > You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k

          No, I do not. Good for me I guess.

          > The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters

          What an absurd claim.

  • andyferris3 hours ago
    I've spent my spare time in the last _days_ rewriting a pretty small document made in collaboration with Fable. It was reluctant to simplify the proposed design. And the language is so dense - it's almost poetic in nature and concision, but I wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.

    It's an interesting model/tool. Powerful but still chock full of trade-offs. I hope the next model's language is more like e.g. OpenAI models in terms of language use. (oh, and the code comments, yikes).

    • PatronBernard2 hours ago
      Claude Code's creative use of language in an engineering context is often quite infuriating. I want language to be as simple as possible, it should be accessible and require as little context as possible. Below are a few examples that Code wrote that I encountered in my own work (related to signal processing):

      "excursion" (means: a spike/jump — a value that rises or deviates from baseline, just say spike or outlier)

      "legitimate majority-normal baseline" (means: a real majority of normal pixels)

      "matched pool of pure-noise ('normal') pixels" (means: the same number of normal pixels, don't bring pools into this)

      "ablation" (means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)

      I actually used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these, even though I encounter them like every other sentence. I can imagine this style is great when writing prose, not so much when writing documentation.

      Similarly, I tried using Claude Design to make some slides, and the individual slides were fine, but just about every other slide it used different words to denote the same concept, which I would say is the fastest way to lose your audience.

    • esperent3 hours ago
      > wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.

      Did you try specifically telling it that? I haven't used Fable but I do write lots of docs for a non native audience and I get good results from stating that.

  • hombre_fatal3 hours ago
    I don't see why Anthropic would be expected to publish default Claude voice or use Claude for their public writing. No matter how great AI is, it doesn't commit you to using it for everything.

    And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".

    When you read a blog post with Claude voice, you're seeing the result of someone who couldn't even be bothered to do that which is why they deserve extra lashings.

    • rossy2 hours ago
      > And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".

      You can probably get it to do a surface-level impression of Mark Twain that way, but from what I've heard, it's not that easy to prompt Claude out of the "voice" described in the article for technical writing, and all existing methods, like asking it to ELI5 or tropes.fyi, only have partial success.

      • hombre_fatal2 hours ago
        For a single document like a blog post it should be easy, though you don't have to sub a famous author in for X.

        There are all sorts of ways to do it though, like pointing it to an example doc.

  • BoredomIsFun4 hours ago
    There are many different ways to make an LLM sound more human-like (the author has actually explicitly mentioned ChatGPT sounds more natural). For their public announcements etc. they might as well used specially trained small 24-32B creative writing model or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku. One could also use "antislop" samplers, maybe some encoder-decoder unslopping postprocessing small models etc. Or they simply may have been written by humans.
    • StilesCrisis2 hours ago
      Why would they use Haiku for anything? They aren't paying for the tokens.
      • BoredomIsFun2 hours ago
        > Why would they use Haiku for anything?

        Good enough for essentially blogposts? Easier to finetune?

        > They aren't paying for the tokens.

        They are paying for electricity, though.

    • swiftcoder4 hours ago
      > or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku

      Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?

      • BoredomIsFun4 hours ago
        > Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?

        Oddly enough standalone LoRA adapters are very popular in image generation world and utterly unpopular in LLM world - there it is customary just to distribute fully merged models on HF.

        Having said that I personally use a finetune of Qwen 3.6, Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic, which was was not designed for creative writing per se but is far better than any other 24B-32B model I've tried for writing, let alone awful vanilla Qwen 3.6.

        • BOOSTERHIDROGEN3 hours ago
          Interesting use case, with so many finetune available at HF, how you determine a good models?
          • BoredomIsFun2 hours ago
            /r/localllama, /r/sillytavernai for leads and then personal vibe check.
  • miranaproarrow5 hours ago
    whats troubling here is that one of the anthropic devs on twitter or github don't seem to acknowledge this issue, If they don't acknowledge there's nothing for them to fix
  • perching_aix5 hours ago
    I do really enjoy the style of their blogposts, they remind me of the Cloudflare postmortems. Wish their models could produce it.

    Not sure I agree about e.g. GPT not sounding this formulaic though, imo it definitely does.

    I don't actually have a problem with the common terms Claude emits, I think they're appropriate for a coding agent. But I do find them overused.

  • redsocksfan45an hour ago
    [dead]
  • wiradikusuma6 hours ago
    On the bright side, I'll know immediately a post is Claude-generated. If the author didn't bother writing it, I don't bother reading it.

    /s?

    • reddozen5 hours ago
      This is where the concern-trolls barge in with "what about non native English speakers using AI to blogslop everything is actually a good tool!"
    • 2 hours ago
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