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Comment by thunfischtoast | Hacker News Reader

They still need to choose when to do that though. When I prompt the program to e.g. alter a bash script in a specific way or to recite a longer known text it can't go round and randomly exchange tokens. It has to somehow define what is a simple repeated text from a different origin and what is a novel generation.

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I am wondering how that applies to newly generated code.

Odd variable naming? Stylistic choices that are watermarked?

Or as someone else noted further down in the comments, it could be more subtle:

Between the first and second most likely choice, in certain positions it will consistently choose in a certain way.

> Odd variable naming? Stylistic choices that are watermarked?

Whatever it is, I'm sure it's load-bearing.

You're absolutely right. But it is not just load-bearing, it is the load-bearing seams.

Personal observation: Opus 5, over the last week, has started outputting A LOT more comments. Despite my global instructions being full of variations on "don't use comments unless absolutely necessary".

I might be imagining things of course. But comments would be great fit for this use case.

They have mentioned that their system prompt used to say "avoid over-commenting" and it no longer does. They should bring that back IMO.

Yes the length of comments Opus 5 leaves is exhausting. Not to mention it will insert info thats only relevant within the current session. I've just been deleting all of them lol

Comments seem most plausible, especially since I absolutely expect it to match my code style, existing architecture, and have the code go through CSharpier and dotnet format after the fact.

edit: as an aside - I actually use extensions to collapse comments and change the color to be less intrusive.

You are aware that Claude already doesn't choose the most probable token, right? That's literally what the temperature parameter means. It picks tokens at random (from the list of most probable next tokens), increasingly so as the temperature goes up. This has always been the case. And now, with the watermarking, it will simply go from random to pseudo-random, adding some patterning.

There isn't any effect on the quality or precision of the output. Nothing changes in practice.

I cannot imagine the code with well defined specification will have extra watermarks unless the watermark is requested as part of the harness instructions.

If it works like people describe - on the every nth token or something - then the mark will be left in the chain of thought and discussion with the model - not in the code artifacts.

I would guess they're not worrying about watermarking a tweak to a human-written program. That's both a tiny fraction of Claude use and of very little concern to the kinds of people who want to check watermarks.

If you're that targeted with your edits, then do you deserve a watermark anyway?

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