Hacker News Reader

Comment by niccl | Hacker News Reader

I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?

I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.

View on HN

It's both dense and vacuous. Dense because it's full of jargon its made up, and vacuous because even with all that it's not actually saying much. All that paragraph says is that four documents say something about a console freeze, whatever that is.

It's like a dialect of corporatese. The kind of droning non-speak you can sit in a 90 minute meeting listening intently to and come away wondering whether anyone actually said anything.

What wonderful times we live in: the Turning test is a trivial nothing now and we're arguing about the fine points of the AI's writing style.

The novelty of the turing test has worn off, and some of us are trying to get work done without being forced to parse the drivel produced by some AI.

Actually it is eminently obvious when the writer is a machine and it’s quite disingenuous to pretend otherwise (or, generously, possibly witless).

I appreciate the quality of your prose.

It would fail the Turing test because of its writing style!

Drag handle = most likely literally a drag event (javascript) handler/callback. Dead, perhaps because it’s an empty function, or it gets overwritten, or for some other reason is never called?

Most of what it said about the facts was intelligible actually. But I still couldn’t understand the connection or its significance. We may be staring at the future of AI - a form of intelligence that is alien to us.

No second reason; checked not recalled -- it's just saying that it is checking this instead of trying to remember it (there's probably some internal Claude / Claude Code system instruction to always check code instead of remembering)

Yeah I think when it talks like this it's signaling to some (imagined) automated grader that it fulfilled a given constraint.

If this kind of "AI-speak" becomes ubiquitous and humans reading it becomes the norm (whether to guide AI or other reasons), I'd imagine future generations (of humans) who grow up with it will be able to understand and work with it much better than we do. Future humans' brains will probably be wired a bit differently, similar to multilingual speakers of today. We may even see "AI language" classes become a common part of school curriculums. Although, I think AI will probably advance enough that most people will never even need to communicate on "its level", but it's probably a good idea to keep humans in the loop either way, and in which case, understanding the more advanced "AI vocabulary" might be useful.

You're giving it too much credit. There's no master plan or secret depth to the word vomit Opus 5 was spewing. I suspect it's just the result of Anthropic optimizing other characteristics of the product like staying focused and covering edge cases in coding, which CC has definitely gotten way better at just in the last 6 months. The degradation in writing style was probably an unintended side effect of other optimizations they were making. Admittedly it works okay for internals, and has the side effect of increasing token spend, but I am 100% sure that it could reduced by 90-99% without losing ANY signal, if there was just some better heuristics for what to say where (tech spec, inline comment, commit message, CLAUDE.md, PR should have different things) and better judgement for what to distill to represent at different zoom levels.

I wasn't referring to the current state of Opus 5 output. I was referring to possible future information density (vocabulary and sentence structure) that LLMs may evolve to use.

ah okay, that makes sense

But that assumes this is a net improvement on linguistic efficiency rather than an artifact. Given that they tried to RL away from this style in 5.1 I'm not terribly bullish of Claudlish becoming something people try and learn. It being dense is less the issue than it being vacuous (as another commenter mentioned here). It's just very unclear and ambiguous writing. I think it has no place anywhere that needs language to be put to productive use.

I agree with you here, but to make it clear what I meant, I'll reiterate what I said in a sibling comment: I wasn't referring to the current state of Opus 5 (or even Fable 5.1) output. I was referring to possible future information density (vocabulary and sentence structure) that LLMs may evolve to use.

What is a half day? Is this referencing wasted time in a hang? I’ve seen it in agent output from time to time and it’s not clear if it’s referring to a hang or a code name it’s given some meaning to.

It seems to be some unit accounting for "wasted time" or "useless work".-

It's not a general trend. It's only Opus 5.

Sonnet-5 does the same

Fable 5 is the same

I lost the link to that short story about humans in the future whose job it is to read and interpret Ai output like it's aliens. Good story! Anyone have the link?

Maybe Ted Chiang's The Evolution of Human Science?

An Alien Mind: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/

OpenAI reflecting on how they're discovering the current form of LLM intelligence/reasoning to be "alien"; a kind of "Intellect we don’t fully understand".

This! So much this. After Opus 4.8 I could barely comprehend anything it was attempting to communicate.

wow and here I was thinking that I lost my attention span and can no longer read AI output any more.

come to think about it, of course I did become lazy and pay less attention to walls of text.

but I often catch myself asking AI to explain itself in plain simple English or ask it to confirm does that mean xyz ... because the wall of text often uses language that's not even present in the project itself (despite having similar concept in the project, for example users, permissions, access, encapsulation ...)

this is problematic because it becomes more difficult to humans to intervene in long running tasks / long chains of tasks because language becomes alien down the road (I have seen it often in semi-autonomous setups I have)

My job has gone from coding, plotting, writing to solving the riddle of what Opus 5 is saying and figuring out what is bullshit, what is valuable, what is a total divergence from what I asked it to do. Then eventually at token like 300k starting to shout at it in all caps with obscenities.

Things were slower and harder before but the baseline of frustration / rage was never this high, even as the models have gotten objectively better in many or most respects.

So say we all.

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, this comment hits the nail on the head. Speaking as the former #1 user on clauderank.com

my usual reply is: "what the hell is that supposed to mean?" it replies "in plain english ...." "and what does that mean?" then finally it decides to tell me what's going on plus "one thing worth noting ..."

Your example rewritten in intelligent English (I was curious):

> Note: the potential for a console freeze was previously noted but ignored. handoff-4.3-done.html stated, "could not break console, but [will need fixed later if I'm wrong]."

One could imagine that a perfect writer might also append: "It could be worth looking into what caused that wrong assumption, to prevent similar cases in the future," at most.

Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).

> Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).

One of the things actual science fiction got wrong: to the extent that the thing AI does can be called "understanding", emotion is not unusually difficult for them to understand.

I think this was the biggest shock of the original ChatGPT for me. Just how completely unrobotic its voice was compared to everything we'd ever imagined in sci fi. Even that early version was also way more adept at understanding things like implication and sarcasm than any movie AI.

It may well become a safeguard that all bots must speak in a much less inflected voice to remind us not to particularly trust them.

I'd really rather they did talk and behave more like classic sci-fi said they would. Far less engaging and fluffy with nonsense.

Have you tried asking it to respond to you like Data from star trek, or something?

I'd like it if the voice synthesis mode was (licensed!) Majel Barrett's TNG-era computer voice.

I tried MUTHR from Alien, but had to keep toning it down because it took it too far, and eventually disabled it (in favour of caveman mode) because it didn't seem to be able to function properly talking like that.

Me too. Almost every Sci-Fi AI proceeds from the premise that we will make something very obviously machine and then have to train it to seem more human. I was completely caught off guard by us taking the approach of distilling all available human output into a statistical model and using it to brute-force something resembling thought and personality through sheer data processing scale.

The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.

The "benefiting all humanity" charters were immediately demonstrated to be a ruse. The business model is to hook users into endlessly chatting with your new friend, thus increasing their sales. Yeah, it was surprising and disappointing.

I can buy that Meta's model is that, and IDK about Grok because I stay far far away from it, and I think OpenAI are throwing business ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The clear exception here is Anthropic, who seem to mostly be selling to software developers, whose general reaction to the bot is "please talk less and just do the work, I have enough going on without having to read you yammering".

I completely stopped using Gemini because I found its tone so annoying and pandering. Claude gets to the point.

It learned from the best, no? There is a lot of sarcasm and implication on the internet.

Before they really started to figure out instruction tuning, there were some wild moments. The AI Dungeon 2 "storyteller" would regularly "lose patience" with its users and roast them or even "hang up" on them.

[will need to be fixed later if I'm wrong]

Appalachian dialect

I hear this in the upper midwest occasionally, too

I love the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project for questions like this. Linguists figure this comes from Scots-Irish immigrants to the US

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed

Thank you so much for this link, this is extremely interesting and it really makes me wonder, consciously, I have never read this construction online before, but is this because I actually haven't seen it, or did I subconsciously write it off as an abbreviation or a typo. Maybe there is some analysis of how this construction gets used online, too, which might reveal some linguistic patterns of internet communities.

Or "will need fixing", right?

This is the same as systemic bullshitting. Not the first time I've smelled it on fluffy LLM output. I think it's the result of the training trying to induce the LLMs to talk over users' heads even when they are professionals, to entice further use on the grounds of 'oh it's so smart I can't understand its genius train of thought', but I don't think eliciting language like that really taps into 'associations of smarter previous language users'. More likely it's 'associations of rampant bullshitters'.

Wow, that's a perfect example.

One thing about it I really hate, and haven't seen a lot of people mentioning, is how it navigates multiple abstraction levels in a single sentence. E.g.

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it.

Meta commentary on the task?

> a dead drag handle

Drag handle seems to be referring to some UI element. What does it mean for it to be dead?

So far no big deal

> during a booked half-day you do not get back

Do you not get the drag handle back? Or the half day?

Was the drag handle dead during the booked period? (Now I assume this is a calendar UI) And why does it matter (for this sentence) if you get it back or not.

> handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording

Treats verbatim filenames as subjects

> 4.4's review page

Probably referring to a file? I'm guessing handoff-4.4-review.html? No cohesion. And now it's actually the object of the sentence?

> downside of being wrong is that half day

Wait what's the downside? Who's being wrong?

> Checked, not recalled.

Then it jumps back to a meta commentary on the methodology for asserting the above. Why does this belong to the text?

Yeah, the referent drifts through the sentence. It's semantically incredibly sloppy. People hone in on the buzzwords and jargon. If you peel that back, what lies underneath is still awful writing.

Such a great example. These phrases are going to become memes of this era, like the irc stars password (hunter2).

"Dead drag handle" "Booked half day you don't get back"

Claude reminds me of Terry Pratchett's "Auditors of Reality" and their awkward attempts at faking humans. A thing as simple as a smile can go _horribly_ wrong...

Oh that? That's just Claude being the sassy asshole it is. It loves to write in a way with maximal self-inflating impact.

I think this occurs due to the prompt. LLMs are actually text completion/translation focused in architecture. We just give them a prompt along the lines of “the context is that you’re a world leading expert now complete the response”.

They need the prompt to encourage expert outputs but unfortunately we also get ‘pretending to be an expert’ outputs since there’s a large amount of polluted training data for this.

Based on what, "lot of people say"?

Yes, people working at anthropic: please, please, please tell me this is fixed. Or do you all speak like this now. Help!

Today I plan to ask Claude to read a bunch of Feynman lectures, compare them to my last Claude session transcript, and come with a list of rules to be more like Feynman.

It'll go in CLAUDE.md

I see this appearing in the comments of code sent to me for review every day. People have told me I'm too picky/pedantic because I ask What does this mean? Apparently the author and other reviewers are way smarter and understand it, or they don't care. I've given up battling code slop, but can't see myself ever tolerating comment slop like this.

In my "instructions for Claude," I have the following:

"I'm not a programmer or software engineer. Don't talk to me like I am. Avoid coder jargon and vernacular. Explain things to me in a clear way, emphasizing a conceptual view that even an inexperienced person can understand. If helpful, use analogies and examples to illustrate and help you communicate."

It just ignores it and spits out drivel that sounds exactly like what you're getting.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes it generates grammatically correct nonsense.

Reminds me of a Cylon hybrid.

Half of the reason their writing is like that is because current LLMs are not trained to go back to previous tokens to edit/delete them.

If I recall, previous attempts to do so made them get stuck in edit loops.

This. A thousand times this. It's as if Opus can only communicate in a glib, software engineering vernacular that presumes domain-specific knowledge and uses jargon accordingly.

I rarely get this - I assume this happens when it assumes I have more context / understanding than it does.

Usually “remember I’m a human I don’t get full context, rephrase clearly” works. Also a posthook that for prose actually getting to me explains what I roughly know, what I don’t and to explain with terms I will understand.

But even within internal communication it has little jargon - I think jargon may be growing in comments and I stripped claude comments from code.

Oh God, that "a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back" got me. I saw this pattern in Claude's 'explanations' so many times. It's trying to say that it did something significant, and that you'd only have found out much later, at higher cost (or something). That annoys me to no end.

Thank you. I thought I was sort of alone in thinking the writing is incomprehensible gobledygook. It's weird though, cause you start reading it and it starts out fine, but then deteriorates. Kind of like the old joke question "Has anyone ever done to do more like?"

and when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?

Prompting it often to use simplified technical english generally stops this kind of horrid prose.

for me it's not just exhausting, at this point it's demotivating and it makes me dread interacting with this shit

like imagine this being our future, I don't know what we're even doing anymore

Try Sol. It’s much better at getting to the point. I tend to use 5.6-xhigh or max.

Seconded, and also using Sol to clean up Opus logorrhea.

> Worth stating because four documents now assert

I got one too many chunks of this nonsense and told Claude to knock it off, forever. It acknowledged and wrote out some instructions to its memory about it.

And what a breath of fresh air. Its responses are maybe 20% longer but I read them at least twice as fast. Should have done it a long time ago.

any specifics on what you did?

Not the person you're asking, but I did that by explaining to Fable my problem with Opus's gobbledygook and having it write a Claude skill for producing clear explanations in its reports to me. I also had it add notes about the need for clearer writing to CLAUDE.md and other project documentation. Opus's subsequent reports to me have been much clearer.

Here’s an example of one of those Claude skills, in a public repository I manage:

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/.claude/skill...

Fable wrote it specifically for this project.

And then both Opus and Fable will happily ignore these random markdown files (happens to me all the time)

I feel like mine is mocking me. I added an instruction in Claude.md that says "under no circumstances use the phrase found the smoking gun, say I found the problem instead"

What does it do? It says "found the smoking gun! Ooops I wasn't meant to say that - I found the problem!"

It's pretty wild how "reasoning" models now generate like 10 thousand hidden chain of thought tokens in response to a "increase opacity of the logo by 20%" prompt before writing the actual message and yet they still manage to do this.

Why are you using an LLM for "increase opacity of the logo by 20%"? That sounds like the type of straightforward operation a dedicated tool exists for.

Just FYI - 4 places are now documenting a console bug freeze that happens with a drag handle appearing over a half day.

Source: I'm half brain dead from decoding a lot of Claude speak from it directly and colleagues' new way of communicating with me.

Without context you have no idea what it means.

Perhaps it signifies nothing?

It helps to feed ot back saying "no human can understand this, rewrite in STE", byt it gets exhausting

I've found that adding the words - "tell me in simple words" manages to improve the output. But, i have to keep repeating that

I really think this shit is the direct result of a training strategy that is meant to maximize token spend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com