This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.

When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.

I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.

Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.

It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".

It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".

Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.

I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.

No it's not!

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.

I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?

Of course it is, it's trained on millions of internet comments.