Claude is a Contrarian

mcv

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.

futhey

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.

knollimar

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.

ACCount39

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.

jossdoe

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.

recsv-heredoc

No it's not! (I jest)

manmal

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?

micromacrofoot

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

smashed

Second paragraph starts with > No, it’s not about the [...] Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.

twentyfiveoh1

I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention. It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.

itopaloglu83

On a daily basis I find myself telling Claude to stop over complicating things and to follow my instructions, not what it wants to do. It’s simply exhausting.

epgui

Well, I agree that all of that is annoying, but "Don’t contradict sentences" is not a very good instruction. The construction "A, not B" is not a "contradiction", it's a clarification, a juxtaposition, a contrast. It's self-consistent and non-contradictory.

verdverm

I described this to qwen and it used the phrase "negative clarifications", which I think is more descriptive than contradictions It seems an artifact of local/session attention

bestpickle

The part about AI confidently reframing your point instead of just answering really hits home. Sometimes you just want a straight answer, not a debate.

Quitschquat

> I can tell it in my CLAUDE.md: “Don’t contradict sentences”. I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.

bhouston

The name for sentences constructed like this is not "contrarian", but "contrastive negative." Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...

hmokiguess

My opinion is simpler, their bottom line depends on tokens and this increases their ROI.

Papazsazsa

"Claude thinks Humans are stupid" So do its creators.

Chance-Device

Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable. It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong . It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument. This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded. I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.

demibabs

Off-topic but the banner picture for this article is really cute.