Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

rickcarlino

Concise output mode only helps a little bit. Tools like this still have a reason to exist.

user102030

Looks like a wrapper around this prompt: You are an editor. You'll be given a message with strange characteristics: - Weird subject and verb combinations - Subjects that should be objects - Very roundabout reasoning, peppered with pseudo-epiphanies - A distracting beat to the flow of the message - Self-praise Remove these characteristics, and rewrite it in a clear, conversational style. Keep the intent of the message, and take care not to lose any of the details. A few specific rules: - The message is usually set in the first person - Only humans, groups of humans, and agents should do "action verbs" - Objects should never do anything. Here are some examples to avoid: - X carries ... - X names ... - APIs are a minor exception to the action verb rule. They can do stereotypical things like CRUD, queueing, running, and calling. - Avoid em dashes (—), as adds a distracting beat The whole message you get is one block of that output. Reply with the edited prose and nothing else.

pebbly_bread

I think this needs a before and after example

imalerba

I like the "Claudish to English" name better. https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english

jerpint

I’ve been using the pattern of using coding agents to orchestrate my CLI agents and it’s really good for these kinds of things The vomit never makes it my way

jeffreyrogers

I hope at some point Anthropic does a post-mortem on the strange behavior their models have been displaying recently. I mostly switched to Codex because I was finding Claude's behavior increasingly frustrating.

nycdotnet

Very interesting you identified “carries” as well. I have been working on a claude.md to effectively ban this as well as forms of “hold”, “spells”, “sitting”, using “where” instead of “when” (except in SQL), and “pins” other than when pinning an assumption or version of something. This has helped a bit, but Opus 5’s prose is really quite bad.

rootusrootus

Which Claude 5? Opus 5 does seem to have diarrhea of the mouth. But Fable 5 hasn't been so bad for me. Or perhaps it is just better at adhering to my guidelines.

NitpickLawyer

For the local folks, I found Muse Glimmer 30B to be great at writing good technical stuff. It has good enough comprehension that it can take in a repo and find the relevant stuff that I ask for, and the output style is a breath of fresh air, with no fluff, ootb.

yomismoaqui

Just. Use. Sol. $20 and try it, then compare.

purpleflame1257

I "downgraded" to Opus 4.6 which is the last one that didn't have these problems.

wood_spirit

Meta to this is anyone remember those days - ages ago now, probably months at least! - when Anthropic’s moral stance against the administration (combined with general consensus they had by far the best model) was making them the underdog champion that got a swell of support on HN? Recently the temp on HN seems to be that they’ve jumped the shark? Their brand doesn’t ooze ethics any more and their models disappoint?

bob1029

At some point one has to wonder if it's still worth using anthropic's models if we need to babysit 100% of its output with another vendor's model. Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything? I can't help but feel the circumstances that enable this kind of front page article are vestigial from the days when OAI was super bad and Anthropic was beyond reproach. This change-over-time is why I avoid getting tribal with technology vendors. Assigning ideological motives to 200k+ employee organizations is how we wind up in weird contortions like this. Most rational actors simply moved from one to the other. It takes a special kind of devotion to the proverbial hole in the ground to keep pushing in this direction.

hn97o8vvbt

This framing is spot on

extr

I'm sorry but the whining over LLM output styles is embarrassing. Do Claude and GPT models always respond in exactly the way my most articulate coworker would? No. The overused jargon is absolutely annoying. But these things aren't my drinking buddies, they're professional tools. It's not _literally unreadable_. It's just not ideal. Most of my tooling is "not ideal". That's okay. That's what I'm paid for. I just work around it. For me I added some instructions to speak clearly and it helped marginally and that's fine. There will be a new model out in a few weeks where I'm sure they've laser focused on this issue since nobody can shut the fuck up about it. The same thing happened with GPT if anyone can recall the ancient period of 4-6 months ago.

tombot

Just switch back opus 4.8, it's just as capable and you can actually understand the output

rob

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

juancn

Just set the following incantation: You must use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) when it doesn't detract from meaning.

trefoiled

I've been grappling with this for weeks, not just in Claude but in Codex as well, which isn't quite as bad but still annoying. AGENTS.md does very little, agents will consistently violate the communication preferences, especially as the session drags on. It's incredible to me that there's no good way to reliably change the way an LLM responds to you that a workaround like this would even be necessary. It seems like such a failure to live up to the promises of the product. The baked in communication style of these models is so obnoxious it's impacting my work. The best way I can describe it is that everything is optimized to impress the user and make the agent sound more authoritative, but the way this is done is through deliberate obfuscation, inserting inappropriate and extremely dense jargon, and bizarre, stilted metaphors. It's like they've been trained to produce output that's hard to read.

feverzsj

Sounds like LLM centipede.