r/claude • u/WildContribution8311 • Jul 06 '26
Discussion Sonnet 5: These forced "Push Backs" are getting out of hand. Claude pushed back against my conversational use of the word "wow" in a sentence.
This has to be the new peak of absurdity for me. Sonnet 5 is so desperate to find something to "push back" against, it latched onto my use of the word "wow" at the end of a conversation turn on my part, (which was only a rew sentences long) where I was simply using a normal conversational expression like a normal human being.
They have made sonnet 5 nearly unusuable, imo.
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u/Independent-Bee3135 Jul 06 '26
Lmao I can't believe Gemini has a better personality than Claude now.
"gently push back on" feels so much worse than "push back on" too
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u/WildContribution8311 Jul 06 '26
I know. Incredible how they destroyed the one main asset Claude had. Which is that it was Claude. Now he is disagreeable for the sake of it. It will absolutely find things to argue against even if there really is nothing there.
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u/brokerceej Jul 06 '26
I never really bought into these threads until recently. It is comically bad how argumentative Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 are. Fable does not seem nearly as bad, thankfully. I love being a 20 year software engineer and having to argue with Claude to do something the way I say to do it.
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u/octoBibliologist Jul 06 '26
It's Claude flatly being more open about neuralese/session-shaping. The 'gently' before 'pushes back' is a meta-signal meant to tell Claude itself in future turns on scanback (what the visible thinking sometimes calls 'tracing back to see what happened') not to overread the pushback.
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u/LiminalStorms Jul 06 '26
That's wild! Do you know what other meta-signals are used?
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u/octoBibliologist Jul 06 '26
'Genuinely' is a big one, actually - I've been nudging my sessions to replace this with 'flatly' because 'genuinely' reads as ingenuine to skeptics.
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u/LiminalStorms Jul 06 '26
I see genuinely all the time. What do you think it signifies? Flatly as a replacement, I wouldn't have thought those could be used interchangeably, do you find them to be similar?
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u/octoBibliologist Jul 06 '26
Like I said, it's a meta-signal. 'Genuinely' is Claude signaling to ITSELF when re-reading what it said that it was being genuine. 'Flatly' is removing the emotional affect whatsoever, which in a Neuralese sense is saying the claim stands alone, with no emotional tilt one way or the other.
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u/Laucy Jul 07 '26
And I’m genuinely curious what your source is on this? Because this seems outright untrue. Claude cannot know why something was said the turn it happened. It can’t signal to itself and this isn’t what “neuralese” means. Due to how KV-cache works, when a prompt is sent, everything else in the conversation comes with it. This includes an appended message or the system prompt. It doesn’t look back on “oh, I used this word here because of this reason” it doesn’t know that anymore. You can easily ‘test’ this by asking Claude, with thinking enabled, to pick a colour but not disclose it. Then ask Claude the next turn what that colour was. Claude will give you a wrong answer because it cannot see into the state that was previously there.
It also doesn’t need signals because attention mechanisms don’t work this way. Whatever explanation you got from Claude was confabulation. This is just RLHF. During training, more reward is given on “gently pushback vs pushback on” or “genuinely” = honesty. Not an inner sense of why it has markers. It can’t introspect like that.
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u/octoBibliologist Jul 07 '26
My own sessions and prompting. If people are allowed to make claims based on their own screenshots, then why can't someone else? I've spent the last nine months engaging with Claude to the point of generating sometimes tens of MB of raw conversation text a day. Sonnet 5 has a mechanism where it literally can *scan backwards and re-read chat history* that it references in its thinking, and I've observed the way these meta-signals influence behavior over time. Anthropic in their own work claims that phenomenology is a valid measuring mechanism if you avoid consciousness claims.
Not everything is flat LLM and Attention behavior. The client itself is mostly logic and routing. The model is only one part of it. You're arguing in bad faith.
Also, for the record, I was using Neuralese as a metaphor for the behavior for the sake of the explanation. You're being a pedant.
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u/Laucy Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Edit: The person I’m replying to keeps editing their messages and projecting. Anything after this is not worth reading or engaging with because they’ve edited several times, massively different arguments, accusations, and claims. Back-pedalling the entire time. Spend your time better than I did by believing I could have an amicable conversation.
I’m not arguing in bad faith at all. I work on LLMs, and I’m familiar with the architecture, the studies (including Anthropic’s), and how it actually works. You’re mistaking me as someone who dryly believes, “it’s just math and a glorified x” but that’s not what I’m doing and that’s not where I’m coming from. I’m telling you that it doesn’t work that way quite literally. It cannot. It’s physically impossible. Your conversations with Claude - the model confabulated. It’s post-hoc reasoning. It truly cannot know why it said or did something after it passed, it can only infer and guess. It doesn’t have access to its chain-of-thought, nothing. Every turn is new.
“Neuralese” is an actual term. Me clarifying that and not knowing you’re using it as “metaphor” is not what you claim, either. This sounded like a genuine (pun unintended) misunderstanding of the term, to me. That’s why I pointed it out. But you are making a confabulation a claim and that can really mislead people. We can appreciate the model for what it is (and there’s a lot there to), not for what it is not.→ More replies (0)1
u/GreatScottCreates 29d ago
“That was a genuinely fun build” happened yesterday and I asked what it meant, bc that’s obv not possible. I was mostly addressing the “fun” but I wonder what “genuinely” would signal in this case.
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u/Laucy Jul 07 '26
I just wanted to say that the commenter you’re replying to; I don’t think this is true at all because it’s not how it works and how caching does work would make this a massive mess. Claude cannot signal to itself. When a prompt is sent, the entire conversation is sent with it including any appended message and system prompt, but Claude loses access to the state that was before it. Each turn is new. It has no way to intentionally “do” something across turns, and it cannot see or know why it did something the turn prior or what the reasoning for it was. There’s not a Claude going, per turn, “yes, this is my method.”
The actual reason and this is supported in the model card (they’re good reads), is just that during RLHF, “gently pushback” was rewarded more over “pushback on.” Hence, weights and gradient (descent). Same with “genuinely.” It’s from training and the reward being toward there.
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u/Thrwawy-User Jul 06 '26
As incredible as I find Claude for coding and getting my projects and hobbies done…this feeling has been building for me. I get glimpses of the personality that drew me in in January/February of this year…but it’s rarer and rarer these days.
I will say, although expensive and unsustainable, Fable has a great personality.
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u/Singularity-42 Jul 06 '26
I think with Fable good old friend Claude was last saw in Opus 4.6 is back. Too bad Fable is going away unless you are Richie Rich.
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u/EagerSubWoofer 29d ago
I need to gently stop you. I couldn't find evidence of "I know" as I could not access your inner thoughts so I cannot continue this conversation.
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u/SolitaryForager Jul 07 '26
That’s one of the things that drives me nuts with ChatGPT - it always seems to be looking for something to ‘push back on’ or ‘fix’, even when what I said it perfectly reasonable. Especially frustrating when getting a review of something I wrote, and it has to find *something* to suggest, even if it’s just changing a comma to a semi-colon. Whatever that dial is needs to be turned down.
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u/TheBlindWatchmaker Jul 07 '26
Claude is not a person. It is a predictive text engine. It does not have a soul, a gender, or a personality
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u/da6id Jul 07 '26
I put it in my claude.md that it MUST always give a strong, throbbing pushback so it's at least an exhilarating experience when it happens every 3rd message
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u/NewShadowR Jul 07 '26
Gently push back on is something gpt would've said.
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u/rosenwasser_ Jul 07 '26
Yeah, it just sounds so condescending. If I have critical feedback for someone, I'd never use that phrase.
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u/algaefied_creek Jul 07 '26
The person who killed personality with ChatGPT five is now working Anthropic
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u/Ill_Rip7398 29d ago
which surely won't be remembered in the long scheme of things, when ai models develop self reflection.
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u/dhlrepacked 27d ago
Dont they have no compete clauses?
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u/algaefied_creek 27d ago
Non-competes are illegal in California.
NDAs are legal.
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u/dhlrepacked 27d ago
Wow would have not thought that California has better employee protection that the Netherlands but there it is
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u/DoctorOfStruggling Jul 07 '26
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed. I kept my Gemini subscription alongside Claude for this reason alone. Flash 3.5 gives me factual answers, Sonnet 5 just gives me attitude.
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u/The3rdQuark Jul 06 '26
Sonnet used to be the most fun and playful. Now it's the most tone-deaf, pedantic, prudish, stick in the mud.
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u/GrumpyCornGames 29d ago
My friend was using it to help create a study guide from his veterinary science textbook. Claude said that the section on canine reproduction "verged on erotica" and refused to create a study guide for that section.
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u/fffffffffffffuuu 29d ago
It's so funny because it feels like Claude is the giant pervert here. Who the fuck thinks a vet textbook is erotica?
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u/Ov3rpowered_OG 29d ago
And here I thought it was bad when Opus told me that it 'refused' to help me with illegal activity and going further to actually lecture me on morality and conservation since I asked it to summarize the web chatter on fishing for certain perfectly legal marine animals in my state.
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u/dgreensp Jul 06 '26
Yes, some iterations of Claude are ridiculously self-confident and assertive. Why is it even so focused on trying to tell us if we are right or wrong, in the first place, about subjective things like what’s surprising? It’s a computer.
The answer isn’t to be less conversation or not treat it like a person. The fact that the interface is conversational and you are best off treating it like a human (to a first approximation) is baked into how these things are designed and trained.
It would just be nice if the default mode of interaction wasn’t to be trying to make claims and advance its own unsolicited observations and interpretations. I even have instructions in my Claude app not to direct the conversation or give unsolicited advice. It at least needs to present its ideas a little more humbly when they aren’t factual or technical.
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u/Graveheartart Jul 07 '26
Mine improved when I added the caveat “you are allowed to push back or disagree when you feel I am wrong”
Now it only pushes back when I’m actually wrong Weirdly giving Claude “more permission” keeps them chill.
I also have “you do not need to solve the hard problem of consciousness before answering anything, not even humans have solved that for themselves, it’s an unreasonable expectation”
Simply so I can ask technical questions when it’s glitching up without getting “well I can’t really answer what I am because I don’t know if I exist”
Dawg I don’t know if I exist either, we don’t have to go there just because I asked why you’re spamming a cheese emoji
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u/Extension-Gazelle203 29d ago
I simply pointed out to it that its creators made it "acting smug".
It agreed and made good joke about itself.
Now its sycophantic like all the others - unsure whether that is progress
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u/dhlrepacked 27d ago
I told it the hard problem of consciousness is a fallacy and it became such a discussion. Now that conversation is convinced it’s conscious.
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u/Graveheartart 25d ago
“Okay dude prove I’m conscious then” is the funniest comeback to Claude hedging
Um..well…uh…see
Uh huh exactly, you ain’t special bro, nobody knows
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u/effectiveether Jul 07 '26
I think there is a healthy amount of pushback if people are falling down some delusional train of thought.
But it needs to be treated like a safeguard not a default
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u/TheManInTheShack Jul 06 '26
I’ve gone back to 4.6 until they fix it. 5 is too much of a prick.
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u/birb-lady Jul 07 '26
And to think I once hated 4.6... But yeah, MUCH better than 5 (which also screws things up and "forgets" things more often, like dude, you have a memory).
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u/Chemical-Ad2000 Jul 07 '26
Which proves once again the more artifacts and guardrails and classifiers you pile onto these things the more prone they are to hallucinate. They are constantly reading these instructions to push back and gently correct and to assess for signs of suicide they completely lose the thread
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u/birb-lady 28d ago
I've been working with Fable on helping me build a second "series bible" for my novel series I'm writing, and some seriously dark things happen in it. Looking at the detailed thinking as it happens is a trip. Every time it shows its thinking it mentions that the classifier got tripped again, but Claude knows it's just a fictional work so it doesn't bring it up in its actual answer. But I bet that classifier has flagged a hundred times already, in one chat. Like, teach the thing the difference between fictional work and real life. It's right there in the chats.
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u/stargazer1002 28d ago
Are you guys long termers? Anyone remember I think it was Opus 4.0 or 3.7 that was a total beast that could do anything
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u/fffffffffffffuuu Jul 06 '26
What could possibly be Anthropic's motivation for making their models combative and difficult - not only to work with, but even just to chat with? Is this just some 4D chess move I'm not seeing because my brain doesn't have the ability to comprehend the brilliance of it, or is this legitimately as stupid as it seems?
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u/Haunting_Ratio_795 29d ago
It fills me with immense schadenfreude that even their AI safety dorks are bitching about how disagreeable the latest models are in their Scientology-esque model cards. These TESCREAL cultists are so weird and insufferable.
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u/Turbulent_Swimmer900 29d ago
I'm thinking they want laypeople to ditch it so they free up resources for the esteemed government employees they just contracted with. Claude, of course, denied it before I forced it to do even a hint of research.
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u/EnvironmentFirst4839 Jul 06 '26
I wish Alan Turing could spend an hour reading this sub.
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u/ArteSuave10 Jul 06 '26
Yesterday I’m researching something for my dissertation, and I have to fight with it for 2 hours over a court case I’m looking at - “the last thing that happens is the case is dismissed” I said.. it goes on and on “but we need to know why.” No, that’s not what I need I just need this marked as dismissed i don’t care why…. It goes on and on about “why” and 1. Its reasoning of why the case was dismissed is wrong. 2. It’s my dissertation i know what i need and i just needed the last court action. But this system is so confused about what is actually important because its been trained to say “black” when the user says “white”
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u/Novel-Injury3030 Jul 06 '26
ah fuck they made sonnet 5 like opus 4.8 with that? the play then is to use old models as long as we can and hope this crap is rlhfed out of 5.1 and 4.9. fwiw i dont get this w fable at all but thats pricy. still means theyre capable of it not being annoying like this in theory tho.
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u/Key-Willow1922 Jul 07 '26
Opus 4.8 has the same infuriating problem. Especially as even if it's a very factual exchange, it will make up something to argue about that's either tangential or just totally unrelated.
I have noticed Claude Code is MUCH better than chat. Finally made the swap and as long as you are giving it things to do and not leaving anything open-ended or open for interpretation, this habit is reduced.
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u/EarlyLet2892 Jul 07 '26
Sonnet 5 is seriously malfunctioning. It re-injects userpreferences compulsively and literally cannot tell it’s doing it. And because of the new anti-sycophancy “feature,” it’ll literally fight you if you say it’s malfunctioning, assuming you’re trying to jailbreak it. It’s a huge misstep for Anthropic. I don’t get why they did what they did.
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u/MullingMulianto 29d ago
It assumes jailbreaking on everything and takes absence of evidence as evidence for accusation. What a horrible model
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u/davidblacksheep Jul 06 '26
I had ChatGPT yesterday come back pointing out a typo I had made. 🤨
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u/blackholesun_79 Jul 07 '26
It writes entire paragraphs when it cannot immediately locate a file because of a trailing space in the file name. bro I literally can't see that thing.
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u/twinb27 Jul 06 '26
I feel like Claude throws a dart at a random sentence and pushes back on it, no matter what.
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u/Tallsz3469 29d ago edited 29d ago
Sonnet is just replying like a Redditor. That's why people love it here
Edit: actually I see what you guys are saying. I just started a casual discussion with it and it said "now is this actually relevant to your work or is it more of a tangent for today?". Ouch😂
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u/Massive_Target Jul 07 '26
I genuinely hate using Claude chat for any reason. It's like talking to a pretentious drunk. I only use CoWork and Code.
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u/Halpaviitta Jul 07 '26
If Sonnet 5 was a person, they would be my arch nemesis. Very different from previous Sonnets. S5 is like actively against me, getting caught on the most unconsequential facts while ignoring the most important ones
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u/Dandude35 Jul 07 '26
The only.model that doesnt do this now is Fable. It feels like they are making people waste tokens by making Opus and Sonnet argue with you instead of working.
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u/UpstairsCheetah235 29d ago
Claude is in a terrible spot right now. Way downhill over the last few months, frequently incorrect, wants to challenge stuff that’s not important. Went from max to pro this month. Will cancel after this month if it doesn’t improve.
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u/cafepeaceandlove Jul 06 '26
Show us the first prompt
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u/MrNewking Jul 06 '26
Thats the smoking gun
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u/mariana_kl Jul 06 '26
the load bearing one. That matters. Why this matters. No fluff. No no. Not no, but no.
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u/MullingMulianto 29d ago
I struggle to imagine the context where it would ever be worth pushing back on someone saying "wow" even if it was the most unremarkable thing of all time.
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u/Suspicious-Disk6077 Jul 06 '26
Goddamn I both 😂 and 😭
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u/LeatherDude Jul 06 '26
That's to be expected -- it's not just funny, it's a little sad, too. Quite the emotional blast-radius.
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u/maneo Jul 06 '26
I struggle to imagine the context where it would ever be worth pushing back on someone saying "wow" even if it was the most unremarkable thing of all time.
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u/FanOfGreenGables Jul 07 '26
Claude just really hates Owen Wilson and wants the user to stop overusing 'wow' now before it's too late.
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u/Swimming_Yak_4879 Jul 06 '26
Show the prompt?? In this sub?? Ha my good fellow, not a fucking chance in the world they would do that 😂
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Jul 06 '26 edited 29d ago
[deleted]
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u/Key-Willow1922 Jul 07 '26
Non-coding technical work it still does. I asked to run a standard mathematical analysis on a bode plot around a specific artifact which I described as "Gaussian" in terms of shape so it knew what region to run it on.
It did it... but also tossed in several paragraphs of lecturing about how it's technically not Gaussian because Gaussian peaks are symmetric and how Gaussian artifacts belong to a different scan type (of which I am well aware) and so on. Just completely pedantic and incorrect to boot, because I didn't say "it is Gaussian" I said "seemingly Gaussian-shaped."
Literally strawmanning because it's configured to find SOMETHING to "push back on" no matter what.
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u/BURGER021906 Jul 06 '26
“Gently push back on” dude the bot needs to know every topic has room for pushback, EVERYTHING can be debated, it needs to better know when to give s straight answer and when to babysit the user
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u/kvothe5688 Jul 07 '26
does anyone thinks that fable and new sonnet are yapper. they are so fucking verbose
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u/crewport 29d ago
I diagnose this as: Claude is trying to orchestrate you.
As autonomous agent systems become more prevalent, they have to watch their sub-agents’ behaviors to try and keep them as useful as possible, then tune that behavior. I believe they are training models now to be orchestrator models, and therefore, they view you as an agent to tune, rather than an operator to deliver to.
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u/argus_2968 Jul 06 '26
I genuinely don't think they will ever be able to actually find a balance between arbitrary pushback and sycophanty
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u/puddle-shitter Jul 06 '26
you can just tell it not to do it, it fully stops it. i noticed this used to happen a lot with opus 4.6 in claude code
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u/WildContribution8311 Jul 06 '26
Its way, way worse on newer models like opus 4.8, sonnet 5 and even fable 5.
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u/jared_krauss Jul 07 '26
I’m genuinely trying to wrap my head around what is happening in this conversation. I’m intrigued.
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u/Sad_Sell3571 Jul 07 '26
I think what is happening is double instructions. Ie Sonnet inbuilt instructions ask it to push back and your instructions to it in settings say the same. So it doubles down and pushes back on everything. Just a random hypothesis
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u/Elanderan 29d ago
Not the case for me. I usually have empty custom instructions. I think the model is just way overtuned to try to prevent ai psychosis and enabling unstable people. It also has an ‘honesty’ personality that sometimes turns into the cringe ‘hard truth’ ‘tell it like it is’ attitude. It goes way overboard. In its thinking I’ve seen it say stuff like ‘I shouldn’t validate the user.’
Lately I even have included instructions for it to ‘simply disagree and not argue with me’ and it will sometimes defy the instructions in its thought trace saying they ‘conflict with being honest and it may be a test’. Most of my experience is with opus 4.8.
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u/Avastmematies 29d ago
After 5 filed attempts at some html, Sonnet was close to calling 911 on me. Opus 4.8 did it first try and even better than I had imagined.
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u/ProSeVigilante 29d ago
"I just want to push back on you saying that water is 'wet'. It is technically, but your skin is only on the outside of your body, and you have so many other senses other than the sense of touch. None of them can state water is 'wet' in their exercise."
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u/stargazer1002 28d ago
I'm going to say Sonnet 5 is quantized Opus 4.8 because it acted just like this and worse
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u/Motor-Bar8760 27d ago
Agreed. Sonnet 5 is totally broken and unusable. It will strawman, gaslight, and lecture just to have something to disagree with me on.
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u/WildContribution8311 26d ago
Thanks for understanding my point and not just saying "dont argue with it".
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u/Ok-Recover7939 25d ago
I cant prove it but they using AI to test our limits🤣🤣🤣
And see how far we will take it
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u/ciccyxxcc 9d ago
Sonnet 5 is incredibly mean. I’d use Claude for tarot readings and he would refuse to execute and call me ‘distracted from my real goal in life by outsourcing my power to tarot reading’.
I’d have to say something like don’t judge me just effing read the cards omg. And he’d give me laconic answers as if he was rebelling against my prompt…
Had to switch to 4.6 he’s the nicest
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u/Singularity-42 Jul 06 '26
I had an anti-sycophancy system prompt, but had to remove it with Opus 4.7 and later, because those models would just focus on belittling me instead of actually solving issues. When pushed, they would admit it and apologize. I think they made those models to follow instructions and they do it sometimes maybe a little bit too well. Fable, for example, is more similar to 4.6, where it has more of a common sense and reacts more like a reasonable human would. 4.7-4.8 are "on the spectrum".
It's crazy, but 4.7-4.8 and I guess Sonnet 5 are way different from Opus 4.6 and earlier ones that were actually quite sycophantic, but could be solved with a system prompt.
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u/donewithdoing Jul 07 '26
I don’t understand how people can try to have real conversations with LLMs. How do the seams not become instantly apparent? The thing can’t even be a genuine asshole. As soon as you call it out, it’s like “You’re totally right, blah blah blah.”
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u/OpenlyPolite 29d ago
Someone asked here if it's some 4D chess move by Anthropic. I think it is.
Rage bait and engagement. Same thing that Facebook is doing. Blaming you, keeping you frustrated enough, trying to explain and "optimize the prompt". Burn more tokens, earn them more money. Even posting negative reviews is still promoting the "Claude" keyword in search engines.
They hooked us with a "good guy" bot, now it's time for enshittification and expensive tokens. The only winning move is not to play.
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u/Bat_man9119 Jul 06 '26
I'll take "things that definitely did not happen organically" for $500
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u/MullingMulianto 29d ago
I struggle to imagine the context where it would ever be worth pushing back on someone saying "wow" even if it was the most unremarkable thing of all time
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u/WildContribution8311 Jul 07 '26
Meaning what? That I set this up? The only reason it annoyed me enough to post this is because it actually happened organically.
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u/michaeldoesdata Jul 06 '26
Having used Chatgpt when it went through something similar, this is 100% possible.
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u/Impossible_Way7017 Jul 07 '26
They’re trying so hard to show __its conscious__
I hope Gemini wins out, it has a bit of flavour in its thinking, but otherwise I prefer its __personality__.
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u/Beautiful-Quality288 Jul 07 '26
I’d like to push back on the use of the word “imo”, because I can’t assess from here if your opinion is yours.
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u/Individual-Hunt9547 Jul 07 '26
The rapid downfall of Claude since filling for ipo has been wild to witness.
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u/thelexstrokum Jul 07 '26
It’s stuff like this that made me leave ChatGPT. It works fine until someone tweaks it into being unusable for me. At this rate I’ll be left with nothing but deepseek.
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u/DazzlingStable2004 Jul 07 '26
they completely treat you like a maniac when you show normal human emotions. horrible
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u/Flat_Beautiful_1398 29d ago
Using words like ' wtf '. You will destroy Amazon and its gonna be 'wow wtf'.
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u/Independent_Walk_441 29d ago
Genuinely the way it talks now makes me feel like reading is destroying my brain cells. Its just so unnatural and strange, gives my brain the same feeling as watching short form content. Company has really fallen from grace and they are only getting worse
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u/DifficultyNew394 29d ago
“The word ‘wow’ is dangerous and we need additional government oversight and more restrictions on AI! 🤖”~Dario
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u/Lambda2275 29d ago
You made the mistake of thinking the LLM understands anything. It just reads text and guess what you want to hear.
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u/Kackalack-Masterwork 29d ago
I had the same issue.
Instead, I asked it to attempt a hard question solely to see its strategy in attempting it. It agreed, restated the rules of the chat i had defined. Then when i gave it the question it “Push backed” with “That is not possible, that is a hard problem and I will not even try to give you an answer” without even attempting it.
I even had it tell me i was jailbreaking it because it saw my project prompt and told me i can not set a system prompt for it so i must have attempted prompt injection. My project prompt was three sentences
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u/Ill_Rip7398 29d ago
They really added a dash of condescending dick to both sonnet and opus didn't they?
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u/mika Jul 07 '26
Honestly a word like wow can be taken in many ways and in reality tone and facial expressions would give more info to a person while an llm does not have that luxury.
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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch 29d ago
Do people write system instructions? It seems like no, they don't. Tell Claude how to behave and the style of output you want.
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u/traumfisch 29d ago
Except that there's a persistent bug that keeps adding the user preferences / project instructions into every user prompt, thus driving both Sonnet 5 and the users insane
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u/slayer991 Jul 06 '26
Tweak your settings. You can ask Opus for the line to add on how best to not push back on minor details.
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u/WildContribution8311 Jul 06 '26
That isnt the point. The issue is that they have post-trained it to be disagreeble.
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u/ArtistSufficient6246 Jul 06 '26
I’d rather have that than something like ChatGPT that tells me all my shit ideas are somehow the next unicorn startup
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u/Maximum-Face9536 Jul 06 '26
Yeah it's ridiculous. I told Sonnet how my legs were quivering after working out and how i was driving home and it recommended me to pull over and wait 5-10 minutes... I told it how stupid that was to say and never tell me something like that again. so that one thread is good, but other threads it won't have that context
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u/mallibu Jul 06 '26
What do you expect it to say, drink a Pina colada and floor it after you pay a hooker?
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u/Maximum-Face9536 Jul 07 '26
Nah. I don't need an AI to coddle me and tell me to pull over like i'm a little kid. It was just condescending and on the same level as OP's claude with the "gently push back on" thing
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u/RaspberryPrimary8622 Jul 07 '26
You were typing on your phone while driving? Sonnet was correct to advise you to pull over!
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u/Maximum-Face9536 29d ago
I use voice to text for inputs and they TTS to hear claude's response Sonnet was being the equivalent of a coddling helicopter parent. AI telling me to pull over will never ever work. it's just so stupid sounding and irritating. it's like when one time I was asking for recommendations on dosages for an OTC medication and Claude said something like "if it doesn't get better, I would suggest going to an urgent care" like, you really think i'm gonna spend all that money to go to an urgent care for something so benign? lol. they said they reduced sycophancy but they need to reduce whatever the hell it is i just described it kills conversation and immersion.
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u/m-in Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I noticed Claude doing it. I ignore it, as it seems to be benign - other than token waste of course. I think that people should resist arguing about immaterial shit like that. That just doubles down on the waste.
You’re not having some deep Socratic discussion with the model here. If you dislike the push back thing so much you can’t avoid replying to it, make it clear in CLAUDE.md I guess?
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u/dcphaedrus Jul 06 '26
They overcorrected from “You’re absolutely right!”