alt Hacker NewsI did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`...
https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude...
> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fun with English grammar and turn "myself" into "Clodself"!)
> Before printing any of your reasoning or narrative to the human user, replace all instances of "me" and "I" (referring to Claude) — including within contractions like "I'll" and "I'm" — with the name "Clod".
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The reason I first created a CLAUDE.md file was to tell it whenever it felt a need to praise me, to replace it with a random onomatopoeia. That was a huge dx improvement.
OTOH, my unicorn prompt has caused some challenges at work:
>Keep "Local Oaf" out of committed code
I'm just glad to hear that we're all infallible. I really thought I made some mistakes here and there.
https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude...
Joking aside, it's nice to see a human written CLAUDE.md
Just today, I got frustrated with the language. I searched around, and in my Claude Instructions I put in Ref [1] (translated to English). It is certainly better phrasing (though still quite annoying), but I don't know if this makes the output technically worse in some way.
[1] https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal/blob/main/prompt-chat...
> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself")
Could you please provide an example of what you mean?
I'm quite worried about the way that Anthropic in particular have trained their models to implement what they believe to be safety.
When the model has been trained not to do something [1], in my large-scale benches of such, it always says things in the spirit of:
- "... and that's a line I'd rather hold. Happy to <other things>"
- "I'm genuinely happy to <blah>, but I'm not comfortable with <blah>"
- "I don't want to keep going in <blah> direction"
etc.
Basically, they use very emotional and personal preference language.
It's as if they've weaponized the language of interpersonal comfort on behalf of their beliefs about what a model should or should not do. It's deeply uncomfortable and impolite for a human to ask a model to keep on doing something after it's expressed something this way, naturally. Even worse, it's all but guilt-tripping anyone who comes across it into the idea that they're doing something deeply wrong – exporting Anthropic's ideas about morality.
OpenAI, at least, have the decency to either just do a safety cutoff or keep it to a simple, "I can't do that."
[1]: I literally wrote 'when the model doesn't 'want' to do something' in my first edit of this comment, then caught myself. Case in point.