alt Hacker NewsThe "yes, with caveats" thing is boilerplate for both Codex and Claude since this current generation.
It's actually a bit annoying because it primes you to think that the caveats are real, but most of the time it's just something terribly obvious and not a real caveat, but the model probably has some system prompt that tells it to always consider caveats or something like that.
Same as the model starting every reply with a commitment to be "honest". LLMism are fun but I tend to just suppress them via AGENTS.md because they distract me
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gizmodo59 • today at 10:51 PM
A lot of things are not black and white and it’s nuanced so someone with higher intelligence will point it out. It’s an emergent behavior not a defect
At least Opus up to 4.7 or so, my experience is that Claude often uses "yes, with caveats" in place of "no, you numbskull".
"Is a meter the same as a foot?"
"Yes, exactly, you have it now, except they're different distances."
Maybe it's because I ask it to quiz me, and it really doesn't like to tell me I'm wrong. I also got a fair amount of
Claude: Ok, I will test your understanding. Question A? Question B? Question C? Question D?
Me: A=10. B=2. C=121. D is not solvable.
Claude: You got most of them right! You're very astute in saying that A=10, but actually it's 7. B=2 is exactly right! C could be 121 if we were talking base 4, but we're actually in base 10 so it's 25. D is trivially solvable and is 0.
Me: ...isn't that like 1 out of 4? How is that "most of them right"?
Claude: You're absolutely right! ...blah blah blah