alt Hacker News> The single biggest annoyance with Opus 5 is that it writes too elliptically.
This is even more painful for non-native English speakers like myself.
I feel fairly comfortable reading academic papers or in general, communicating in professional context.
But with Opus 5, it feels like reading a literature book: load-bearing, inert, wholesale, hunk, verbatim, and so on... I can figure out the meaning, but working with CC became unenjoyable.
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A lot of people I work with are reporting that reading Claude-made PR descriptions is burning them out of doing PR reviews because it is incredibly tiresome to read.
My company recently forbid AI-only text if it’s meant meant to be consumed by humans.
I dodged the drama but I agree so much.
OK so I am not the only one who never heard 'load-bearing' before Claude started using it 100 times a day?
As a native speaker, I have to ask it to rephrase 5-10 times a day. Sometimes I actually get mad and I tell it “I can’t answer that because I don’t know what the fuck load-bearing indirection means”. I’ve gotten so frustrated that I’ve ended a session and started over.
the tip that was floating around on x was to tell it to use "ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"
cladue desktop has an instructions sections under general options, you can put something like
"try to stick to ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, keep answers short and to the point"
funnily enough the placeholder they suggest when its empty is "keep answers short and to the point"
I'm particularly fond of "load-bearing seam", which it loves to use. It rather hilariously fails the "draw the metaphor" test.
I'm switching to GPT because of this. The prose is so much more legible. The only reason I keep using Claude Code is because the harness is the best IMO.
Thank you, my dict.cc search history contains exactly some of these words. I felt like my english got much worse but when Claude kept talking about "hunk" over and over I felt like the problem is maybe not on my end.
Why not set a global instruction that their direct outputs to you should be in your native language?
For a long time I had Claudes (in the 4.0-4.5.x range) use only French in the chat, while keeping English for working docs (and the code, obviously). Works just fine.
edit: I can guess that any right-to-left languages would likely break claude-code rendering?
As an English native speaker the language it uses is difficult for me to parse the majority of the time. Nobody speaks like the output Claude generates.
OK so I am not the only one :D
It seems to have a preference for speaking in poetic or highly expressively language, rather than precise and concise as most engineers like to talk.
The amount of times I have to ask "precisely what do you mean by x?".
It's kinda like that engineer that likes to throw around unnecessary technical jargon just to sound more inteligent, worse because at least you could kinda understand what the technical jargon dude was on about even if it was totally unnecessary.
As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.
Anyway, you might have more luck just writing to it in your native language. It’ll be equally crummy, but maybe you’ll find it easier to decode.