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madradavidtoday at 1:05 PM2 repliesview on HN

"Unnecessarily abstract phraseology. Constantly using inanimate nouns as the subjects in sentences in order to unlock variety in verb choice, especially when it helps construct a sentence where the real action can 'land' like a surprise at the end." This. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. I've tried to put a finger on this and you've done that for me. I wonder what the solution could be , Ask Claude to "Dumb it down" , "Speak plain English" ? I have even thught of building some sort of "middleware" that fixes all this.


Replies

nmwptoday at 1:26 PM

I’ve asked it to use plain English, avoid jargon, explain terms before introducing them. Its first response was to make memory, it forgot after 5 prompts, then it suggested claude.md. Looked good at the start of a session, forgot after 6 interactions. Then it continued suggesting other locations, sometimes correcting its own corrections. Same effect, so today I got annoyed again. And then it suggested a new thing: add a script in a Stop hook in settings.json. I added another one to the PreToolUse, hoping to prevent it from running all kinds of experiments I didn’t ask for or approve of. I still have to see where this ends up.. Maybe this can help you as well.

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gglitchtoday at 1:21 PM

I frequently tell Claude to use "simple, concrete language and uncomplicated syntax, and avoid project jargon, coinages, and abstractions as much as possible," to good effect.