I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?

I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.

It has always seemed to me that they're hacking for dopamine response in moderately interested data labelers.

Spot on wrt CoT. I have thinkingSummaries enabled and I find it eminently readable compared to the prose in Claude's replies.

In fact, whenever Claude disobeys me, I usually first skim the CoT to figure out if my original instruction was ambigous given the context. I usually come away with a better understanding of how to frame my prompt to be less ambiguous or just force myself to be more explicit when prompting.

Regarding diosbedience, usually this is either due to a blanket instruction from me during an earlier turn in the same session, an explicit instruction in its system prompt or it being just eager to bring a task to completion.

  # ~/.claude/settings.json
  {
    "model": "opus",
    "showThinkingSummaries": true,
    "skipDangerousModePermissionPrompt": true,
    "verbose": true,
    "remoteControlAtStartup": true,
    "agentPushNotifEnabled": true
  }

I find that Claude Code writes very long comments, longer than even a human trying to be helpful would write.

I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.

I think the specific issue with Opus 5 is that its writing style is just trying to cheat at RL. It makes everything hypey yet self deprecating and constantly brings up "honest caveats" because the scoring rubrics look for those.

I've been cleaning up AI generated system/software design and architecture docs for an agentically engineered application, to translate that dense AI-speak into a clear human-readable form, cross checking it all against the actual codebase.

When I read the translated version, I felt a flush of relief, because I finally could confirm that it built the right thing and properly implemented the requirements.

I then asked in a fresh session which version was better for it as a reference for future work. It unequivocally voted for the human readable form, and gave it's reasoning with specific examples why.

So, I have a hunch that this "packing of lots of signals into fewer words" isn't really better. The incomprehensible prose just makes us think it knows what it's doing, like some mysterious magic that is only smoke and mirrors.

Chain of thought does not exist in the output of Claude, they disabled true thinking due to distillation risk. What you see when thinking summaries are enabled are just that, summaries of thinking into Claude-isms, therefore you cannot make any inferences on what the model is doing unless you literally work at Anthropic and can see the true thinking traces.

It's all about conducting users into using their plans/tokens in accordance to a certain cadence

sometimes by increasing human cognitive load during reviews, sometimes by expanding the number of gated decisions, sometimes by penalizing those using their accounts on other harnesses

Yeah, if anything the problem is that the output uses too many words for too little signal, and incorrectly uses confidence based on insufficient information to the degree it’s clearly bullshitting.

I don't know, I just pulled up the status for an active session and here's what it said:

  One thing I found before dispatching, and filed as Q0579. The halt told you C6
  was all that was left in the unit. That was true of the step's criteria and
  false of the unit's acceptance, which reads "exits 0 AND witnessed red" — two
  conjuncts. The witness half holds; the exits-0 half does not, because hello's
  G7 currently reads DIFFER 554/51340. I re-derived that from the gate map
  rather than trusting the prior step's report. So satisfying C6 does not by
  itself finish this unit, and I've filed that so attempt 1's success can't
  quietly be read as the unit's.