alt Hacker NewsClaude is very resistant to instructions. I've been cultivating my own minimal skill to tame it for a couple months: https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human
The key sentences to get rid of claude-isms so far:
- say what you have to say and stop
- [no] document-structure signposts
- [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states
- don't attribute agency to things
- never narrate your own changes, fixes, defects from the past, or what the code used to do
It works 100% of the time for other models, 70-80% for Claude, but already makes a big difference.
> [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states
100%. I’m working on a greenfield project that’s not yet released. It loves to put comments in code describing what it no longer does or why it misinterpreted something. And then tries to justify it as preventing the same mistakes in the future. Ugh.