It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity.
I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...
It's not that it fundamentally isn't able to produce something concise, it's that the business model of the companies developing these models rests on selling tokens...
because human writing IS not just producing the Next token, sometimes you write shit and then go back and find ways to improve and try to play tricks inside the structures only you or your coauthors understand. AI doesnt do this
Exactly! That's also why almost every slop commit I see has a linecount like +700 / -20, whereas human commits often end up net zero. I try to remove more lines than I add, if possible, but LLMs will just add more bloat, forever.
I don’t know. The old models were much more concise, answering your question in a couple of sentences. At some point they just started outputting walls of text for every prompt.
It's not a conspiracy to say it's unwise to expect a company to drive a research & product direction that will directly impact their reduce. Some might be smart enough to realize it's the right long game, but it takes leaders who understand and plan out second order consequences.
Bullshit. It would cost them more money to post process all the bullshit and then ship that, instead they just point the cannon at your face and pull the trigger.
I had Claude knock out a feature but it was too big of a change set for a single PR so i set up a worktree and started extracting parts piecemeal. Along the way I would clean up and rewrite pieces. By the end of this process i had abandoned everything Claude wrote and looking back at the original branch I was like "oh my god, that's so bad in so many ways, i can't believe i was actually just gonna ship that"
I have to ask Claude to compact the comments every time, and I give specific criteria for it. Never ever reiterate what’s in the code, never mention decisions not made, never mention the conversation, etc etc.
Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments.
Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.
I just wrote a utility to rip all comments out of the code. Now the code is fully uncommented and it has saved lots of input tokens and also lots of meandering because the model is no longer getting stuck on bad ideas it told itself about.
I set a line budget for comments (also wiki page parts, chat responses, etc). That only helps when I ask it to do a second pass to reword everything to the budget and add links. I think they tuned it this way to stash reasoning dumps in the code. Unlike human developers, it has no context in its head, other than general GitHub knowledge.
I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...