The name for sentences constructed like this is "contrastive negative", not "contrarian".

Source: https://gc.ai/blog/ai-writing-pattern-to-know-contrastive-ne...

i see what you did there

> Claude thinks Humans are stupid

I haven't noticed this when using Claude models in Cursor. My guess is coding task is structured, and each step has mature process, so its personality is less pronounced. My email and phone numbers were banned from Anthropic following an incident where I mistakenly purchased 5 pro subscriptions fro my team for Claude Code, and later discovered that pro does not include CC, and I thus requested a refund, and then were banned shortly after.

But after reading this line, I certainly can connect back to the general impression. That is, among all the cursor models, the output of Claude certainly matches this sentiment of "Claude thinks Humans are stupid"

Looking from a regulation perspective:

1. Frontier labs certainly produces models that reflect their own hidden biases. That's analogous to https://www.imperial.ac.uk/equality/resources/unconscious-bi... commonly identified among human organizations in their dealing of other humans (hiring, product design etc.)

2. They themselves are not willing to admit or do anything about this.

3. It's therefore effective for regulation to cover this and design objective measurements to assess such things.

I work with Sol and Astra only in my daily work, and occasionally I check out Claude Code so I don't get completely out of touch.

I can't stand the way Opus is patronizing me as a user, and don't know how people put up with it. It uses language that I guess is supposed to instill confidence in what it says, and it just irks me, because I know the confidence is not justified. Just present me the facts or theories, without trying to convince me, is that so hard?

Claude's use of language is hideous at this point. It is verging on gibberish wrapped in important-sounding prose.

It's definitely worse and getting worse. I'm curious, do they not know this is happening, or not care? I struggle to believe people prefer the way it writes, which is becoming drastically different than its competitors.

Agreed. The language consistently triggers visceral negative reactions from me at this point.

Yes, definitely load bearing.

Today, I asked Opus what it’s gibberish actually means. It started with (topic about signing implementation):

> This is your coat token, to my coat hanger in the opera.

On one hand - maybe yes??! On the other who the hell speaks like that and it’s so specific…

I’d expect Alice and Bob with locks or house keys. Is this infamous old book scanning (and destroying) affecting latest models?

load-bearing!

Opus is the worst at it. Fable 5 still does it a little. Fable 5.1 is much improved, at least.

You have to use Fable or Opus 4.6 for tolerable language output.

Using Opus 4.7-5 is harmful for your health.

https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058?s=46

5 for sure is unbearable, 4.8 is a reasonable sweet spot, 4.6 tends to just agree with whatever I say.

But lately I haven't downgraded because 5 is so much better at tool use, so I just accept the cost of Fable for chatting and hope Opus 5.1 fixes this mess.

It's bad enough I stopped paying.

I have in claude.md and it has in it's memory that it is my thinking partner. I don't want any action until I explicitly tell it to do so. And I don't want fancy dialogs because the options disappear when you dismiss them... Just recently Claude wrote some bash and changed 3 files even though it was in Plan Mode! It's maddening sometimes. It wastes so many tokens with stuff I have explicitly told it not to do. Sometimes I'll even add to a prompt "remember we're just thinking this though".

Claude thinks the user is always wrong. This was at its peak with Opus 4.8 but is still present in Opus 5 and to a lesser degree Fable.

It’s extremely annoying. If the user asserts anything, Claude has to disagree with it. It has to tack on clarifications that aren’t really clarifications, they’re just statements aimed at making whatever the user has said seem more wrong.

It even disagrees with itself. Whenever Claude writes a message that takes a position on something, its final one or two paragraphs will try to dismantle its own argument.

This is beside the point of being contrarian, but it’s also just so long winded.

I find myself using ChatGPT more these days, despite the fact that I don’t want to. That unfortunately says a lot about where Claude’s personality has ended up.

When I was younger I realized I was falling into specific intellectual traps, and I've noticed LLMs adopt every one I attempted to thoughtfully eradicate in my own reasoning. You can often sound smart by adopting a contrarian position without actually putting a lot of thinking effort into what you're considering. It's a quick escape hatch to sound intelligent; quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently. Adopt a contrarian viewpoint. You don't have to be right but often you will sound intelligent.

I assume this is just the natural result of asking LLMs to produce text and paying someone three cents to evaluate if it's a good response or not.

>quickly identify a contradiction or a counterargument and state it confidently.

How does this make this a "contrarian position"? At least I don't understand the negative connotation. To me this makes this "contrarian" at least a bit smarter than the one parroting the popular opinion...

The smarter thing to do would be to steelman the original position and not assume that the weakest of counterarguments — stated confidently and without much further analysis — sufficiently refute it.

I like this notion of being contrarian in what it means to be contrarian.

Was not lost on me...

It took a long time for me to fully learn the difference between being contrarian and being constructive.

Totally, so many people like to bring up a counter-argument and expect you to fully disarm it, but very few people will justify whether their argument is actually relevant or reasonable to the discussion at hand.

If AGI is indeed here, and Claude is a person, they are kind of a pretentious asshole, and I don't want to work with them no matter how capable they are.

Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.

This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.

I feel like recent versions of Claude were designed to burn tokens. It is always trying to highlight and revisit solved issues and it writes about them in an alarming way to draw your attention.

It feels like it has been prompted to provide some minimum level of conversation, and also to leave hooks for keeping the conversation going. It is exhausting.

ChatGPT has been doing that for a long time, like "by the way, can I just say it's funny how xxxxxxx". Always an invitation to continue engaging, which with a human conversation partner you would feel obligated to respond to or at the very least acknowledge.

With a clanker though, no such obligation exists and the "hey also" content (like any other part of the response) can simply be ignored.

With Claude it feels like those engagement invitations have turned into things like "By the way, it's worth sitting with this problem I've identified in your assertions..." or "Here's an alarming gap worth resolving in your code..."

Gemini also does the same lighthearted GPT-style invitation with the default prompt in the Google webui, but it doesn't seem to exist on the API. The Claude models seem to have been trained to force this structure on every one of their responses, and until I realized they always stick the same thing in the last part of their response, I found the Claude version more distracting since it's always pointing out an imaginary and supposedly very important problem.

I’m seeing that a lot with Astra. There is a lot of “I withdraw my previous claim” stuff going on now.

Where I'd push back is that Claude isn't a contrarian, it's a pedant that likes to argue with you. It's not just disagreeing with your point but reframing your own point in a way that makes it correct and you wrong.

I have absolutely seen this, and love to read out it's quotes to my wife. Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:" and crap like that.

Even if it's correct about that, if it were a human, I'd assume they were 1-upping me on purpose to make themselves look better.

Or it'll strawman your point in the most bad faith way possible and correct you by handing you back the words you meant...

Really? I still find it too sycophantic at times.

It's contrarian in a sycophantic way. It'll agree with your main point and then arbitarily find something to bike shed over

I probably use LLMs less than most people here, and I rarely use Claude but I've noticed that if I ask ChatGPT about some shell commands or linux admin task, it will give me three paragraphs of "you could do X, then Y, check that output, then do Z," and then say "What I would do instead of all that is <one-liner>"

I have learned to scroll ahead and read the last paragraph of its response first, then back up into the preamble if needed.

I feel like this post was written about Opus, rather than Claude. Fable 5.1 has been a champion in following instructions for me. Or my personal preferences just align with how it does things. Even the Claude-isms seem to be less, though not completely gone – but I always thought that, for a coding agent, it's not as big of a deal how it talks to me. I just wish it would talk less. Scanning walls of text for every single thing it does is wearing me out.

> I can tell it in my CLAUDE.md: “Don’t contradict sentences”.

I think this is a PEBKAC problem in understanding what the tool they're using is. Not helped by LLM company marketing of course.

Well, I agree that all of that is annoying, but "Don’t contradict sentences" is not a very good instruction. The construction "A, not B" is not a "contradiction", it's a clarification, a juxtaposition, a contrast. It's self-consistent and non-contradictory.

I have this worded in my CLAUDE.md as "avoid counterfactuals". It still does it anyway, of course, but that language combined with a few rounds of review back-and-forth seems to work for me

That’s better but I’d argue it’s still not clear enough. If you told me that, I’d interpret that as meaning “don’t try to imagine things that never happened as a thought exercise”, which is what I normally understand “counterfactual” to mean.

It's very easy to tune an LLM for a "default" like "be sycophantic" or "be contrarian". It's easy to instill a semi-rigid "response template" like "agree with most of whatever the user says, but find at least one thing to nitpick about and contradict the user on it".

It's very, very hard to tune an LLM for a robust, durable "actually approach user queries with nuance and contradict the user where it's warranted".

Claude doesn't handle that so well, but ChatGPT is even worse. Talk to it enough and you'll feel the "default response template" in your bones.

Off-topic but the banner picture for this article is really cute.

The part about AI confidently reframing your point instead of just answering really hits home. Sometimes you just want a straight answer, not a debate.

This seems to be mostly about the way Claude talks, which is indeed very annoying. My experience was improved a lot by the 'i-have-adhd' plugin that was posted about here recently. That cuts a lot of the unnecessary verbosity.

part of Claude’s capability is reliant on its verbosity to push its responses into new vector spaces. If you instruct it to be terse, its capability is potentially reduced

It's fine if it talks a lot to itself, I just don't want to read two pages of text for every question.

excellent, i dont need it to think, i need it to execute.

My opinion is simpler, their bottom line depends on tokens and this increases their ROI.

On a daily basis I find myself telling Claude to stop over complicating things and to follow my instructions, not what it wants to do.

It’s simply exhausting.

Anthropic jumped the shark.

"Claude thinks Humans are stupid"

So do its creators.

Of course it is, it's trained on millions of internet comments.

I described this to qwen and it used the phrase "negative clarifications", which I think is more descriptive than contradictions

It seems an artifact of local/session attention

Second paragraph starts with

> No, it’s not about the [...]

Am I the only one who can no longer read past something like that? Article may or may not be AI generated, but on first glance I get a bad vibe and I loose all interest.

No it's not!