any specifics on what you did?

Not the person you're asking, but I did that by explaining to Fable my problem with Opus's gobbledygook and having it write a Claude skill for producing clear explanations in its reports to me. I also had it add notes about the need for clearer writing to CLAUDE.md and other project documentation. Opus's subsequent reports to me have been much clearer.

Here’s an example of one of those Claude skills, in a public repository I manage:

https://github.com/tkgally/je-dict-1/blob/main/.claude/skill...

Fable wrote it specifically for this project.

And then both Opus and Fable will happily ignore these random markdown files (happens to me all the time)

I feel like mine is mocking me. I added an instruction in Claude.md that says "under no circumstances use the phrase found the smoking gun, say I found the problem instead"

What does it do? It says "found the smoking gun! Ooops I wasn't meant to say that - I found the problem!"

It's pretty wild how "reasoning" models now generate like 10 thousand hidden chain of thought tokens in response to a "increase opacity of the logo by 20%" prompt before writing the actual message and yet they still manage to do this.

Why are you using an LLM for "increase opacity of the logo by 20%"? That sounds like the type of straightforward operation a dedicated tool exists for.