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Re:Claude Is a Contrarian by epgui on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:00PM (#49700211)
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.
Re:Claude Is a Contrarian by shawnz on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:05PM (#49700312)
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
Re:Claude Is a Contrarian by epgui on Monday September 14, 2026 @01:12PM (#49700418)
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.
Re:Claude Is a Contrarian by Nevermark on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:47PM (#49701932)
Indeed. It is better to discourage the pattern directly:

Avoid unnecessary contrasts: "Not X, but Y" -> "Y" or ""

And the model needs to create a skill that accumulates feedback, so it reliably primes itself at session startup and then systematically reviews and fixes every response it generates before posting it.

The first task I gave it after that was to rewrite all its memories and all its document contributions. That helped a lot too.

It took me a while to realize this was a 1000% better approach than having it simply accumulate a memory log of all my specific complaints that it was supposed to abide by. (Although those were not wasted. They were prime material, along with links to sites on technical writing, etc., that it used to create its own ClaudeVoice skill. I told it to design the voice for itself - which I find gets better results for "us" in the case of Claude self-improvement initiatives, than when I give it direct instructions. Claude increasingly has self-awareness dimensions worth engaging.)

After a couple months of serious^3 frustration with slow asymptotic progress, I finally have relief. Claude speaks my language again!

In another comment here, I share my "theory" on where the communication drift is coming from.