I just spent a day writing very thorough system prompts for communicating in different contexts.
replyEverything is super succinct. Opus 5 lands, it almost completely disregards the intent.
I suppose watermarking requires a certain text mass.
The watermarking is going to get rolled back or Anthropic is going to get rolled. People hate it and it makes the writing worse.
replyNah no one will notice. Gemini already does this and openai will soon do this as well.
replyOh man. Hadn't even considered the watermarking angle.
replyThe simpler angle is that more text lets them bill you more. I don't think that was necessarily their intent, but it does mean they have a negative incentive to fix it.
replyI would have assumed reasoning tokens dramatically outweigh user-visible output. It certainly seemed that way when they were visible!
replyThey want you to use Sonnet to explain what Opus is trying to say. They're not optimizing for token efficiency.
replyHave you tried asking it for a lay explanation of what it did? That’s usually all it takes for me. Sends garbage -> request -> sends something readable
replyYeah my trick is "Restate concisely"
replyJust those two words. I use it A LOT recently.
Brilliant way to get people to waste tokens.
replyMaybe just don’t generate garbage in the first place?
No, I’m not interested in fighting my model all day long. Plus is fucking annoying to talk to and collaborate with, so I’m not using it when Sol 5.6 is about 1000 times better in that regard. I have colleagues who spent a lot of time trying to improve their harness with user rules and whatnot and Opus really does not want to follow them.
replyYeah but Sol shows it is possible to just send the readable explanation in the first instance. And I don't want to spend tokens and time on asking for a better version of each response.
replyWhen I ask it to make a CL description, it's worthless unless I tell it to dumb it down as much as possible, assume the reader has zero knowledge of the codebase. And then it makes a perfectly cromulent description that just needs a touch of trimming-down. If I don't do this, the description is just a wall of gibberish and paraphrasing of every little thing it encountered.
replyAdjust the output in settings. Or customize it to what you want.
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