Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news update

Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news: what actually changed

HN Claude/Codex/Fable reports: Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose. Article URL: https://blog.kvit.app/posts/agent-not-allowed-to-write-prose/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49874299 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

It bans “honestly”, “genuine”, “landed”, and the phrase “earns its keep”. A later section bans false-contrast pairs such as “This is not theoretical.

Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news: how it works

It is standard engineering.”, runs of short sentences written for punch, and one-line closers. Each rule is there because reading Claude’s prose day after day wore me down.

Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news: why it matters now

I run about a dozen agents at once, so whether I can read and process a report from an agent in seconds or need several minutes impacts my work speed. See the full write-up from HN Claude/Codex/Fable via the source link for quotes and complete context.

Until recently I treated that as a writing style problem: if the reports were still hard to read, style rules were not complete yet. The list kept growing, fastest after Opus 5 came out, when the prose became unbearable.

Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news: who is affected

Opus 5.5 writes quite a bit better, but finding the parts of a report that matter is still a chore: the model tells me in detail which problems it ran into, how it tried to solve them and which paths it took, and most of that I do not need. Somewhere in the middle, often in passing, it mentions that it noticed something that might be a problem and might need a closer look, and that sentence is usually buried among details I could have skipped.

Claude Isn't Allowed to Write Me Prose news: what to watch

Telling the model how to write, and what not to write, still lets it produce an essay of whatever length and shape it chooses; the rules only change the words inside it. See the full write-up from HN Claude/Codex/Fable via the source link for quotes and complete context.