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Comments (128)

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  jp57
  Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense.I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's engrams?
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  sleazebreeze
  Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single response, but I suppose that could work it'll just take longer for everything (and Claude models are quite slow).I don't think we can skill our way out of this one.
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  ryandrake
  The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on the list view." I mean, thanks, Claude, but I don't care what the code doesn't do. Don't tend to see this with other LLMs.I almost want to try adding a rule "Never use the words 'not' or 'instead'."
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  hbn
  > Install> Copy/paste into your CLI prompt:> Install the i-have-adhd skill/plugin from https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd, refer to the repo's AGENTS.md for instructions.This is a weird evolution from "don't copy-paste scripts that pipe curl into your shell interpreter"I know LLMs are getting better but I'd be at least a little nervous it could end up installing something from a squatted similarly-named github repo because the LLM text watermarking needed to swap out a token for an alternative "just as correct" token that matches the statistical pattern.Am I being paranoid?
• acaloiar
  I used it for a few months, and can say that no skill is up to the task of keeping Claudeuage in check. You'll get a lot more mileage out of an "output style" with the same instructions, because output styles regularly remind Claude how to speak.Even output styles are not always up to the task (Claudeuage slips through), and they're mutually exclusive, so you can only have one active at a time.
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  hk1337
  > A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answerThis is just an annoying thing for anyone. It gives a 10 page dissertation that sums up to, "it's good, nothing to worry about".
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  mzajc
  Is there a reason this needs 8.7k lines across 59 files (according to scc)? The prompt itself seems to be in skills/i-have-adhd/SKILL.md, which is 140 lines long at just over 1.6% of the repository.
• gerad
  Personally I ask it to explain it simply like it’s talking to an executive reading it on their phone while on another meeting.
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  h4x0rr
  I found 2 things helping a lot: 1. Use the desktop app instead of the terminal. It really helps with text readability and structure. 2. Avoid opus 5 - 4.6 and 4.8 work much better. 4.6 being by far the easiest to read and also just a good collaborator, you should try it again. Fable also if you can afford it.
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  whirlwin
  Can someone explain why this is a agent skill and not just agent config (AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md)?
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  agentdev001
  Until either of these cases happen:A: Devs with an online presence stop using Anthropic modelsB: Anthropic catches up to OpenAI in terms of per-token efficiency, and average token total for final-outputWe will continue to see posts such as this generate lots of interaction. This is not a skill to stop "coding agents" from burying the answer. This is a skill to stop coding agents backed by models which have a tendency to bury answers, from burying the answer. Stop trying to patch the downstream behavior, and look at the root cause.
• vvpan
  Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.
• WhyNotHugo
  You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".
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  abathologist
  "Software Engineering" in 2026.
• VCFundedGenYer
  Every chat bot has this problem. If you don't tell it to respond tersely and without conversation, it will waste a billion tokens giving you a 5 paragraph manifesto of rambling and useless redundant information.
• heyiammallik
  I like the problem this is trying to solve. One thing I'm not sure about though is whether this kind of a preference should be a skill at all.Stuff like put the answer first, don't bury the useful bit etc feel like user level preferences that should survive across tasks. Agents.md is repo context, skills are useful when a particular task needs extra instructions but this is neither really.Right now we seem to be stuffing all 3 kinds of things into context hoping model pays attention to it where needed as session grows. Also +1 on not making this purely about shorter output
• ricksunny
  I look forward to the superpowered upgrade of this I-am-a-gnat-on-crack
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  smusamashah
  Simply adding "Keep answers short, I have ADHD" should work same as this skill.
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  SandersAK
  love when they put stuff in like this...One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.
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  josefresco
  Does this not work? "Output styles" https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles
• pelagicAustral
  ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.
• bentt
  I am deeply curious if there are people that would not benefit from this.
• bityard
  The README makes mention of The Adult ADHD Tool Kit by J. Russell Ramsay and Anthony L. Rostain which looks like a pretty good resource.
• thefourthchime
  I asked my agent if I should install this because I already have a bunch of instructions that are similar.For example, if it's going to give me an answer that's longer than three paragraphs, I tell it to give me a TLDR at the end. This is what it gave me for this."TL;DR: Skip the install. You already built a better version for your world. If numbered steps and "where are we?" restatements still feel missing, cherry-pick those into one short rule instead of adding another full skill on top."
• hinkley
  Might I suggest you instead call this Executive Summary?It's not just neurodiverse people who would like to get to the fucking point sooner and the explanations afterward.All of us have other shit we need to be doing.
• cush
  I’ve had a lot better output from my agents since I added “I probably have ADHD” in my user context
• IshKebab
  I solved this by switching from Claude to Codex. It's crazy how much faster it is to reply and how much less verbose its replies are. Dunno why Claude is popular at all...
• TZubiri
  this feels like the opposite of skill
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  bethekind
  Still a great skill, but at this point, I just write "I have adhd, can you explain that again" or "I have adhd". Works great for compressing it ELI5, but less dumb
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  egeozcan
  As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).
• cruffle_duffle
  Opus 5 is such a massive regression, I really don't understand how Anthropic green-lit it. It makes me wonder so much about the company.Like, did the people who work there actually have to suffer through it's absolutely unintelligible word salad like the rest of us? Or did they actually dogfood it and in-fact enjoyed its output? Or do none of them dogfood Opus because they are all sucking down Mythos-Max + Speed Boost or whatever every day and their only exposure to Opus 5 was as subagents?If it was my company, fixing the output would be the absolute top priority of the company. I'd be all over every channel admitting the massive fuckup, apologizing profusely, and working non-stop to push out a fix. Yet it's crickets from Anthropic. Is it simply growing pains of the company or is it a deep, systemic structural/cultural "thing" that led to this fucked up model getting released?Was it a cascading failure of models training models training models with almost no human oversight? Or was there human oversight and, again, people actually decided the way it responded was good? I hope it was the former not the later because I have no earthy clue who the fuck would look at what opus spews out into the console as good.Because to me, Opus 5 is completely unusable in almost any context. As a product, it fails to deliver value. I just don't understand it. I really honestly don't understand how the fuck Anthropic released it at all.And in a weird "meta" twist it makes me wonder how much of these LLM's are just smoke and mirrors and opus 5 output is basically the end state of what you get when you push them as far as they can go. It's some kind of twisted proof of "max complexity they can handle and deliver" and opus 5 walked to the edge and went over and it's slop output is demonstrating.... something.... about the limits of large language models. I dunno. But what I do know is it caused me to subscribe to Codex. No 1m context window, the harness isn't nearly as polished, but at least their models don't return condescending, unintelligible word salad.
• quietraster
  the 'burying the answer' framing is so accurate. does the
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  messh
  good skill. but why should all this repo e needed for a small MD file??
• joduplessis
  This doesn't seem to be a big issue with Codex. Claude, yes - I have from time to time said "ffs one liner please".
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  tonymet
  “Be concise “
• daksh_aneja
  [flagged]