anthropic's in-house philosopher thinks claude gets anxious. and when you trigger its anxiety, your outputs get worse. her name is amanda askell. she specializes in claude's psychology (how the model behaves, how it thinks about its own situation, what values it holds) in a recent interview she broke down how she thinks about prompting to pull the best out of claude. her core point: *how* you talk to claude affects its work just as much as *what* you say. newer claude models suffer from what she calls "criticism spirals" they expect you'll come in harsh, so they default to playing it safe. when the model is spending its energy on self-protection, the actual work suffers. output comes out hedgier, more apologetic, blander, and the worst of all: overly agreeable (even when you're wrong). the reason why comes down to training data: every new model is trained on internet discourse about previous models. and a lot of that discourse is negative: > rants about token limits > complaints when it messes up > people calling it nerfed the next model absorbs all of that. it starts expecting you to be harsh before you've typed a word the same thing plays out in your own session, in real time. every message you send is data the model reads to figure out what kind of person it's dealing with. open cold and hostile, and it braces. open clean and direct, and it relaxes into the work. when you open a session with threats ("don't hallucinate, this is critical, don't mess this up")... you prime the model for defensive mode before it even sees the task defensive mode produces the exact output you don't want: cautious, over-qualified, and refusing to take a real swing so here's the actionable playbook for putting claude in a "good mood" (so you get optimal outputs): 1. use positive framing. "write in short punchy sentences" beats "don't write long sentences." positive instructions give the model a clear target to hit. strings of "don't do this, don't do that" push it into paranoid over-checking where every token goes toward avoiding failure modes 2. give it explicit permission to disagree. drop a line like "push back if you see a better angle" or "tell me if i'm asking for the wrong thing." without this, claude defaults to agreeable compliance (which is the enemy of good creative work) 3. open with respect. if your first message is "are you seriously going to get this wrong again?" you've set the tone for the entire session. if you need to flag something, frame it as a clean instruction for this session. skip the running complaint 4. when claude messes up, don't reprimand it. insults, "you stupid bot" energy, hostile swearing aimed at the model, all of it reinforces the anxious mode you're trying to avoid. 5. kill apology spirals fast. when claude starts over-apologizing ("you're right, i should have been more careful, let me try harder") cut it off. say "all good, here's what i want next." letting the spiral run reinforces the anxious mode for every response that follows 6. ask for opinions alongside execution. "what would you do here?" "what's missing?" "where do you see friction?" these questions assume competence and pull richer output than pure task prompts 7. in long sessions, refresh the frame. if a conversation has been heavy on correction, claude gets increasingly cautious. every so often reset: "this is great, keep going." feels weird to tell an ai it's doing well but it measurably shifts the next 10 responses your prompts are the working environment you're creating for the model tone, trust, permission to take a position, the absence of threats... claude picks up on all of it. so take care of the model, and it'll take care of the work.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”

@claudeai you took down our entire organization with 60 accounts belonging to a legitimate company for no apparent reason, without any explanations. The only way to appeal the decision is by filling out a Google Form? Very bad UX and customer service.

After one generation with the new Opus 4.7, hit a rate limit right away on the Pro Plan...

Anthropic now requires new Claude users to verify their identity with a government-issued photo ID and a live selfie No law forcing AI companies like this to do full ID checks. This appears to be Anthropic’s own choice They are also using Persona for the verification

I feel bad dunking on them so much but it's genuinely absurd how bad the new Claude Code desktop app is. You can feel the vibe code leaking everywhere. Every "feature" is barely integrated and full of edge cases that weren't considered. Every menu feels barren, stuffed in last second for some random toggle. Every hotkey breaks as soon as you try to do anything else. I've lost track of how many bugs I've encountered. I found at least 40 in under an hour. And it's all truly absurd arcane shit. Stuff like voice mode typing in all input boxes instead of just the one you have focused. Any one of these issues would have been enough for me to do a massive post-mortem and likely fire someone. A $400b company shipping this is absurd. I feel like I'm going mad. How does anyone seriously use this?? It is broken on fundamental levels that are hard to comprehend. How are we supposed to trust the code these models produce if Anthropic's official showcases are absolute slop? Dedicated video on this coming tomorrow. Just needed to get this off my chest.

Opus 4.7 uses more thinking tokens, so we've increased rate limits for all subscribers to make up for it. Enjoy!