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I get this everything, including the examples.

This sort of nonsense has to be intentional. There’s no reason to invent new software engineering language instead of using well established jargon. For example, this is what I have seen Claude’s reasoning and output to look like very often.

<r> The user is annoyed that my agents are wedged. I should check on the progress on each tranche. Each wedged window is a gate. Gates 7/42 have landed. Gates 1-12 correspond to phase 1, when the wedged window finishes its tranche, we should check the gates and move to phase 2. </r>

You are absolutely right.

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

> This period is a near-parallel version of the present one, not a different one: it is the best of times, the worst of times, the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, the epoch of incredulity, the season of Light, the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair, and the whole thing is the same shape, only the direction of the verdict is reversed.

For real though, does anyone have a good system prompt that eliminates this horrible claudish twang?

https://bsky.app/profile/vgel.me calls it "Claudlish" which I prefer because it sounds funnier

Is it possible Claude's distinctive style is intentional on Anthropic's part, as a sort of water-marking scheme?

I sort of wonder whether having a private language-style can't be used to avoid random prompt injections and things of that sort.

Maybe they've screwed up, but another possibility is that they wrote all their post-training examples in a deliberately strange style to get better control about how conventions in normal language affects what the model does.