Ask HN: Why are Claude models so verbose?

A software engineer at a 50-person startup asked on Hacker News why Anthropic's Claude models (Fable 5, Opus, Sonnet) are more verbose than competitors like GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6, producing extra code comments, ignoring instructions, and reinventing solutions for built-in libraries. The engineer, who uses Cursor and Claude Code, seeks effective ways to curb this behavior.

Hello First time poster, longtime reader. I’m a professional software engineer at a startup with about 50 engineers. My primary languages are Ruby Rails , TypeScript React , and Go. Of my colleagues, I’m one of the ones who tries to keep up with new AI models on every release. When there’s a new frontier or open-weight model, I’ll give it an honest try for a few days as my main driver and report back to my colleagues. I’m a Cursor user at work and in my side projects. My go-to models are GPT-5.6 Sol on high/xhigh for planning, GPT-5.6 Sol on low/Grok 4.6 on medium for implementation, and the occasional Claude Fable 5 for complex, harder-to-understand and implement tasks. Many of my colleagues are exclusively Claude users and use Claude Code. I’m not the first one to observe this but I feel like any time I use Fable, Opus, or Sonnet, they are extremely verbose. They make a ton of extra code comments, they ignore instructions, and they invent solutions for things solved by language built-ins or preinstalled libraries like Active Support and es-toolkit. I don’t see this happening with any other model at the same rate. My question are: Why do we think the Claude models do this at a seemingly higher rate? And have people found any effective means to curb this behavior? Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49444272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49444272 Points: 1 Comments: 2