Claude Style Patch

A drop-in style section for CLAUDE.md that changes how Claude writes prose, targeting the worst of recent 'Claudish' in the generations since 4.6. I've been driving it for a long time now with success - this represents the final product battle-hardened against many, many Opus / Fable turns.

Dense, gnarled prose was driving me insane when using Claude, so this was built to fix it. I'm a fan of Anthropic the company, and I want them to do well. I'd be thrilled if this spec is helpful in identifying what to target and in a perfect world maybe even influencing evals designed to improve Claude's ability to communicate with humans in agentic and work-oriented contexts.

It targets several clusters of habits in the default house voice. Claude tends to announce a point before making it, hinge sentences on a colon where the left side labels what the right side does, open paragraphs with verbless fragments, and stack compressed phrases against each other until a sentence has to be decoded rather than read. Those habits get worse as a conversation gets longer and more abstract, which is when clear prose matters most.

The patch states each habit as a ban with a repair attached. Claude follows a concrete rule far better than it follows a stated preference, so every rule here names the habit, shows an example of it, and gives the rewrite. I've been quite satisfied with the results after daily driving this for quite some time, starting with Opus 4.8.

Install

Append it to your global config:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andrewroxby/claude-style-patch/main/STYLE.md >> ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

Or scope it to one project by appending to that project's CLAUDE.md. Outside Claude Code it works as-is pasted into a Claude Project's custom instructions, or into any system prompt.

Caveats

Compliance is good but not total, and it degrades especially on long threads. Fable seems to be better at flawlessly following the spec than Opus, again, especially on longer threads. The opening paragraph tells Claude to re-check the rules when the material turns dense, which helps and does not fully solve it. Telling Claude directly to 'hew closely to the response style instructions' does, however, seem to work particularly well; eg before creating long prompts to other agents or generating new prose.

The file is roughly 1,600 words. I've found the context deeply worth it in sessions across both Claude Code and Claude.ai.

License

CC0. Copy it, fork it, strip it for parts. No attribution needed.