Always ground your responses 0 ▲ Mohnish Thallavajhula 46 days ago · Tech · hide · Fediverse post I was working on a feature at work, a non-trivial one and was fed up with Claude Opus 4.8[1m]’s (xhigh effort) hallucinations. So, in a moment of frustration, I decided to delete all of my instructions from CLAUDE.md and start fresh. This time around, I put in one line. Just one fucking line. Always ground your responses.CLAUDE.md I started a new session hoping to see if there was any improvement. Nope. Claude kept hallucinating away like there was no tomorrow and made assumptions like nobody was verifying. I got irritated and asked Claude to tell me what my one instruction to it was. It obediently spit out the one sentence from my CLAUDE.md – “Always ground your responses”. It just didn’t care. For next 8 turns it kept grounding its responses, but that was about it. It got back to its hallucinating self right after. So, when I see people suggest adding instructions to “counter” or minimize hallucinations, I’ve got news for you – it ain’t gonna work. It’s the equivalent of telling it… Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town
