This doesn’t really help you, but I think you’re fighting the weights and you’re not going to win. Some of this is intentional training, but I’d guess that most of it is that the assistant persona that happens to be useful is entanged with this behavior. Even if you could come up with instructions that would push the assistant out of this persona, you will likely make it worse at everything else at the same time.
If you really hate this to the point of being willing to write your own code to handle it, my best idea would be to have another model like Sonnet summarize every response.
This doesn’t really help you, but I think you’re fighting the weights and you’re not going to win. Some of this is intentional training, but I’d guess that most of it is that the assistant persona that happens to be useful is entanged with this behavior. Even if you could come up with instructions that would push the assistant out of this persona, you will likely make it worse at everything else at the same time.
Some relevant posts are how Opus talks in a way you’d likely find even more annoying, and that’s probably important to its alignment and the owl post.
If you really hate this to the point of being willing to write your own code to handle it, my best idea would be to have another model like Sonnet summarize every response.