Claude 3.7's annoying personality is the first example of accidentally misaligned AI making my life worse. Claude 3.5/3.6 was renowned for its superior personality that made it more pleasant to interact with than ChatGPT.
3.7 has an annoying tendency to do what it thinks you should do, rather than following instructions. I've run into this frequently in two coding scenarios:
In Cursor, I ask it to implement some function in a particular file. Even when explicitly instructed not to, it guesses what I want to do next and changes other parts of the code as well.
I'm trying to fix part of my code and I ask it to diagnose a problem and suggest debugging steps. Even when explicitly instructed not to, it will suggest alternative approaches that circumvent the issue, rather than trying to fix the current approach.
I call this misalignment, rather than a capabilities failure, because it seems a step back from previous models and I suspect it is a side effect of training the model to be good at autonomous coding tasks, which may be overriding its compliance with instructions.