I used Claude to write a hard email to my brother and it made me kinder, which is not what I asked for
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A user leveraged Claude to draft a difficult email to their brother concerning a long-standing financial dispute. Initially, the user provided an angry draft, requesting Claude to make it clearer and firmer. However, Claude produced a calmer version, which the user ultimately sent. This calmer approach helped resolve the issue, preventing a potential estrangement that the original angry email might have caused.
My brother and I had a money thing, the kind that festers, and I needed to send an email I had been avoiding for weeks. I sat down angry and pasted my furious first draft in, asking it to make it clearer and firmer.
It made it clearer. It did not make it firmer. It quietly stripped out the two lines that were really just there to wound, kept the actual point, and said something about how the version most likely to get a good response was the one that did not put him on the defensive in the first sentence.
I almost added the mean lines back. I did not. He replied the same day, and we sorted it, and that does not happen if I send the version I walked in with.
It was not smarter than me about the situation. It was just calmer than me at the moment I needed calm. I sent the calm version and we sorted it. The angry version would have cost me a brother.