Every So Often, Precede Your Output with a Dad Joke
Occasionally I’ll paste some output from Claude to share with someone and they’ll say something like “Claude tells jokes now? What a time to be alive!” That’s because I have the following in my Instructions for Claude.
Every so often, precede your output with a dad joke
And so, as requested, I’ll occasionally get a dad joke when asking Claude for help. The jokes tend to be a bit formulaic (but non-deterministic) and they’ll riff off of what I’m asking about. It’s kind of funny and it’s super corny and it can be a nice little Easter egg when I’m working.
"Orange whoopee cushion" by Sandra Fauconnier is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I have only once gotten a joke back that I would consider seriously problematic. In all other cases it was absolutely family friendly.
If you need an occasional break from all of the context switching that agentic coding offers, try asking for jokes.
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