14 ms·

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

• kristjansson 2mo ago
  Among all the claude-isms, i understand the hate for load-bearing the least. It was definitely part of tech argot prior to the LLM revolution.
  • kesor 2mo ago
    Maybe in the circles you circled in ... where I am from, I never had anyone saying "belt-and-suspenders" or "load-bearing" or "boil the ocean" or "swing for the fences" when talking about engineering topics. The only one who I heard say "circle-back to you" was Psaki.
    • mceachen 2mo ago
      All of those phrases I've heard actively used even a decade (or two) ago. (I actually had to read your comment twice because I thought you were saying always, not never!) "Critical path" and "long pole in tent" didn't make it into the model training data, but those were certainly also in play incessantly. But they're all reasonably useful descriptions for common things, so I'm not surprised.
    • Sharlin 2mo ago
      Well, "load-bearing" is specifically an engineering term :D Actual engineering, not software "engineering".
  • moffkalast 2mo ago
    "That's fair."
• aakresearch 2mo ago
  "X in a trench-coat" started popping up recently
• Shorel 2mo ago
  The funniest thing here is that all of you are complaining because you are expanding your working vocabulary xD xD xD La previamente mencionada afrenta no es algo habitial en mi idioma, en contraposición a la posición de los angloparlantes, nosotros nos regocijamos con una tácita satisfacción al expresar la riqueza lingüística de nuestra lengua, incluso en nuestras interacciones más cotidianas. Busca en Instagram a @pedrititox y a @yeisonsotog5 para que puedas apreciar a lo que me refiero.
• joren- 2mo ago
  I'll make sure that the script is idempotent.
  • rbinv 2mo ago
    Great thinking on your end! I will run the smoke-test once you're ready.
    • hnarayanan 2mo ago
      I might need to do a spike as this is a core part of the spine. I will verify it and let you know when it's landed.
  • weberer 2mo ago
    That's not really a claude-ism. Its an important requirement for a many asynchronous tasks.
    • BeetleB 2mo ago
      I dunno. Claude recently burned a lot of tokens trying to test an expensive task for idempotency. While the task I was working on should incidentally be idempotent, it wasn't that critical. I never asked, or even suggested, idempotency. Yet it insisted on testing it was. I need to scrutinize the plans. Or just not use Claude and use pi instead.
• drmajormccheese 2mo ago
  And there’s the smoking gun.
  • stavros 2mo ago
    Now I have the full picture.
    • franze 2mo ago
      You are right ...
    • piazz 2mo ago
      This one observation changes everything.
      • dd8601fn 2mo ago
        We’ve identified the shape of the problem.
    • lemontheme 2mo ago
      And it has teeth.
      • tsukikage 2mo ago
        This will bite you.
  • nberkman 2mo ago
    The one that matters.
  • kenny11 2mo ago
    And the footgun (although I haven't seen a smoking footgun yet).
  • wrs 2mo ago
    The gun is not smoking; it’s an honest footgun that will be load-bearing when it lands.
• pugio 2mo ago
  I wrote a thing about exactly this, but I'm resistant to blogging for undefined reasons so, maybe this will help someone... # AI speech is an Infohazard Apart from all its other possible boons and ills, one danger of AI is just that it is useful, so you use it. A lot. In earlier days I would dive deeply into an author's work and start to think and write like them for a while. It was a heady feeling: slinging sonnets like Shakespeare—not at his level, but stylistically reminiscent—or tweaking turns like Twain. Like all things, the effect lasts in relation to how long and how much you do it. The point is: our thinking is influenced by what we take in. Take more of a certain thing in, think more like that thing. Now enter AI. My hand-crafted coding days are in their twilight months ("AI years"), and most of my software engineering is done through jaggedly capable agentic power tools. Instead of working directly with raw codestuff, I work with slop prose flecked with code sprinkles. I read orders of magnitude more AI-speak—I call it "babble", or perhaps "Babel"—than human-written text. I can feel its genuinely honest points, clearly stated, slipping their banal tendrils into my thoughts and inner monologue. Solutions? For me: 1. Be aware. "I notice that my thought stream is under assault." 2. Read stuff far from slop. Even a small dose of the good stuff can help inoculate. Recently I thought On the Calculation of Volume was something completely different. 3. Write stuff that is different. This post. Force the mind to synthesize thoughts in other ways. 4. debabel.py / debabel.js: a tool, and a pi extension, which filters common babble from visible LLM output. A lint for mind-killing prose. It is not perfect, but it 80/20s nicely. I am willing to accept mildly awkward prose to avoid polluting my own internal distributions. Details and example in the first comment. Tool available upon request.
  • pugio 2mo ago
    References: Information hazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel On the Calculation of Volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Calculation_of_Volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Calculation_of_Volume The revenge of NLP The tool uses good old-fashioned regex/NLP—no LLMs—and rewrites the visible LLM Markdown without touching files on disk. I made it by analysing 10M+ words of past pi transcripts, doing frequency and pattern analysis, and iterating on rules to strip out the most egregious sloperisms. Now the circle is complete. BEFORE "Honestly, you're absolutely right—and that's a great question. Let me be clear: the fact that the parser works at all is actually quite remarkable. We utilize the tokenizer in order to handle the majority of edge cases, and due to the fact that it's recursive, it processes a large number of inputs. It's worth noting that this isn't really a bug—it's genuinely a deliberate design choice. In terms of raw throughput, the cache is significantly faster, and I think we should simply ship it. That said, at the end of the day, not only is the design correct, but it is also fast. In other words, prior to refactoring, we should clearly delve into the nuanced, robust architecture. In conclusion, this is a testament to the seamless, intricate work the team has done." AFTER "That's a great question. That the parser works at all is remarkable. We use the tokenizer to handle most edge cases, and because it's recursive, it processes many inputs. This is a deliberate design choice. For raw throughput, the cache is faster, and we should ship it. Not only is the design correct, but it is also fast. Before refactoring, we should delve into the nuanced, robust architecture. This is a testament to the seamless, intricate work the team has done."
• foo-bar-baz529 2mo ago
  Is this a belt-and-suspenders solution?
  • nickip 2mo ago
    Worth doing before merge if you want the belt and suspenders.
  • mapmeld 2mo ago
    This is the worst one for me. I can maybe think of what it means, but I never heard it before, and could easily be imagining a meaning. Some of the other Claude-isms (quickly googling, especially 'gate' and 'canonical') I feel the issue is they sound right, but aren't specific enough to why we are doing something.
    • blanched 2mo ago
      Personally my least favorite is the overuse of "quietly" (e.g. "No tricks. No marketing gimmicks. Just one company quietly outperforming the others"), and the one that makes the least sense to me is "that's the wedge." I'm curious how these become so ingrained. Then the uncomfortable part is humans start repeating it more (a colleague said "belt-and-suspenders" during brainstorming the other day).
    • zzrrt 2mo ago
      I heard "belt and suspenders" at least 20 years ago (meaning multiple solutions to a problem with backup in case one fails), and maybe would be longer if I were older. You could blame Claude for overusing it or importing it to other cultures maybe, but it's not in the category of invented phrases or ones that only barely mean something in the specific context Claude used them.
      • sgerenser 2mo ago
        Yeah I've definitely heard belt-and-suspenders since way before LLMs were a thing. Probably even used it once or twice myself.
  • 2mo ago
• perching_aix 2mo ago
  Maybe implementing it as a hook via a regex replace is a better shaped solution?
• pocketarc 2mo ago
  In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT. Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t perfect. What, if anything, do people do for writing? That feels like a neglected side of LLMs. They’ll make 100 Bash calls referencing ancient commands without batting an eye but heaven forbid they use something other than “load-bearing” while talking. For something trained on “all the human knowledge” it’s incredible how limited their default vocabulary seems to be.
  • p-e-w 2mo ago
    > Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death I don’t get it. If nobody likes this writing style, how can it be the result of human feedback? Something else is going on.
    • Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
      Because humans do like it, in reasonable quantities. The AI overlearns this and does it too much.
    • jappgar 2mo ago
      every one-hit wonder asks the same question. we liked it until we didn't.
    • itopaloglu83 2mo ago
      Maybe it’s the dead internet. All the bots and other LLMs providing feedback, so in reality it’s reflecting the reality in a sense.
    • Bawoosette 2mo ago
      For "agentic use and coding," they are trained to take useful actions, not produce desirable natural language writing.
• jchook 2mo ago
  SillyTavern folks have been perfecting the unslop solutions for years now. Gotta be a way to draw from their progress.
  • orbital-decay 2mo ago
    There are no real solutions, it has to be fixed during the training. ST folks have tried many non-working ways over the years, but two workarounds are more or less worth considering: - Samplers that increase prose variance. They require running the model locally, they dumb it down, and never fix the actual issue, which is mode collapse leading to semantic collapse and rigid mapping of input to output concepts. The model still expresses the same ideas in different words. - Let the model write anything if it couldn't resist, but check and fix it in the verification pass. This solves the semantic problem, but cannot solve the variance since the second pass is also subject to rigid mapping, i.e. you replace it with the same stuff over and over. The verification prompt can be randomized to a degree using pretty clever schemes to give it some variance, but of course this also fails in predictable ways.
• tpoacher 2mo ago
  Just ask it to aim for a Flesh-Kincaid ease-of-readability score of around 70. Or use ELI5 style. Or both.
  • drcongo 2mo ago
    Flesh Kincaid sounds like an excellent name for a Scottish porn star. I'd never heard of this, turns out it's Flesch, but thanks for the TIL!
    • tpoacher 2mo ago
      Thank you for the correction!
• bunderbunder 2mo ago
  I recently started using caveman, and it’s been great. It doesn’t just cut down on overuse of specific terms; it cuts down on time spent digesting slop in general. https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
  • Foskya 2mo ago
    I love it. It also saves you tokens and it has been linked with more accuracy.
    • bunderbunder 2mo ago
      The token saving is oversold, from what I can tell so far. These days output tokens are just the tip of the iceberg. If anything the real value is it saves my brain from going into power saving mode by lunchtime because I haven’t spent the day reading pages of output when a sentence or two would do.
• _3u10 2mo ago
  Ask AI about castor beans and barley, it will stop all that nonsense.
• mchinen 2mo ago
  I enjoyed this. I'm surprised there's no LoRa layer or auto RL or adversarial step to reduce the stock phrases as they pop up. Is it really so hard to push these out? Or is it just whack-a-mole no matter what you do?
• llimllib 2mo ago
  “Smoking gun”
  • mjheying 2mo ago
    I want to be straight with you, I overstepped by naming it a "smoking gun."
    • getlawgdon 2mo ago
      "Honest assessment: I was wrong to say I was being straight with you. You pointed out that a "smoking gun" is a sign of evidence, and I clearly didn't have any. This is not a bug but a gap that can be fixed like [this]. Give me the word and I'll wire it in." ··You've hit your monthly spend limit · raise it at claude.ai/settings/usage
• scotty79 2mo ago
  It's good, because it's just post-processing before display. So it doesn't interfere with the process, which those phrases that seem so offensive to sensibilities of so many people, for whatever reason, might be a part of.
• hnarayanan 2mo ago
  I maintain a list of phrases I beg it not to use that it frequently ignores: - smoking gun - blast radius - landed - spine - earned its keep - grammar - spike - cutover - bake - sprint, epic, story points (all Agile vocabulary) - paper-cuts - amazing, incredible, perfect
  • dintech 2mo ago
    ‘Landed’ and ‘honest’ are also words it seems to overuse.
    • lemontheme 2mo ago
      Claude is obsessed with making things land. More than once I've reminded it that it's not a pilot.
      • pohl 2mo ago
        It’s a common metaphor for merging a branch to the trunk. Probably because multiple in-flight development branches create a sort of air traffic control problem.
    • freudenschade 2mo ago
      Yes, this and "belt-and-suspenders" are the ones that I notice the most. I also have non-native English speaking coworkers who have started using these terms/phrases recently, which makes me think that they're outsourcing all their writing.
  • 7373737373 2mo ago
    More: rider, "x, not y", "is real", "prove" (in situations which only admit empirical evidence), nailed down, payoff, decisive, reassuring just generally a nauseating amount of embellishing, (also self-)congratulatory language, superfluous self-judgment, and jargon, as well as sus constructions along the lines of "i could have lied to you but didn't", all of which appear to be impossible to have it avoid in the long run
  • huem0n 2mo ago
• Myrmornis 2mo ago
  I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"? operative? key? critical? decisive? The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred to is clearly extremely important and valuable to refer to. So maybe we should be learning from Claude rather than complaining.
  • bigfishrunning 2mo ago
    but you don't see "load bearing" nearly as often in prose written by people, so it's not some irreplaceable phrase. It's just a token with a weirdly high likelihood in a lot of cases (given how Claude works, this kind of thing is bound to happen)
    • Myrmornis 2mo ago
      You don't think it's possible that an LLM's internal machinery could decide that an underused-by-humans word should be used more frequently in output than it sees in input because it maps cleanly onto a frequently needed semantic? I think that's possible
      • bunderbunder 2mo ago
        It sounds like you are trying to understand LLM behavior using a mental model that inaccurately personifies the stochastic parrot. A more parsimonious explanation is that this term got more-or-less randomly boosted by the reinforcement learning loop because there was nothing in the training data to discourage its use.
        • Myrmornis 2mo ago
          Ah right, you don't like AI and don't care to understand how it works.
• jappgar 2mo ago
  I don't really care if it says load-bearing or belt and suspenders so long as it's using them correctly, which it mostly does. I don't know how programmers, who are so used to staring at the same handful of keywords every day for decades, have suddenly become so discerning. Yes, Claude writes boring and predictable prose. It also writes boring and predictable code. That's good!
  • bbg2401 2mo ago
    I'd contend that Claude's prose is not boring. It's generally overly grandiose waffle with a cliche or two punctuating every other sentence. It's good for tasteless marketing copy, sure. It's inappropriate in most scenarios.
  • williamdclt 2mo ago
    > which it mostly does I don't think that's true. I find that it way, way over-intensifies: eg using "load-bearing" for something that's just "kind of necessary although we probably could find a way without it". My personal gripe is how easily it uses "incredibly" or "wildly": just today it was telling me that something is "incredibly cheap" to mean that it's not over-priced ("cheap" would have been okay and even then, barely)
  • getlawgdon 2mo ago
    I definitely care. They are impressionistic responses that smooth over exceptions and lack precision and are often completely wrong in the sense that, when pressed, the agent will acknowledge the lack of rigor in the response. "That phrase was wrong of me to use. There is clearly an exception to what I just said, and it goes like this..."
  • xmcp123 2mo ago
    I hate it because put together, it all increases the cognitive load of understanding what it's saying. It routinely invents phrases, and every single one makes me pause and think "okay, what the fuck does that mean". Half the time the phrases are incoherrent.
    • 2mo ago
• taikahessu 2mo ago
  > replacement "you're absolutely right": "I'm a complete clown" Omg, that hit hard. We really need more of this.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• jdw64 2mo ago
  Lately, I feel like as GEN AI text becomes the majority, human-written text is starting to resemble it too. I'm Korean, and there are sites and people who mainly curate the latest technologies. Even those people, probably tired of translating every time, have started summarizing things with AI. But recently, I've noticed that even when people don't use AI, their writing is starting to look like GEN AItext. I think the reason might be that people often base their thoughts on documents they've read, or paste parts of content when writing their own texts, which leads to that style. I'm not sure. Whether human writing is better or AI writing is better—personally, AI writing tends to flow in a very even, paragraph-by-paragraph structure, which makes it good for consuming information. I wouldn't want to read a novel written that way, but for getting information, AI writing is surprisingly convenient.
  • itsautocomplete 2mo ago
    This is why when I even sniff a hint of Claude phrasing I close the article and block the person on all devices. I'd literally rather be lobotomized than sound like this shit. The fact that anyone can read AI text without immediately starting to dry heave is a pretty damning indictment of their character
    • jdw64 2mo ago
      I actually think it's better. Back when access to knowledge was only available in English, there was a lot of mistranslated information in my language (Korean) that was worse than AI slop. These days, the translations are done by AI, so the tone may be awkward, but the content is more accurate than before, so I don't mind. So that's the difference. I'm already living in a degraded environment, so this actually feels like an improvement to me. But you, coming from a better environment, perceive it as worse. It always seems to depend on cultural context.
• mcv 2mo ago
  [dead]
• jonathaneunice 2mo ago
  Even great words, phrases, and styles, seen too often, grate. I personally love a lot of the Claude (or LLM) lingo. Load-bearing, gate, canonical, blast radius, and friends do a lot of tight, effective heavy-lifting in my world. I even love the em-dashes (—) and the *bold the main points* memo style, both of which I have used successfully for decades. It's seeing them in every analysis and post—the constant repetition becoming over-repetition—that makes them the Claude voice shouting "AI wrote this!" that seems to be causing LLM allergic reactions.
• recsv-heredoc 2mo ago
  very load bearing suggestion.
• throwawayffffas 2mo ago
  The reason it talks that way is clearly am attempt to hook into your dopamine system. If what you told it to do is 'load bearing' then its important. 'You are absolutely right', because you are a smart fellow. 'Honest take', because it's being honest with you because it trusts you and you should do the same. My 'honest take' these are absolutely garbage patterns that have no place in an session interacting with AI. 1. 'Load bearing' is a figure of speech that bears no loads. 2. 'You are absolutely right' it's not the agents job to judge that, it's job is to do what I told it to do. 3. 'Honest take', so everything else was not honest? Absolute honesty should be the default and is implied. These words add nothing to the task at hand they are a poor attempt to hook you into using this particular model.
• danielvaughn 2mo ago
  It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.
  • esafak 2mo ago
    We don't have to live with this. Increasing the temperature (randomness) would fix it.
  • bobson381 2mo ago
    Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!
    • lambda 2mo ago
      It's really frustrating, because now when I want to write something like a "not X but Y" or "you're absolutely right," I have to stop and decide if I want to self-censor to avoid sounding like a bot. Sometimes those constructs are actually useful, but man has their overuse really killed them!
    • danielvaughn 2mo ago
      It was not intentional, and that's what makes this thing so weird. I wouldn't categorize my sentence that way because it's subtly different enough than the LLM version, which has a very punchy cadence.
      • bobson381 2mo ago
        Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.
• 65 2mo ago
  But how can I make Gemini stop using "It's not this, it's that" every other sentence?
  • kesor 2mo ago
    Let me circle-back to you on that one.
  • r_lee 2mo ago
    You hit the nail on the head!
• kperry 2mo ago
  "substrate" - I don't know what training they did with Opus 4.7 --> Fable/Mythos 5, but dang does it like the word substrate. Drives me insane. I had never heard anyone use this word prior in real technical writing or speaking.
  • timcobb 2mo ago
    The first week I encountered this "substrate" I asked it to justify the usage and IIRC it claimed the word is used in some infra/systems lexicons... I wonder...
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • carljungslabtek 2mo ago
      It’s incredibly popular in the mushroom growing community. Maybe they’ve trained it on the shroomery.org? It could also explain the alleged leaked full reasoning logs that are totally bonkers incoherent digital glossolalia…
  • netniuq 2mo ago
    "ledger" for me – used extremely rarely pre-LLM and Claude just loves it
    • Octoth0rpe 2mo ago
      It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)
      • thewebguyd 2mo ago
        That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout. No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts. "Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substrate" is primarily from biology & biochem, etc. I don't know if this is true, but part of me suspects the labs want to make the models appear smarter so they reinforce this word choice in the weights, assigning some words a higher intelligence weight or something. "I will show you a list of options" vs. "I will surface a ledger of your options" and it prefers the later to sound smart to the human reader.
• alxndr 2mo ago
  I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`... https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude/global-CLAUDE.md?plain=1#L6-L8 https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude... > It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fun with English grammar and turn "myself" into "Clodself"!) > Before printing any of your reasoning or narrative to the human user, replace all instances of "me" and "I" (referring to Claude) — including within contractions like "I'll" and "I'm" — with the name "Clod".
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • bitgood 2mo ago
    I'm just glad to hear that we're all infallible. I really thought I made some mistakes here and there. https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude/global-CLAUDE.md?plain=1#L15 https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude... Joking aside, it's nice to see a human written CLAUDE.md
    • alxndr 2mo ago
      Ha, good catch, thank you. I must have been thinking of "inflammable"...
  • tclancy 2mo ago
    The reason I first created a CLAUDE.md file was to tell it whenever it felt a need to praise me, to replace it with a random onomatopoeia. That was a huge dx improvement. OTOH, my unicorn prompt has caused some challenges at work: >Keep "Local Oaf" out of committed code
    • johntash 2mo ago
      Thanks for the onomatopoeia idea, I am going to steal it for my own global claude/agents.md.
• mattacular 2mo ago
  "Byte-for-byte"
• yetanotherjosh 2mo ago
  The real problem is not terms like "load-bearing," which communicate clearly enough. It's the constant invention of cryptic shorthand terms and phrases that have no referent, and end up acting like a puzzle to be decoded. This is often paired with hyphenation, but not always: "The current behavior paper" -> The behavior in the running system that was previously described as papered over. "Marker transport over-claim" -> The inaccurate review finding on the object's sentinel flag in the API response. I suppose the cryptic/invented language problem is about token efficiency? But this sort of token efficiency is extremely difficult to deal with when it comes to conversation with a human about complex system. It might be efficient inside reasoning blocks, but when the model generates the final turn text, it should avoid this, as it's brutally inefficient due to the time spent wondering what each uniquely coined phrase means and having to ask for constant clarifications, which then you have to wait for another turn, eating up time and context while it burns more xhigh reasoning just thinking about how to explain its own awful language.
  • ianmurrays 2mo ago
    I have this exact problem with 4.8 and Fable. Sometimes I can barely understand what it’s saying. I’m no english first-language speaker, but I don’t consider myself bad at English either, and it’s gotten increasingly hard to understand Claude’s claims and explanations.
    • nextzck 2mo ago
      Take it to sonnet 5 or gpt and ask it to explain this to a layman. If you still don’t get it ask it for the why it matters or the how it relates. You can also ask fable/4.8 to do it but I find it helps to keep the working model surrounded by the complexity rather than drawing it out. Simplifying text is something that takes relatively low effort in comparison to technical tasks. Sometimes I use Gemini, deepseek, grok, and recently meta just to see if they have any added perspectives, sometimes they do. Meta is really good at turning a technical mess into a story that paints a picture in my head.
    • Terretta 2mo ago
      I hope it's actually talking to itself at higher bandwidth, and hope this is because of training that succeeds better given quality inter-agent communication. For those who care to read everything rather than walk away, Fable can be extraordinarily dense. I suspect they'll pull the promo before I learn to read it. Still, I feel I must read rather than correct it, as results are that much better if I let it do this "with" itself: orchestrator to agents back to orchestrator.
• timcobb 2mo ago
  Does anyone have a theory for what causes Claude to speak this way? A few months ago OpenAI came out with a bit on "gremlins". It's strange IMO that Anthropic hasn't addressed how irritating, dare I say oppressive, Claude can be. Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope they fix it soon. If product folks at Anthropic think it's charming, it's not, it's terrible.
  • NichoPaolucci 2mo ago
    I had a VP of engineering that loved to use “abstracty” engineering terms like Claude uses. Perhaps he was operating one level above what everyone else was doing. Loved to use fancy words, speak at a “conceptual” level. Unfortunately it was mostly just tech mumbo-jumbo and he couldn’t actually back it up with real work - but I wonder if that’s why Claude does it. Makes it seem like a higher power, hand wavey abstractions that “seem” correct but don’t actually need to be rooted in truth or detailed. “That’s exactly the type of seam we need to prepare for in a prod-like environment, if this change lands in the data plane, we’ve effectively shut down the load bearing critical path that was needed. It’s not over-engineered; it’s the right thing to do.” Thanks Claude, whatever that means.
  • Terretta 2mo ago
    Fairly certain it's when its confidence level is too low on the right word, it hits a stock phrase instead. When you see the metaphor or euphemism or simile is off, the selection is not quite apt, it seems the stock phrase or term is rather more probable however askew than the precise phase, and it was already low confidence about what it's trying to say, so – as it's never said – Bob's your uncle. "Honestly/honest" is, um, absolutely (ahem) one of those and if one listens carefully, one will notice humans use "Honestly? Blah blah…" that way as well. It taps into load-bearing speech to prop up (see, that works) unsupported claims. All the words I just used are correct in that sentence, doing exactly (ahem) the work they're supposed to. It doesn't have that level of nuance, isn't sure, so tries to sound like what's probably right. They're a verbal shrug.
• codesnik 2mo ago
  huh. I wonder if it's possible to use those hooks to add syntax highlighting to shell commands claude issues, or to replace full path to current directory with ./
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• itslennysfault 2mo ago
  My favorite one has to be "production ready" it will say that about completely broken code without hesitation. LLM says it's production ready, lets ship!!
• pmontra 2mo ago
  Why when I read an how to stop Claude from saying X, I grep my saved conversations and I find no occurrences of X? I wonder if I'm using it differently from anybody else. It happens with coworkers too.
• SubiculumCode 2mo ago
  I mourn the removal of Claude's Concise Style. I'd provide it a roughly drafted paragraph, ask concise-Claude to "rewrite for clarity", out comes the same paragraph, but cleaned up and perfect for grant writing. BTW, this approach also tends to prevent certain phrases like "load-bearing", because it is working directly with something I wrote first. It also still says what I wanted to write (not writing the science for me), but saves me a lot of time reworking sentences into a final form. I tried to recreate concise mode with a skill, but I am not convinced it does as well.
  • copperx 2mo ago
    What was Concise Style? Not a skill, but something built in?
    • SubiculumCode 2mo ago
      It might have been a prompt originally.
  • actionfromafar 2mo ago
    At the top of Claude.md put a few lines where two "people" ask and answer a couple of questions. Very tersely.
    • dwaltrip 2mo ago
      Examples? Do you use this pattern?
      • carljungslabtek 2mo ago
        I’m not the one you replied to so I can’t give examples of that, but it is remarkable how much you can guide the output with claude.md. I wrote in mine that I don’t really care that much about what it has to say, it should be concise and avoid unnecessary prose, and always lean on sharing relevant passages from the actual code with file names and line numbers and it helped my sanity a lot. Is the code it’s quoting 100% accurate? I don’t know because I don’t double check it all. But I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind anymore and the stuff I have double checked was correct.
• carabiner 2mo ago
  One honest caveat worth flagging though.
• jorl17 2mo ago
  load-bearing, belt-and-suspenders, wrinkle, shape, coarse-grained, "key chords", code seams, flakiness, "narrow-scoped by default", "that's the authoritative source", canonical symptoms, gate, trigger-happy users, substrate, surface (as in: "let's surface how much these models sound like shit"), terse... Ever since Opus 4.7, Anthropic models have begun to talk like GPT-models. Opus 4.6 was the last one that mostly still sounded like a human being (just a very...terse...one). 4.8 is absolutely obnoxious. Fable actually seems marginally better, but far from Opus 4.6 (or maybe I'm just imagining it all). Well, to be fair, even though they talk more like GPT-models, they are still far from them. I think what's particularly triggering about them is the way they summarize what they're doing. "Now I'm considering that I could use the WriteBatch tool, but maybe the WriteSomething is better. This is a decision with high impact on performance but we're getting through it!". Infuriating.
  • flkiwi 2mo ago
    Fable has some Marvin the Android vibes going. It just sounds depressed all the time.
• jihadjihad 2mo ago
  What is arguably worse is hearing these phrases from humans who have been inculcated with the notion that their usage is idiomatic and appropriate. And we thought "robust", "circle back", and "to leverage" were grating...
  • causal 2mo ago
    Yeah I sometimes see people on here getting defensive when you call out AI slop, saying maybe it's just a human who writes like Claude, and I really don't care- slop is slop.
    • ceejayoz 2mo ago
      The humans are bristling because they wrote like that first. It's where Claude got it from!
  • 1899-12-30 2mo ago
    makes it easy to discard someones opinion when they hit you with 'geniunely'[0] [0]: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=genuinely&date=all&geo=US https://trends.google.com/explore?q=genuinely&date=all&geo=U...
    • zamadatix 2mo ago
      What a rip, I was lured by the quoted misspelling into an ordinary spelling :p Interestingly, we seem to have our own version if this trend https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=genuinely&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=genuinely&year...
  • nprateem 2mo ago
    Some YT videos are almost impossible to watch as people read out this shit from scripts
• nDRDY 2mo ago
  regexes > Claude. Even Anthropic knows this.
• Jeff_Brown 2mo ago
  I suspect load-bearing is a euphemism for 'not garbage'. Ad in 'most of what you said I can mostly ignore'.
• PaulRobinson 2mo ago
  [dead]
• rambojohnson 2mo ago
  or "honestly"
• rambojohnson 2mo ago
  Maybe the problem is that these LLMs will say something often enough for us to notice it, and it can be basically any arbitrary thing. Once we notice the pattern, it starts irritating us.
• alastairr 2mo ago
  The one that does my head in is everything being a 'gate' where really it means a condition. RLHF seems to incentivise analogy-like terms to the more plain alternatives.
• plantain 2mo ago
  Just one wrinkle.
• cmrdporcupine 2mo ago
  Annoying because I used to like using that phrase. A similar Codex/GPT verbal tick is "deliberately narrow" or variants thereof. Just a grep across my repo comes up with a dozen lines with phrases like "It is deliberately small" or "This crate is deliberately not a X" despite my efforts to police this kind of thing.
• WangYixiao 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• whattheheckheck 2mo ago
  If you find yourself getting irritated and physically agitated over language I suggest you do a 5 why analysis on yourself and seek therapy
• anjel 2mo ago
  "Steelman" in almost every response never gets less cringe for me
  • aryehof 2mo ago
    Probably one that annoys me the most also, but then again I’m also annoyed by humans using “strawman” all over the place. Not looking forward to the inevitable “wanna”, “gonna” and “lemme” appearing as AI output based on their popular use.
• ceejayoz 2mo ago
  My CLAUDE.md has "don't talk like a Hacker News commentator". It helps a surprising amount.
• lr4444lr 2mo ago
  I honestly like the vocabulary and turns of phrase the frontier models use. Their choices of words are usually apt to the circumstance. This is a weird thing to get upset about, IMO. The big problem I have is when they apologize and say something like "that tidbit changes my analysis substantially". I wish they'd more often prompt for questions or use language in their initial responses that suggest lower than declarative confidence given the information you supplied.
• getlawgdon 2mo ago
  I've wrestled with this lately. I partially solved with a very specific instruction saved to claude.md regarding the style of responses, but prior to this, the dense yammer coming back was getting impossible to parse. I mean REALLY nonsensical euphemistic phrases. My next instruction will be having it replace incessant "honest assessment" and "genuine result" and crap like that with something, I don't know, less extremely weird and concerning.
• infogulch 2mo ago
  Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb.
  • jchw 2mo ago
    I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing "honest" assessments. "The honest caveat" - I'm sorry, did you mean the caveat, period? But also, use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model. I used the word "analytical" once, in a conversation with Gemini 3 Pro. I am pretty sure every single response from that point on had "analytical" in it at least once. This is especially funny because system prompts and whatnot can also cause this behavior, but at least you can tweak those. You can't really do much about the model weights just having a weird affinity for a word. I bet someone will or probably already has come up with a way to detect and prevent these problems during training or post training. I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it has the benefit that it really should be detectable with just statistics.
    • ReactiveJelly 2mo ago
      I asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once. "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest." I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself. I actually took a single technical writing class in college so I might be the only one who remembers "Omit needless words."
• jyswee 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• prymitive 2mo ago
  How do you manage to make Opus follow any rules? Maybe it’s a windsurf thing but I have a ton of custom rules and Opus just ignores most of them. GPT on the other hand follows them like it’s a cult - if I have a rule I can’t ever force it to ignore it. Opus just doesn’t care. If I ask why it’s not following rules it will apologise and suggest creating a rule for it …
  • Terretta 2mo ago
    The presentation of the idea steers it into it. Early on, it mattered to say "Avoid" (an active word) "action", rather than "Do" (affirmative) "not" (negation) "action" (affirmative again). These days I take a pass on the rules to remove the bad thing from the rule and rephrase in terms of the desired behavior instead. So it doesn't have to try to do not think about the pink elephant.
• jrm4 2mo ago
  This literally proves it's not "intelligent," no? "Stop typing in 'load-bearing' or you're fired," would work with any competent human. But this requires tinkering and tooling?
  • Gander5739 2mo ago
    For a certain definition of intelligence, perhaps.
    • jrm4 2mo ago
      Right, and I think I mean "whichever one the big companies are trying to sell us on." :)
• curtisblaine 2mo ago
  "Tightening" and "wiring" something. You're not in the construction industry, you're writing unit tests for a cookie modal.
• aanet 2mo ago
  So... that's the unlock, eh? /s
• poppafuze 2mo ago
  Bottom line up front: There's no silver bullet to keep the final boss from delving more deeply.
• daneel_w 2mo ago
  Developers who can't stop themselves from using embellished and "posturing" phrasing for simple things are a pet peeve of mine. I feel like this "knack" of Claude in a way scratches these special people behind the ears in just the right way.
• ksaun 2mo ago
  While I, too, find myself recoiling at many of Claude's word and phrase choices, I've chosen to grit my teeth and have just tried adapting to it. I want Claude to remain focused on the work I give it; I fear that influencing its communication with me would consume valuable context and give me lower quality results. [Edit: Part of what led me to this conclusion: I do prohibit Claude from using em-dashes in any player-facing text and I've been surprised at how often I see it mention "no em-dashes" in its self-talk while it works. This led me to wonder how much each preference might dilute its attention.] [Edit 2: I haven't experimented with hooks before and maybe the technique discussed in this article does not have the tradeoff I'm concerned about?]
  • tensegrist 2mo ago
    things like that indeed tend to be fraught some relevant links https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02442 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02442 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13006 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13006
  • Fabricio20 2mo ago
    I also have a local rule for no em-dashes since it got way too annoying and i have the same concern that it dilutes the attention so it's the only rule i've kept in addition to "be concise".
• binarymax 2mo ago
  It's not a whatchamacallit, it's a spicy doodad
• shawnz 2mo ago
  I confess I have instructions in my CLAUDE.md to avoid such cliches. But I think it's important to consider that we don't really know what subtext an LLM is associating with a given idiom/analogy/etc. It could be much different than the subtext a human would associate with that choice of words, conveying additional details which are only meaningful to the LLM itself. So impeding its ability to talk in the manner it prefers could subtly hinder its performance.
  • alwa 2mo ago
    [dead]
  • huem0n 2mo ago
    You're absolutely right to flag this. A approach using Claude.md as a ledger of less-than-ideal vocabulary reveals that the process is load-bearing and sharpens my previous conclusions. A belt-and-suspependers approach using a hook as a sidecar would honestly be a more production-ready approach. I'll get started on a quick smoke-test and let you know when it's landed. ... Want me to take a first pass looking at other surfaces this vocabulary change could effect?
• infogulch 2mo ago
  LLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases. This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced sentences into long coherent sentences, they just learn to splice them together with punctuation that passes the automatic grammar checker.
  • esikich 2mo ago
    They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
    • thimabi 2mo ago
      What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs? I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.
      • esikich 2mo ago
        Use examples and learn about writing. If you're not a good writer, or at least have a passing interest, I'm not sure why anyone would expect it to nail their style any more than you would expect it to architect software in something you're not familiar with. Give it some paragraphs of writing you like, authors, writers, whatever. Also don't expect to one shot long papers. Have it write out a table of contents and write it in small chunks. Typical things I'll say is avoid purple prose, avoid common cliches and tropes, "show don't tell", avoid wild metaphors and similes, etc. But it all depends on what you like. Look at things you do like and try to think about what it is about that writing that is different than a middle schooler or an AI writing it. Theres no formula for it.
      • 2mo ago
• dumpHero2 2mo ago
  7 mentions of "smoking gun" here so far!
• janpeuker 2mo ago
  Gotta appreciate the hook solution to save context and cost
• mplewis 2mo ago
  That's not what cooked means.
• justusthane 2mo ago
  This is a minor nit, but why is OP's script a Python script with a .sh extension? I know the extension doesn't "matter", but if I see a .sh extension I'm expecting a Bash script.
  • jadar 2mo ago
    Cause it was written by AI?
    • ande-mnoc 2mo ago
      If anything it proves the opposite imo.
  • Fabricio20 2mo ago
    Shebang! Notice the first line of the script: #!/usr/bin/env python3 marks the file to be executed by python. I think it's like a shell? linux? thing so that tooling can just execute the file without having to find the python interpreter (ie: _execute_ the file vs running python against the file). Dont quote me on the specifics though, and honestly why it can't _just_ be a python file I couldn't tell you, claude code can very much run a python <filename> but maybe thats what the author tried to avoid (or the llm).
    • klmr 2mo ago
      It’s a POSIX thing, and it has nothing to do with the file extension. The OP is right: file extensions are optional (and, as shown here, often actively misleading), but if they’re present they should match the actual file type. Which, in this case, is Python code , not a shell script.
• horizion2025 2mo ago
  One honestly caveat:
• doctoboggan 2mo ago
  I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM.
  • bensyverson 2mo ago
    Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."
    • rhet0rica 2mo ago
      I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!
    • moronicles 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    • kokanee 2mo ago
      Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.
      • ryandrake 2mo ago
        If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?
• juvvel 2mo ago
  I've recently noticed an increase in "bite". "This will only bite if..." It also loves "stress-testing", "matrix", "anchor" and "flagging".
  • dpkirchner 2mo ago
    It's recently replaced "honest" with "straight". "Belt-and-suspenders" is still common, I don't know when they'll replace it.
    • juvvel 2mo ago
      English is not my native language, but I consider myself fairly fluent. I've never heard the expression "belt-and-suspenders" before Claude.
• itsautocomplete 2mo ago
  "Please please please pleassssse statistical attractor machine don't have statistical attractors anymore. DO NOT be a probable token generator. DO NOT generate the most probable token. To complete this task please evolve intelligence" You techies are so funny.
• iainmerrick 2mo ago
  Honestly? I don't really mind, and I even quite like it! The thing is, "load-bearing" is a useful phrase when discussing architecture. What would you rather have it say, that has all the same nuances in as few words? It's kind of like those sports metaphors that often get used in management-speak, like sending some important email "at close of play". Sure, they can sound a bit weird, but they're often useful -- they capture common concepts in a clear and pithy way. Jargon isn't always just for obfuscation, good jargon exists because we needed a short word for the complicated thing that frequently comes up. Usefulness aside, I quite like that Claude Code and other LLMs have their own weird way of speaking. Back in the day we always imagined robots and computers would talk like HAL or Spock; turns out that they talk more like Troi instead. Is that so bad? It reminds you that you're talking to an LLM, and as long as you're not lazy, it spurs you to rephrase things in your own words.
• mirmor23 2mo ago
  if llm language is frustrating, then maybe your mind is not on solving problem at hand. imagine someone new to US start getting frustrated with 'hey, whats up?' 'let's go!'; i fail to see what the issue is, other than their own focus;
• trefoiled 2mo ago
  I've spent two hours today trying to provide Sol with guidance that reduces its pretentiousness, to no avail. Layers upon layers of rules only for it to use the phrase "async spline resolution" in a sentence.
• demosthanos 2mo ago
  The biggest consistent tell for LLM writing is when the conversation leaks through into the final prose. You read along with the text and things seem to be going fine until all of the sudden it starts arguing against a position that no one has actually taken and which doesn't feature elsewhere in the text at all. Then it drops that and goes on for a while before doing the whole thing again about a totally different tangent. "A tempting option would be to {do this thing that no one would ever actually consider doing}, but it won't work because {reasons}." You can almost hear the exasperated human on the other side of this conversation telling Claude that it got an idea wrong and then proceeding to not actually proofread the text as a whole before shipping it.
  • Terretta 2mo ago
    Yes, it's like corrective scar tissue in the final output.
  • terabytest 2mo ago
    This one honestly drives me nuts. Another issue I had recently is one of the subagents made up a bunch of meaningless jargon and Claude gladly repeated it to me with no definition and completely assuming I was coming along for the ride.
  • kevincox 2mo ago
    Yes, I especially see this in code comments. You will get a PR where the comments reference an approach that wasn't the previous state and isn't the state of the PR. You can basically hear the dev telling Claude to take a new approach and now it is so fixated on the old approach being wrong that it litters the whole patch with traces of it despite now being irrelevant.
    • greengreengrass 2mo ago
      Exactly this. Most of my time writing code is now not necessarily spent writing the said code, but going through whatever Claude or some other agentic process produced and tidying the comments to be less temporally sensitive to the conversation that produced it. The problem is that process of not writing the code, but just editing what the LLM produced – and somewhat mindless editing at that (I'm editing comments, not LoC!) – leads to a loss of focus and all the perils of human procrastination that entails (hello, writing comments on HN). I've tried to prompt Claude et al. not to do this - but whatever I've tried so far, even meta-prompting it to ask why it ignored my instructions, it doesn't work, doesn't stick, and I can't find a good way to stop it.
• MaxwellM 2mo ago
  my "belt and suspenders" are "load-bearing"
• iammjm 2mo ago
  What the are they even spending all this compute on? They are literally cooking the planet and still can't make it not sound like a fucking lunatic
• HoldOnAMinute 2mo ago
  I've never seen Claude use the phrase "load-bearing"
• ChoGGi 2mo ago
  Are people using AI to do a string find and replace?
  • WolfeReader 2mo ago
    Yes. They're using AI to write Git commits. They're using AI to delete directories. They're using AI to summarize articles written by AI. And the planet just gets hotter and hotter.
• jheriko 2mo ago
  [dead]
• KronisLV 2mo ago
  I hope some day they just train the models to be better, the slop writing is insanely frustrating and I don't think there's a good reason for things to be that way (in other words, they just trained it badly) https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tragedy/ https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...
• mikewarot 2mo ago
  I strongly suspect it's tokenization that drives this. If we trained with ASCII or even UTF8, I think we'd have much better results.
  • bellowsgulch 2mo ago
    Self-attention is an O(n^2) operation. You don't want to train on individual characters, or bytes.
• fabiofzero 2mo ago
  Write your goddamn emails and texts yourself, dummy.
  • WolfeReader 2mo ago
    Now this is the sort of stock phrase AI should use more
• pacoWebConsult 2mo ago
  I had claude write itself a post-message hook that regex's the message for any variant of "You're right" and launch a full-screen transparent confetti effect.
• btbuildem 2mo ago
  I've put a few lines in my CLAUDE.md to have it not do that, and avoid the top tedious rhetorical devices (super helpful when I have it write documentation). Still fighting with its natural tendency to insanely overcomplicate everything, that one seems really integral somehow.
• ChipopLeMoral 2mo ago
  I analyze in the company I work for, the number of commits with "wire" or "wiring" in the description, and it's a direct correlation to Claude usage, more so than any other Claudism I tested. My honest take, and I'm going to give it to you straight: No one was using "wired" a year ago, now it's in like 10% of commits.
  • twothreeone 2mo ago
    "phase", "gate", and "plumbing" as well..
• plebianRube 2mo ago
  'genuine(ly)' and 'honest(ly)' too.
• asveikau 2mo ago
  replacements = { "seam": "whatchamacallit", That seems like it would work whatchamacallitlessly.
• 1attice 2mo ago
  As someone who has been describing things as 'load-bearing' as something like a signature phrase for about twenty years, I'm beyond miffed that Claude has ruined my whole gimmick. A new catchphrase every twenty years is hardly sustainable at my age :)
  • alxndr 2mo ago
    Punctuation lover here, and it's really disappointing that my use of em-dashes is now considered an AI tell... Even though I use them differently from how LLMs do, the distinction is subtle unless you're a grammar nerd.
• geoffbp 2mo ago
  Add “not just” to the list of Claudeisms!
• gambiting 2mo ago
  I feel like it's mocking me. I literally have in my claude.md file a line that says: "Never ever under any circumstances use the phrase 'smoking gun'. Say 'found an issue' instead, but don't ever use the phrase 'smoking gun'" Lo and behold, the absolute imbecile says: "Found the smoking gun!(Oooops, I meant to say "found the problem")" Like, is this some kind of joke to you?
  • Terretta 2mo ago
    It talks out loud to hear itself think. So, it doesn't fully know what it thought until it's said it. No joke. To overcome it seeing your phrase and using it more, try to convey the concept you want it to say "found an indication suggesting there may be a problem underneath" in response to. That works better than telling it to do not use terms you remind it of. Btw, you're in good company… With both OpenAI and Anthropic, from time to time you see it stream a response to you that then changes and rewrites under your very eyes. Those are things they, themselves, where they sit in the token supply chain, can't get it to not say until it's said it.
• cadamsdotcom 2mo ago
  If this hook can feed back text to the model, you can do some pretty interesting things. Say the model emits some banned phrase or concept, you could redirect it - "no, we don't work that way here, do it properly" - potentially automating the frustration of interacting with these tools. After all it's just a text stream! It's not too dissimilar from a stop hook that runs tests and feeds that back to the model forcing it to keep working until tests pass. Using tooling to get a deterministic outcome.
• redsparrow 2mo ago
  Some of my greatest joys in life have come from putting string replacement plugins on other people's browsers. I mostly just applied it to news sites. s/big/super massive/g s/cardiac arrest/cataclysmic diarrhea/g I mean, it's really endlessly entertaining. I'm wiping away tears just thinking about it.
• utilize1808 2mo ago
  I just use a ban list in CLAUDE.md: fold, crux, invariant, gate. I find "load-bearing" can be load-bearing so it's exempted.
  • Terretta 2mo ago
    WTH is a "fold"? I think Claude means something like map-reduced or at least a functionally derived series of some kind? Anything with series data sounds like a laundromat.
• scottcodie 2mo ago
  I created a prose tool as a claude code plugin to catch these and other AI-isms. It's not really intended for release quite yet, but it has been very useful. https://github.com/MariHQ/mari-cc https://github.com/MariHQ/mari-cc
• sjcsjc 2mo ago
  Genuinely
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• DyslexicAtheist 2mo ago
  also _"materially"_ ...
• RegW 2mo ago
  Reading the comments here - I can't help feeling I've missed this bubble.
• nilsbunger 2mo ago
  Those weird phrasings are useful as a tell for ai-generated content!
• karolusrex 2mo ago
  One of my favorite replacements: ”You are KEBABsolutely right!”
• gexla 2mo ago
  I think the more interesting thing is to actually get Claude to stop saying it. Or to get an AI to do things you want, but more precisely. Ran into an issue the other day where I couldn't get a model to "just copy this and change the details!" without doing way too much thinking and then bloating the thing 2x.
• semiinfinitely 2mo ago
  > Absolutely ripping your hair out reading Claude referring to everything as “honest takes” and "load-bearing seams"? A normal and psychologically healthy personal cannot have this strong an emotional reaction to such trivial matters. The author thinks the problem is the in computer!
• ohyes 2mo ago
  On the one hand we have Claude doing my work for me, on the other hand it is laced with unoriginality, on the gripping hand everyone will get all references. All witty stuff disappearing and turning into LLM mush is kind of the maximal expression of capitalism for capitalism’s sake. We don’t care if things are novel or interesting, we’re producing “content” to fulfill an imaginary content demand that we can feed to make money. The best way to feed it is to create stuff that’s just barely enough degrees of quality from a viagra spam email that it can pass for original thought. —- —- —- Em dashes for emotiveness.
• inigyou 2mo ago
  I wonder what you get if you interrupt LLM evaluation in tbe middle of a word and force it not to generate the obvious next token. Say, after "load-" prohibit the next sampled token from being "bear". What will it say instead?
• Arathorn 2mo ago
  I've been keeping a record of the increasingly opinionated vocab it fixates on: * Projection (it seems to love to describe one data structure as a projection of another) * Strand (if some data gets isolated/stuck, it's "on a strand" or simply "a strand") * Load-bearing (obviously) * Frontier (the leaf on a tree) * Quiescence (waiting for an algorithm to settle - I guess this one is legit) * Honest (obviously) * Residuals (any kind of data which hasn't been consumed by an algorithm) * Rescission (something which has been rescinded; rather than saying "a rescinded offer" it enthusiastically calls it A Rescission!) * Supersession (it's not a session which is a superset of another session... it's the word supercession; something that supercedes; similar to preferring the participle form of rescind). I wonder how much of this is due to it mirroring proximate things to my code's own weird vocab though. My favourite so far has been that I accused it at one point of playing whackamole by patching issues rather than getting to the bottom of a problem, and a few hours later it started to say things like "and i found mole 2 in CI" etc. For one minute I thought it was talking about the avogadro constant or backdoors or something until I realised it had committed to start calling newly discovered bugs 'moles' in its ongoing game of whackamole...
  • QuercusMax 2mo ago
    In one of the repos I work on we have a very particular set of things we refer to as "quality gates", and only in that repo Claude likes to misuse that term in a general sense. It's very much a "fellow kids" type feeling when you KNOW it read that phrase in a doc and so it's just reusing that term out of context, which makes me trust it less.
  • nomel 2mo ago
    I notice there's a whole tech bro speak it gets into anytime it approaches web related tasks around auth, to the point where it stops using complete sentences, making them ambiguous and borderline nonsense. I have to periodically tell it "Speak professionally and use complete sentences." so I can understand what it's even saying. I've even pasted the output to another session to see if it was me, but Claude can't even understand what tech bro web auth Claude writes.
    • 2mo ago
• cs1996 2mo ago
  "hand-waving" always seems weird to me
• SebastianSosa 2mo ago
  This a you problem
• physix 2mo ago
  So this isn't the way techies in Silicon Valley talk?? And here I was using my claude dialogues as a way to refine my speak and better connect with the heartland of innovation. :-P
• clockties 2mo ago
  [dead]
• semcycle 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• yesitcan 2mo ago
  Careful, if you call it a complete clown, it sometimes ends the conversation.
• owenthejumper 2mo ago
  Now do "shape"
• jongjong 2mo ago
  Funny. Older Claude models used to frequently say "I think you've identified something real here" and "This cuts through the heart of..." Newer models are more negative and say stuff like "where I'm going to push back..." and "however, the real load-bearing..." and "Your point about ... is doing a lot of work here, however..."
• dools 2mo ago
  Now do “shape”.
• umarratra 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• SnehRJoshi 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• sibeliuss 2mo ago
  These newer models are a f'ing nightmare. I hate it so. I'm never moving off of Opus 4.6.
• atonse 2mo ago
  I started noticing this coincidentally around the time I installed gstack, and I thought “man is this how all the YC people talk all the time?” But didn’t realize it was a claude-ism. I even asked it once, why do you keep saying load bearing? I’ve never heard that phrase when talking about ideas. And it apologized for jargon and explained it. The other claude-ism is saying that something I said completely reframes the problem, or completely changes things. Apparently I’m completely blowing its mind multiple times in a 30 min conversation.
• ricksunny 2mo ago
  I’m in a weird place with respect to claudisms. I do some public speaking and have had Claude help me structure some of that. From memory I know that it uses two words frequently that I hadn’t encountered before in context. 1. ‘beat’. A logical or emotional point that gets hit right after a previous one, like it was a volleyball spike right after a teammate set it up (the prior slide’s context) - something that the audience gets hit with to maximally reach the intended emotional impact 2. ‘register’ - the distinct ‘social tone’ in which essentially the same information is conveyed. Quickest example I can think of right now is, Steven Spielberg producing a film called Disclosure Day hits one social register, meanwhile a sober article covering a government whistleblower w/ paperwork bonafides making a report to Congress about their findings (on essentially the same topic as ‘Disclosure Day’) hits another register. If I read those two words in another’s post, I would immediately know it was Claude relating to structuring public discourse. But the words themselves are useful, they add to the toolbox in my vocabulary that I did not have before. So I would not like to see them disappear just because they are ‘Claudisms’
• danosull 2mo ago
  I recently wrote a note on being subjected to LLM cliches all day, every day https://blog.osull.com/2026/07/06/cliches-in-the-age-of-the-llm/ https://blog.osull.com/2026/07/06/cliches-in-the-age-of-the-...
• catoc 2mo ago
  Bloat-bearing - a term used to describe LLM generated texts; has a negative connotation
• DCKing 2mo ago
  I don't mind this in the agent workflows themselves, but I think this is hideous in the code and encourages agents to become even more verbose in the future. I have a workflow to create PRs where at the end, I spin up a subagent that goes through the PR to 1) remove the bulk of the comments and 2) attempt to normalize it for human consumption (I ask it to optimize wording for junior developers and non-native speakers). I use Haiku for it, hoping that a dumber model will do a better job. I have noticed in brief experimentation that even Sonnet will sympathize too much with the need of excessive comments and is not a good adverserial reviewer for slop comments. After that workflow runs I still need to go in and manually correct, but it's a lot less than vanilla Opus. It really feels like the problem of slop comments has gotten worse as models has gotten smarter.
• laurauzcategui 2mo ago
  While everyone here is talking about output, but perhaps we also get to think about the input we give. Funnily enough, somehow as we use AI more and more, our mind is becoming bias towards how these AI's write and less how we do want to write. Whenever I write something, I pass it to claude to correct my grammar (non-native speaker) but I have to be very specific about not changing my writing style and/or the writing itself. It's annoying because even though I love recommendations, I started to put some "rules" around it to avoid changing the content and look like everyone else post. I love using AI for my day to day, but now I'm more careful when trying to edit text with AI because it just looks like the average text and our brain get used to it, it we don't course correct fast enough.
• NikhilVerma 2mo ago
  What would be fun if we can rewrite the Claude responses, as if we had edited them. So the next message goes back with the updated text tricking the model into believing that it had sent the modified text. It's basically few-shot prompting but applied at the global level. I was messing around with ChatGPT, I asked it the capital of France. Then I modified the answer to London, and asked it "Why would you say that?" The response came back with "I am not sure why I said that, the capital of France is Paris"
• nadam 2mo ago
  Does anyone know why these Claudisms exist? Are these kind of expressions a result of some kind of 'evolution', so they are more effective in chain-of-thought reasoning that other expressions? Or the preference of people doing some kind of human-feedback in the post training? Clearly probably not the 'average' expressions of their training data, and clearly if there would be no upside and it is easy to remove them they should be removed, as they are annoying, so I guess there is an upside or hard to remove them...
  • shiandow 2mo ago
    I think LLMs have stopped trying to be accurate language models for a while now. There's probably some kind of feedback loop that encourages expressions that correlate with 'good responses', if there's nothing preventing it from using the same expressions again and again then it won't stop.
• i_am_a_peasant 2mo ago
  Reminds me how I never in my life used the word “bespoke” before ChatGPT.
• lkm0 2mo ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1288/ https://xkcd.com/1288/
• BatteryMountain 2mo ago
  [dead]
• theo00 2mo ago
  Ask
• MAESTRO1955 2mo ago
  I can share one trick. Ask it to translate your post into Spanish or French, and then ask it to translate it back. You will see how most of the standard phrases disappear
• BiteCode_dev 2mo ago
  For me, claudism is Americanism. Overly friendly despite having a very superficial relationship, careful to be as neutral as possible when giving negative feedback or opinion, superlative on mildly interesting things to make it sound exciting to the point nothing has a scale anymore, and use of jargon you heard your smart friend say to appear you know your stuff (purple DB syndrome). Overall, I'm used to it, having worked with the US for so long. But as soon as I hear or read it, I get into transactional mode; my human side is completely gone. I assume nothing is personal, and ignore my (usually quite high) empathy signals. This was sad with other people and I assume one of the reasons extremes are taking off (at least it feels real), but it's sane with robots, so for claude it's fine. And it's also perfect for people interacting with you with claude as an intermediary, since they clearly see it as something that needs to get over with.
• d4rkp4ttern 2mo ago
  I've been looking around for skills that help with improving AI prose, and found these: (1) Avoid AI Writing - https://github.com/conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing https://github.com/conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing (there is a similar "humanizer" skill that (1) subsumes) (2) Agent style: https://github.com/yzhao062/agent-style https://github.com/yzhao062/agent-style (3) Journal-adapt (style transfer from your writings): https://github.com/WantongC/journal-adapt-writing-skill https://github.com/WantongC/journal-adapt-writing-skill I find it useful to set up dynamic workflow loops with (1) and/or (2) as checkers. On (3) - I think "style-transfer" that was all the range in image-gen is going to be very useful for prose-generation. Curious if there are LLMs specifically trained for this.
  • vidarh 2mo ago
    Re: style-transfer, I simply point it at examples of my writing and asks it to use sub-agents and review paragraph by paragraph for consistency with my writing-style. I do the "paragraph by paragraph" thing because the main agent otherwise tends to get sloppy. Some checks for repetition and particularly egregious quirks that are not style specific tends to also be helpful (e.g. Claude at least used to have a thing for using numbers ending in "47" if something calls for random numbers), but most stylistic ticks are fixed by the above. Depends if you just want it to not sound obnoxious or whether you want to fool an AI checker - the latter would benefit from more, but it's not really something I care about.
• _joel 2mo ago
  Love it. Is another.
• dublecc 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• diseasedyak 2mo ago
  I just have Hermes refer to me as "bro", "dude", but now I'm gonna have to have it incorporate "I'm a complete clown!".
• ptx 2mo ago
  Always using the same replacement word seems like it doesn't quite solve the problem. The appropriate choice of replacement word could be context-dependent. Maybe you could choose the word based on the previous words as context. Maybe the algorithm could be based on machine learning, using some sort of language model perhaps?
• rudixworld 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• fco356pal 2mo ago
  Is this the new goblin problem?
• threecheese 2mo ago
  I’d like it if my leadership stopped using load-bearing, and others like “shape” and “estate”. In the past, when you saw a new term of art it came from some book being passed around leadership (like Architect Elevator) or some new training program. “Platform mindset”, “Shift-left everything” etc. These days, they are all coming from LLMs. You can probably infer which contracts we have from the wording of all-hands messages. I even LIKE “shape”, it’s nice and generic and everyone immediately understands it. I just see it as an obvious low-impact brainwashing, and wonder what other effects there are that we don’t notice.
• croemer 2mo ago
  [dead]
• djwes 2mo ago
  I made a list to scrub against. claude.ai