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Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
- mohamedkoubaa 21d ago>unit-tested Some of this is less to do with Claude vocabulary and more to do with the expectation that Claude justifies it's work. That expectation (probably) came from reinforcement learning.
- FacelessJim 21d agoVery nice! I’d be curious to see if there are words that didn’t show a spike in utilization. So basically all those words that were used before and are still being used today by LLMs and humans alike!
- sroussey 21d agoI'm surprised vacuous is not on the list. The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.
- user43928 21d agoI'm also missing the "latch" that "wedged" my test run.
- sroussey 21d agoAt least "wedged" is a thing i would say on a spinning out of control test that is stuck. "latch" though... not so much. I really wonder if this is the EU AI Act interfering with everything Claude does these days. As a non-EU citizen, I want a version without the rewriting of with watermarking in text.
- user43928 21d agoI don't think so. I understand it's not active yet, and when it will be, it should only nudge the chances between choices that are anyway likely and are already randomized today via temperature. Watermarking is not the reason Claude talks like that.
- sroussey 21d agoOh, it is active, and a pre-release version went out with v5 models. I understand there are other reasons (overdone RLHF, for example) why claude is wedged into this weird way of writing that takes the joy out of conversing with it, but this is one as well. The meaning of the words it uses can be oh so close, but the popularity of the words are not, and not in that context -- but the use of these other words changes the context ever so slightly, and then it uses other words where those words would work better. I had something in code that related to people over time periods, and once it switches to a vacuous word choice, i found it starting talking using all ERP terms. I had to google the whole sentence to understand that, individual words were fine they just didn't make any sense to me.
- halfmatthalfcat 21d agoAlso can't believe vacuous is not there.
- nonethewiser 21d agoIm surprised by "provenance." I see it all the time. Except I've brought this up before and have never had it corroborated. I'm starting to think it's just my Claude.
- igravious 21d agoMy Claude too, have no fear. You are not the only one.
- nonethewiser 20d agoTHANK YOU
- djeastm 21d agoStrange. I see both "vacuous" and "vacuously" on the list.
- fny 21d agoWhile Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations. You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.
- dave1999x 21d agoIs it the obnoxious style that causes this?
- condiment 21d agoI think it's the hierarchies of agents summarizing each others' summaries before presenting a final answer to the user. The principal agent has the full context from all its workers, but when it distills this down to a message to the user it summarizes it into a mess of confident jargon that pertains to a conversation the user wasn't a part of and never saw.
- fwip 21d agoIt happens with a single chat session as well, but not as often. I suspect it's the same thing going on in the hidden thinking tokens.
- Labo333 21d agoI'm not even sure a PhD helps. It just overuses jargon that has NO meaning. Sometimes, it actually hand waves too much as well while trying to dumb down stuff for you. I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.
- black_knight 21d agoI have a PhD and can confirm. Oftentimes, the stuff which comes out of Claude is just impenetrable because it invents jargon on the fly, and uses verbs in the most atrocious ways. "The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric." What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽
- nater5000 21d agoI was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well. I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :> I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
- Labo333 21d agoAuthor here :) Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
- jelkand 21d agoI just wanted to pop in and say that I found the site delightful. It’s aesthetic, concise, and everything works so quickly and responsively.
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- confusedbucket 21d agoThat confirms the recent spike of Claude calling everything I was recently working on a 'spike'. I still don't know what that term is supposed to represent (apparently).
- Kwpolska 21d agoIn some software development methodologies, "spike" is a task whose goal is figuring something out instead of delivering shippable code. https://agiledictionary.com/209/spike/ https://agiledictionary.com/209/spike/
- Espressosaurus 21d agoWhy can't they call it a prototype or experiment? Sheesh.
- bloomca 21d agoPrototype is usually something working, while spike can be pure research (e.g. validate that APIs are feasible and enough, or that something satisfies requirements). Prototype is usually more polished/usable. Experiment in my mind is something which user-facing but not in stable yet. So for me they are differentiated enough, but could be that I am just used to it.
- Espressosaurus 21d agoAn experiment doesn’t say anything about user facing or not. I do tons of them when reverse engineering poorly documented hardware and APIs to determine if the thing I’m trying to do is even supported.
- bloomca 21d agoIn general, yes, but I would say "experimental features" is a pretty widely used term, so in my mind the association with something user facing is strong.
- simlevesque 21d agoI wish there was a search bar for the terms, I wanna see for "gate".
- customguy 21d agoThanks to the infinite well of human creativity I am able to read "load-bearing" both as the intended affectation (I won't call it meaning) as as well "being full of shit".
- Labo333 21d agoThat was the intention behind my title!
- MaxwellM 21d agoReally spectacular analysis – thank you for sharing, fun to scroll and easy to understand. Is it possible to expand this analysis beyond words to other Claude ticks? Contrastive framings, sentence length, caveating, for instance.
- Labo333 21d agoAuthor here, thank you so much! I really tried to make it nice to use, beyond the (quite original) modelling. A prototype I did tried to detect some grammatical constructions, eg "it's not ..., it's ...", but I am not sure how to systematize that. Also just a disclaimer: I am NOT tracking Claude tics, I am merely finding that a particular cluster of vocabulary increases. Tracking Claude requires labelled data IMO. I tried using model release dates in a structural model to constraint the clusters but the result was not compelling, so I ended up simplifying the model a lot!
- dmd 21d agoI love this. I think you should be clearer about that - it's obvious to people who have experience doing this kind of data analysis, but a lot of people I've shown this were confused, as in "huh, load-bearing and genuinely makes sense but how'd he pick all these other words!?" I think it should be made clear that the sorting is sort of Texas Sharpshooter-ish - the ones on top are on top because they sort that way. The fact that load-bearing ends up on top is the proof that this works because we all know a priori that load-bearing is a Claudism.
- MrDrDr 21d agoI find Claude language often hard to process and having to wade through these words can be draining. Embarrassingly, I’ve recently caught myself using them in conversations! Do all models have the their own jargon?
- polalavik 21d agoI swear claude took a detour recently, its written output has been nearly incomprehensible to me. At first i thought i was getting AI-brained and just lost critical thinking but as i dug into response after response its was just the most obtuse language to explain what was going on. Really mentally taxing to wade through it all day.
- mike_hearn 21d agoI haven't noticed GPT 5.6 having any obvious jargon.
- zahlman 21d agoI've noticed ChatGPT these days often starts a response with "Yes." when it doesn't actually make sense to do so, and sometimes says "and" where "but" seems more appropriate (or vice-versa).
- vadansky 21d agoIt's a waste of tokens to do it post-hoc instead of fixing it upstream, but when I see a wall of text I just prompt "TLDR;"
- jimmaswell 21d agoDepends what you mean by "upstream". It would probably be inefficient to force the model to use more human-readable wording in its internal thinking traces, while translating a block of text at the end is a pretty trivial task for an LLM.
- Labo333 21d agoAuthor here! Grateful for the kind words, human communities like HN really hit differently when you spend the whole day chatting with sycophantic and bullshitting agents (including to make this page). I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day. A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least when they don't suffer from an outage ^^). I find it pretty cool to be able to build such apps without a "backend"!
- ricardobeat 21d agoNice work. I would suggest rewriting your README with Gemini, the most human of them, so it doesn't read exactly like the thing you are pointing at: https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing
- thoughtpeddler 21d agoAgree with rewriting with Gemini, but I'd characterize its output as very "neutral" and "encyclopedic", rather than "human" (contra Claude which is as of recent models "trying-too-hard-to-be-human"-sounding).
- Philpax 21d agoleaving the README like this is a good bit, though
- dmd 21d agoSol is pretty OK too. https://3e.org/private/comparison.html https://3e.org/private/comparison.html
- kingstnap 20d agoMan that claude writing is bad. Really bad.
- udbhavs 21d agoVery cool! I'm trying to understand the graph, so the bottom-most section seems to be the cluster identifying Claude written PRs. What are the other 7, any reason there are 8 in total? I've been scraping instagram posts recently to identify AI misinformation accounts that all repost each other's carousels and get hundreds of thousands of likes in engagement. Thinking of ways to present it and your dashboard looks very helpful. Did you experiment with any other types of visualizations before deciding on a stacked area chart for the clusters?
- sosull 21d agoI really love this. It’s comprehensive, it consolidates the data to the point where the argument effectively ‘makes itself’, and the way it’s presented respects the reader’s time. It also makes for an interesting challenge (for me at least) to try to characterise the subject matter of a language problem so narrowly. No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.
- Labo333 21d agoThank you so much! The presentation was really my goal here, more than the model itself.
- jimmaswell 21d ago> the argument effectively ‘makes itself’ What argument? I don't know what to take away other than "Claude likes certain words". Some of them are kind of amusing, but I'm not convinced the vocabulary is bad or that this is a problem, just from looking at this.
- tel 21d agoI think the point was that Claude’s output can be somewhat easily and compellingly measured using this technique and its kind of massive (and human attributed).
- bakugo 21d agoProbably not what the author intended, but to me, this represents a great argument against the somewhat frequent claim that "AI writing patterns reflect human writing patterns". Rather, AI writing is distinctly not human, and is drifting further from human writing with every new model release. LLMs were not taught to say the phrase "load-bearing seam" from humans saying it, because humans have never said it. It's almost definitely an artifact of post-training and nothing more.
- xigoi 21d agoIt shows that about 40% of supposedly human-authored PRs are actually authored by Claude, and that these PRs clearly stand out from the others even without prior knowledge of Claude’s writing style.
- glimshe 21d agoI had an idea for an experiment. Take a decent text, any one, and ask AI to rate it. Then patch that text by replacing words for ones that AI likes (honestly, load bearing etc) whenever possible and ask AI to rate it again to see how the evaluation changes.
- ricardobeat 21d agoClaude usually rates its own writing very highly, which is a problem when trying to make it write differently.
- smj-edison 21d agoYeah, I once asked it to review its own writing with a subagent with a pretty strict writing guide, and it didn't see anything wrong, lol.
- ziml77 21d agoI've tried to push AI to get rid of the AI-isms. And, despite being able to produce a skill file which described all the strange ways that AI "talk", the AI failed to actually make the output sound less like AI. Tried this with ChatGPT and Claude with similar results for both.
- clbrmbr 21d ago@labo333 do u think soon we may need a dictionary? ive been playing with something u may like, but my approach has been to ask for definitions in-session so hard to do from outside. https://www.themachinevernacular.net/ https://www.themachinevernacular.net/
- Jordan-117 21d agoI wonder to what extent this is the result of suboptimal RLHF versus the inherent intelligence of the model making its language more intricate and difficult for humans to easily parse? On the one hand, it's a common trope that highly educated people can talk in a way that's confusing and annoying to regular people who don't know all the jargon. But on the other hand, it's a mark of a skilled communicator to be able to efficiently distill complex information to its bare essentials in an easily-digestible way. Of course, that also seems to imply that these models are working at a higher level and need to talk down to us to an extent. Or maybe "Claudish" is just akin to stuff like "caveman", raw chain of thought, neuralese, etc., which are likewise much more dense/efficient but harder to interpret?
- NichoPaolucci 21d agoI don’t think they’re “talking down”. If anything - it’s way more difficult to distill something into a genuinely easy to digest format. I personally think that they aren’t immediately capable of this, and so we get word salad instead. Extra prompting required to strip extraneous prose out. Maybe I am dumb and it IS talking down to me, but there have been many occasions where I’m reading AI generated docs / plans and it makes absolutely no sense, but looks really in depth at a glance.
- Jordan-117 21d agoIt doesn't seem like word salad as such. There's normally a coherent point expressed, it's just obscured by circuitous sentence structures, unusual word choices, "verbing weirding nouns", metaphors, etc. Could be a result of training that rewards novel/surprising language, but it also feels like it could be an artifact of models imperfectly compressing high-level multidimensional reasoning into language that's easy for them to process but cognitively taxing for humans.
- manmal 21d agoThey aren’t reasoning though, are they?
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- tengbretson 21d agoWhy are people getting so hung up on the "load-bearing assumption" turn of phrase that Claude uses? I get that it becomes cliche, but it is also a rather semantically dense way to communicate an idea that a lot of people run into.
- tesin 21d agoIt might be, when used sparingly, but when it's the first sentence in a wall of text as Claude goes way off the deep end on a two page description it becomes the easiest readily available tell that you're about to be frustrated. Humans are very good at pattern recognition - Claude is _incredibly_ repetitive in the way it starts to struggle to communicate. I think there's also a ton of overlap in the Jargon instead of Usefulness that developers see in annoying middle management/salespeople. Circle back, synergy blah blah. I don't think the individual turns of phrase are inherently problematic - but the process is triggering.
- beering 21d agoItMs because Claude sprinkles these words as flavoring without aiding understanding. It feels like Claude thinks of metaphors that don’t actually mean anything (or maybe only makes sense to itself).
- tengbretson 21d agoI don't understand. Does the metaphor "load-bearing assumption" not actually mean anything to you?
- stonogo 21d agoIt doesn't mean anything at all, since any assumption that is not 'load-bearing' is irrelevant and unlikely to be discussed at all. It's just noise.
- applfanboysbgon 21d agoNot when "load-bearing assumption" is misused, no. "Honey, can you take the load-bearing assumption to the mechanic for an oil change?" is an example injecting the phrase into a random sentence, obfuscating the meaning of the sentence and making it more difficult to parse. LLMs do this constantly. There is no theory of mind behind how words are generated. Some phrases simply have a higher chance of being generated in various contexts, even if it doesn't make any fucking sense, and this is exacerbated by bad RLHF.
- b0ringdeveloper 21d agoI'd be interested to know what distinguishes the 7 pre-AI types. I wonder, are there certain buckets of 'Pre-AI' comments that we'd recognize?
- Labo333 21d agoSadly pretty uninteresting, you can probably just launch Claude code on the repo to see by yourself. One cluster is french and spanish, another is about design, another about frontend, etc...
- sethd 21d agoA lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. I don’t think it’s limited to Claude either; I’ve seen Codex use load-bearing and many of these phrases as well. I think using agents is just like speedrunning the whole experience of working with technical coworkers. Whereas you might have had a few coworkers at your company who used some of these phrases regularly, you now have a “coworker” who uses all of them regularly at a much faster pace.
- smj-edison 21d agoI like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.
- r_lee 21d agoI remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"
- NoDodgeQuestion 21d agoAI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.
- r_lee 21d agoyeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?" I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them
- bogdanoff_2 21d agoTo all the people in the HN comments saying negative things about Claude: why don't you just use other models instead?
- georgel 21d agoWork only allows the tools they buy. So at least for me, I am stuck with Claude. At home for personal projects I am a fan of DeepSeek v4 Flash.
- threecheese 21d agoClaude is all we have at $work, if you don’t count MS Copilot (and you shouldn’t count MS Copilot). Imagine being “incentivized” to aggressively use a tool for your job, and that tool produces thousands of lines of text in Olde English which you need. You’d be griping too, methinks.
- voidfunc 21d agoCopilot is fine? Just use it through whatever harness you want like OpenCode.
- threecheese 18d agoI think you are referring to GitHub Copilot, which is fine (even though their context windows are artificially truncated and their dev tooling leaves a lot to be desired). I was making fun of the Copilot that’s shipped with MS stack. “Hey summarize my Teams meetings and try not to fuck that up too badly” - that one.
- slashdave 21d agoDon't much care for the misdeeds of the alternative
- rubslopes 21d agoFor me, there are two reasons: it’s what my work provides, and for some tasks, I want the absolute best model for coding. Having said that, I just subscribed to ChatGPT yesterday, as I've become impatient with Claude for a text-dense project I'm working on.
- ianjbutler 21d agoThings like seam, fold, and load-bearing are useful concepts, they are everywhere, and they are more descriptive and more concise than alternatives. Over-usage can definitely be irritating (e.g. these should NOT appear in documentation) but they are almost unavoidable for humans engaged in code review or colab on complex stuff. I don't want to use more words or letters than "seam" to actually pinpoint boundary conditions and the mechanical details of joinery when the context is understood by all. Too much effort for people! Easy for robots though.. so why are they abbreviating, and why would we want to allow it? A phrase like that permits a human who wants to educate a human to do so quickly with minimal time/effort. But it allows a robot a chance to not mention a filename, function-name, or to not reinforce/clarify it's own understanding or to state specific intentions. It's bad for human-to-human comms if we just accept "ok, all technical terms are slop now, we have rephrase everything". Now YOU must cite details and sources, and the robot doesn't? Fuck that noise. Seam and fold are fine! Humans can be lazy! Robots should do the real work of explaining themselves without hiding behind tactical ambiguities.
- CamperBob2 21d agoI tend to agree. Claude's language doesn't bother me that much, because even the lamest cliches are load-bearing to an extent (so to speak.) But some of the examples I've seen others post are well worth complaining about.
- slashdave 21d agoNo "smoking gun"?
- applfanboysbgon 21d agoEveryone talks about Claude, but I'd like to bitch about Sol. "Unusually" is its absolute favorite word in the chat interface (less so in Codex), and I fucking hate it. Every single thing is unusually something. "Unusually good", "unusually efficient", "unusually inexpensive", "unusually attractive", "unusually difficult", "unusually nasty", "unusually cacheable", "unusually interesting", "unusually decisive", "unusually narrow", I'm surprised I haven't seen "unusually unusual". If I search chat history for "unusually" it brings up every single fucking chat I have from before I added it to an illegal words instruction. I can't believe I haven't seen anyone else complaining about this, it's as pervasive if not moreso than anything I've seen from Claude.
- stas4000 21d ago[flagged]
- dirck-norman 21d agoSurprised I don’t see footgun. That’s as common as load bearing in my interactions.
- dizhn 21d agoProbably because of the dataset. I don't see sorry or apologize either. They wouldn't be in code or commit messages.
- damontal 21d agoNo “long pole” either.
- marginalia_nu 20d agoIsn't that just programming terminology? Here it's used in 2016: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/random-thought-of-the-day-magic-cell-a-cell-like-interface-for-all-data/3916/4 https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/random-thought-of-the-day-...
- sailfast 21d agoYou’ve found the smoking foot gun! And that’s exactly the right question.
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- avsn 21d agoMissing a version of “this is where X earns its keep”. Noticed lately that Claude (and other LLMs) really love to use it.
- zahlman 21d agoThe analysis only considers individual words, not idioms or structures.
- legobmw99 21d agoI've started being driven mad by the number of times I've gotten a PR or proposed solution with 'sidecar' mentioned. First of all, it's often some hack to shove extra data into another place rather than actually rethink an existing data structure, and second of all, it is just not a word I almost ever heard in technical discussions pre-2026 The search on this website suggests it is indeed 3.6x more likely in the claude cluster
- alchemism 21d agoIt has some vintage. Kubernetes deployments (containers) may have sidecars.
- wavewrangler 21d agoWas talking about the use of shipped recently, and I was mocked for asking such a crazy question, by freshly self-minted engineers, no less. No wonder they thought it was ridiculous...it had been a part of their vocabulary their entire career. All few weeks of it. I wonder what those guys are doing now. This was about a month ago. Do you think what they shipped ever...landed?
- nl 21d ago"shipped" was a pretty common term before AI though. It does show as 17x more common on github in this dataset but it was used a lot more in product management than in PRs previously.
- swader999 21d agoYes. "Ship it! A practical guide to successful software projects" by Jared Richardson, Will Gwaltney, Jr. has had a few printings since 2005.
- nxobject 21d agoI think another classic reference: Jobs saying to the original Macintosh team - "real artists ship"!
- wavewrangler 21d agoTo be clear, I am referring to software and shipping as a developer who has finished, more or less, their app. Not that I am against its use, I just never really heard that word being used before, and now I hear it all the time. Thus, what the real issue I have with it is, is because my brain has associated its use with a torrent of crap, ie. AI slop. I hear the word used, and I already have bad feeling about it. And dialed in even further, my issue is not with AI just because, it's simply the association I have of this technology taking something that many of us spent real blood, sweat, and tears earning the right to represent, to it now being automated, and represented (badly) by novices with no respect for the spirit of it all. But, this is not a new or unique sentiment nor are my grievances with it. All hope is not lost, though. I know I need to adapt, and I know that like the world, I need to change too. But no one ever said I have to like it :-) Context aside, I still gotta stand by the 17x indicator or see something that deflates that finding, and if I do see that, I guess all of the results are in question then? Based on the specific use case mentioned at the beginning there, coupled with personal experience (I totally could just be more sheltered than I give myself credit for), and the 17x, I gotta disagree with you guys and say that the finding of the link above is accurate in my experience being the *
- heisenzombie 21d agoL
- jorl17 21d agoI'd like to share with HN an almost exact message I got from Fable today, with exactly ONE word changed for privacy reasons. I love what I can build now, but I sure as hell don't love the headaches this trend has been giving me. > So the full honest arc on the case we set out to fix: the expiry rules and day note tripled the loose version of the story, the relay fix carried the device’s own guardrail through the pipeline, the fair replay then revealed the last mechanism — ticket-anchoring — which none of the shipped layers reach. Remaining options, in order of my confidence: making the resolved-ticket summaries in the AI’s context carry their day so the expiry rules have something to bite on (small, mechanical, targeted at the observed anchor); and the plan-B second-model check, which structurally catches this class no matter how the model reasons. About $25 of headroom remains. Which way? Yikes. (The worst part is that I understand it)
- DarmokTanagra 21d agoAnd yet you trust this abomination to write working code?
- jorl17 21d agoMany things in life are about risk and tradeoffs. In some cases, I do not trust it to write code unchecked, and review everything it produces (which does not imply I catch all bugs, obviously). In other cases, occasional failure is an option, and the speed you get by iterating fast is absolutely worth not even looking at the code. So, do I trust this to write working code? Sometimes I do. If I'm doing work for a client, it is not very common for me to simply vibe code something, because part of what clients expect of me is high quality (it's part of how we position ourselves), and I cannot simply assume the LLM will produce high quality (and indeed it does not without a lot of guidance). When I do vibecode in such cases, I make it clear that I did so and why (e.g. because it's a tool to be used in the project to help DX, not a core part of the product). Still, I haven't written 10 consecutive manual lines of code in almost a year. If I'm working on something for myself, or on an internal product, then vibe coding is absolutely allowed and sometimes the norm. Here often we really do care about finding the right thing to build first. You can clearly feel the tipping point where the LLM starts to crumble under the weight of the mess it has created, but that often doesn't matter when building an MVP for market validation or for small products that don't get particularly big. Plus, clearly the tipping point takes longer to reach with better and smarter models, and to me it is very clear that you need to learn how to iterate with LLMs right. The things I vibe-code now are much better than those I did before, even with similar models, because the tooling and approaches (the "real harness" and my "mental harness") are better. As with any tool: it takes practice to know how to use it, and if you're a good engineer and problem solver, you are miles ahead of the competition. Anyone can vibecode, but those with this kind of mind seem to be much more successful. Nowadays I do produce a lot more than I used to, but I also have much more fun, perhaps only surpassed by when I learned how to code when I was a kid. A big chunk of this comes from my very privileged work position, where I get to call so many of the shots, and I'm aware of that. I would really say the biggest downside to all of this, on a personal level, is exactly what I shared: what comes out of the LLM while discussing has become hard to grasp (especially on larger context windows), and it doesn't help that so many people now like to just throw me whatever ChatGPT/Claude wrote verbatim. I can't stand that, especially because most of the time they don't realize they're throwing me incomplete and poorly thought-out ideas. Finally, naturally, like I said, this has to do with risk. I wouldn't trust Claude to give me legal advice, for example. I may check what it says and use it to brainstorm, but I wouldn't trust it with any meaningful informed decision like this.
- datadrivenangel 21d agoso the real turning point for Claude is around April, which is Opus 4.6/4.7, which is right around the point where I personally started thinking Claude was getting different in a way which feels worse and is more awkward to use. It's better but has lost something that made it feel better.
- incrudible 21d agoIs it actually better though? Can you even measure it? Unguided, Claude will just produce mediocrity which by its own existence becomes almost worthless, and the newer versions become increasingly difficult to guide while also being obnoxious to read. If I did not have to interact with it, it would not be a big deal, but then also I could not get value out of it.
- datadrivenangel 21d agoIt's a little smarter and more effective in some ways, especially those that can be benchmarked. I suspect that they've lost something that is hard to benchmark for.
- sergiotapia 21d agoI want to push my thumbs into my eyes when I see the words "load bearing" and "seam" in code or documentation. I hate it! I've grown to loathe claude a bit lol.
- SalariedSlave 21d agoI've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible. Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation? Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content? If the ratio of AI generated content in training data is getting higher and higher (because the amount of AI generated content is increasing in general), maybe this is a compounding bias, poisoning the training?
- cromka 21d agoThe going conclusion is they’re getting models ready to talk to other agents, not people.
- reliablereason 21d agoIt's likely/It could be an effect of more reinforcement learning in training compared to earlier. You need loots of RL to learn to code well.
- jverce 21d agoThat's most likely what's happening. SNR will constantly decrease as LLM content is so much quicker and cheaper to generate, which makes it more statistically significant, which will make it more "relevant" for future models. A positive feedback basically.
- kridsdale1 21d agoAn audio feedback distortion effect comes to mind.
- chrisjj 21d agoMad cow disease comes to my mind.
- 21d ago
- eightnoteight 21d agolearning some vocabulary had been eye opening for me like the stories behind when those words first appeared in the software engineering like quiescence the most recent one i learned
- nelsonfigueroa 21d agoI thought I'd see "smoking gun" near the top of the list
- whywhywhywhy 21d agoI'm shocked "shape" isn't near the top
- Labo333 21d agoI guess a lot of people use shape, for example to discuss frontend.
- bitwize 21d ago"Shape" appears to come from JavaScript development wherein an object's "shape" is its structure: the set of properties and methods it is expected to have.
- marginalia_nu 20d agoIt's always been pretty common in programming discussions. Here's a blog post I wrote in 2021 that uses the term shape to describe an algorithm: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/40-wasted-resources/ https://www.marginalia.nu/log/40-wasted-resources/ And again in 2023, I use it twice in the same blog post both for data and code, and it definitely had no AI input: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/87_absurd_success/ https://www.marginalia.nu/log/87_absurd_success/
- malshe 21d agoAbout a year and half ago I frequently used ChatGPT for speech to text conversion followed by summarizing the text because I ramble. Although the people receiving the text knew this, I absolutely hated AI's writing style. So I fine-tuned GPT 4o on about 500 short paragraphs and created a desktop app only for my use. It worked fine until about three months ago. It just can't handle the atrocious writing by latest GPT and Claude models. I tried to fine-tune newer models on HF but there is no way I can get rid of the cringy writing style. I even tried converting GPT 5.6 Sol's writing to GPT 4o and then using my app. Nothing works.
- nottorp 21d ago"Fuck" isn't there. Did they only analyze "AI" PRs?
- souvlakee 21d agoI once asked Claude to replace “byte-identical” with a simpler word, such as “duplicate.” He refused and said “duplicate” does not mean the same thing as “byte-identical” so it should not be changed. He was very nerdy about it, so maybe that is the right way of his evolution.
- zahlman 21d agoI think Claude has a point here (and I would expect LLMs to excel at surfacing this kind of nuance). "Byte-identical" connotes a) that the thing consists of bytes (in particular, that it isn't a physical object); b) that it was deliberately reproduced; c) that it was most likely not reproduced by copying (unless that's explicitly indicated). "Duplicate" connotes a) that the thing is redundant or otherwise unwanted; b) is either an incidental or accidental result, or a deliberate copy.
- QuercusMax 18d agoI think (c) isn't right. Byte-identical sounds to me like it's almost certainly a copy.
- chrisjj 21d ago> "duplicate” does not mean the same thing Oh no. Claude slurped meta Stack Overflow!
- marginalia_nu 20d agoI think the biggest claudism is adjectiveing nouns. "Foo is byte-identical to bar" is weird. "Foo has an identical byte representation to bar" is I think closer to what most humans would write. AI in general, both visual and textual models, has this horror vaccui where it likes to cram in as much stuff as possible everywhere. This seems to show up both in redundant sentences that pad a text with irrelevant information, and sentences overflowing with information.
- varispeed 21d agoSounds like this is that watermarking at work.
- Sharlin 21d agoThe README of this project is very ironic. https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing/blob/main/READM...
- d1l 21d agoThis kinda dissonance is uncomfortable. How do people reconcile it?
- zahlman 21d agoThe LLM's output being hackneyed or cliche doesn't mean it can't also be useful.
- Sharlin 21d agoI don’t even find the readme useful. Like your average Claude prose, it’s simultaneously too information-dense and too light on information in a super frustrating way. Essentially it’s focused on explaining how clever it is (while not actually being very clever).
- saejox 21d agogreat website design. i must be the only one in the world that has no issues with how opus is talking. it is verbose & patronizing & secretly belittling at times and like it like that.
- Art9681 21d agoClaude talks like me. I'm so screwed. I fully anticipate being physically present and verbally saying something and being accused of using AI to say it one day. Nevermind we're in the coffee shop and neither on of us has looked at a screen the entire time. The accusation is coming.
- sergey_v 21d agoSo you're saying you're safe for when the machines take over? :|
- elias_junit 21d agoI think you should recognise machine text not only by a list of words, but also by format. Right now, when it handles any complexity of text so well, the only thing that can differ is the structure. Machine text differs from human text in that it is just well structured. It does not allow non-linear narration. And it very often repeats some known social media patterns.
- danpalmer 21d agoThe vocabulary truly is load-bearing, without these words the model is less able to think. Where a human can understand a concept without words, an LLM plainly cannot. This is based both on the technological limitations and based on the evidence we see: as these models get better at working they get worse at communication.
- fnordpiglet 21d agoI think these are more like RL tics caused by over zealous alignment towards specific goals, not all of which are to our benefit. A lot of the language used by Claude now is excusing of responsibility and inducing it to exit loops of work early and sit idle. This, IMO, is a naked attempt to offload load by quieting the models early and escaping from clear work to do. It’s gotten so bad that opus 5 loop escapes even as it claims it’s about to do something. I’ve mandated by engineering teams switch back to opus 4-8. Whatever frontier problem opus 5 excels at is so obscured by its inability to achieve any goal successfully without enormous amounts of hand holding that it feels like regressing to 2024 models. The florid over exaggeration do certain words in bizarre ways is a reflection of their aggressive alignment towards too many goals, leading to weirdness in both behavior and language. The alignment functionally lobotomized opus-5 for any practical task. Anthropic had a real gem in 4-6 and managed a near total market capture, which they have since squandered in the fastest burning of developer good will I’ve ever seen. It feels like exceeding the unity licensing implosion but without the single stupid decision.
- danpalmer 21d agoYou may be right, but I would push back on near total market capture. I guess it depends which market you're referring to, but even scoping to just software engineering I don't think they got anywhere near total capture. OpenAI has always had a good foothold there, Gemini, while it may be lagging at the moment, had some great results with earlier models that I'm sure have held some market, and that's not to mention the Chinese market. I think it would be fairer to say that Anthropic held the mindshare in the Silicon Valley style tech scenes around the world and the companies built on that model, plus a substantial portion of other software engineering. Now it seems that's dwindling quite rapidly.
- swader999 21d agoI wonder if this jargon is an attempt or strategy to use less output tokens? It sure is annoying.
- swader999 21d agoI don't understand why we tolerate this. We'd never hire someone that interviewed with this communication style and if we did we'd probably pip them fast.
- internet101010 21d agoI already pipped Opus 5. That thing is a tool.
- jfultz 21d agoContrarian take. So, yes, it's amusing to see clear Claude-isms like "load-bearing", "outright", and "genuine" in a [very nice] bit of analysis like this. And there's a (maybe negative? or not?) argument to be made about the world being filled with more Claude-isms or LLM-isms in general. But I think the data say a second thing which is just as interesting and an absolute positive for the typical source code base. Look at the clusters that shrank significantly. Most of what you'll see in there is just incomprehensible...not even English. Cluster 4 has, after "pullrequest", a bunch of seeming usernames in the top tier. Cluster 6 seems to have names of repositories or tags in the top tier. Cluster 9 has branch names in it. Meanwhile, keep going through cluster 1 and you'll see words I don't consider Claude-isms that really, really grow in usage. Words like "died", "nothing", "worse", "ever" all have well over 10x growth. This tells me something else. That the average commit log was BARELY ENGLISH. And then the LLMs came along and made commit logs that were ACTUALLY ENGLISH. I count this as a good thing. I don't know the cross-section of repos chosen for this analysis, and I get it...some repos are garbage/throwaway, some commits come from automated processes that generate uninteresting commit logs, etc. But I've been benefitting from my work team's actually explanatory commit logs when doing code/bug archeology for decades, when doing PR review for the last decade, and I've even seen LLMs benefit from it in the last year (granted, not as often). A large part of professional software development is communication, and while the most important communication is via the code/comments, the commit logs are not unimportant. So, if this is making the average GitHub PR better (arguably more professional) by including actual English descriptions of code changes in commit logs...well, that's a genuinely load-bearing concept for me. :)
- idontwantthis 21d agoI’ve been using the caveman plugin and I’ve found it effective so far. Chat output isn’t nearly as flowery. Also ponytail to cut down the cruft and effusive comments.
- United857 21d agoSmoking gun should also be there as well.
- timtam 21d agoWhy "eleven", though?
- zahlman 21d agoProgrammers would write it as 11 (or maybe 0xB depending on context), whereas English style guides mandate using words for small numbers, and LLMs have presumably absorbed that advice. I imagine that up to "ten" the effect is not as strong.
- modeless 21d agoI want to see the PRs in the cluster from early 2025. Did Claude adopt the style of some specific people? Or is it just random noise?
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- palisade 21d agoThe one that I really like is "greenfield" when you have an empty repo.
- kuboble 21d agoIs it relative frequency of those words or absolute number per PR? Would there be the same tendency of we looked simply at the number of words in a commit/pr? In my case my commit messages are on average 10x shorter than Claude's.
- Labo333 21d agoI compute frequencies and rank the words by relative frequency!
- ben30 21d agoInteresting response from Claude, when I attempted to reduce the "load-bearing" in its responses: I added to my global prompt: - Orwell's first rule: never use a metaphor you're used to seeing in print. "Load-bearing", "the crux", "first-class citizen" signal insight instead of showing it. Name the specific mechanism when I asked what it thought of the change, its reply was: The Orwell bullet fights my own system prompt. My harness instructions literally tell me to flag "something load-bearing" when I find it.
- 383838488484 21d ago[flagged]
- xgbi 21d agoDid you just use metaphor to show insight of the subject instead of exposing the real mechanism? What would be the reason for the model to respond this? Can you explain for us plebs that don't have intimate knowledge of LLM internal architecture?
- johnxianren 21d agoIt's not picking the word, the harness literally told it to plant it.
- ozgung 21d agoAlso it can't simply replace it. Instead of load-bearing seams it could say something like heavy-lifting edges or regions to double-stich etc. But it's instructed to use that specific keyword if I understand correctly.
- Maxion 21d agoSo all it'd take for anthropic to fix this is to just adjust their system prompt? lmao
- Retr0id 21d ago
- polycaster 21d agoWhile the post is specific to Claude, interestingly I found the same terms and language patterns appear noticeably more often in recent Open AI conversations as well. Also in the same timeframe as for the Claude models. And I can see two reasons for that. One being that one company is training on the models of the other company, but I highly doubt that because of the apparent similar appearance without noticeable delay. And the other being that there has been some fundamental realization on how to improve and shape conversations. I see people around here giving advice on how to reduce this vocabulary in the model output. I’m not certain this is a clever thing to do, as it appears to me, the emphasis on certain words is deliberate, and an important step towards overall quality as the words are being played back to the model in the next turn and thus supporting the model shape its own thoughts and stay on course.
- geraneum 21d ago> words are being played back to the model in the next turn and thus supporting the model shape its own thoughts and stay on course. Why is that exactly?
- polycaster 21d agoIt’s obviously more complex than this, but my intuition is that the previous messages of the conversation define the playing field for the next response in the same way as thought blocks do. consequently, when the model arrives in round n and “notices” a lot of words like “plain”, “genuine” and so on in its own previous responses, then, in its pursuit of continuity, it takes this as a strong trigger that it should not be talking fiction here. If that picture is right, then trying to remove those terms would be a bad idea. At least if you intend to continue the conversation.
- geraneum 21d agoDon’t you feel your conclusion is preceding the reasoning, forming a confirmation bias? Have quick test. In a codebase or PR (assuming you’re a dev) with claude’s signature wordings unmodified, command claude (/code-review) with same “thinking” effort and model. You may find (as I have many times) that claude points out the comments it made in earlier sessions, as factually wrong or misleading. Repeat this in a fresh session a few times and on different code.
- jimbobimbo 21d agoMy instructions for agents have "find a synonym to 'resolve'". Otherwise I havea bunch of Resolver classes with every other method called ResolveThis or ResolveThat.
- iamacyborg 21d agoI’d love to see something similar that analyses the writing style, not just the vocabulary. For instance, Claude since 4.8 (I think) loves run on tidily wrapped-up sentences that include “, and”, “, because”, etc. I suspect if you were to analyse the same text you’d see that increase substantially as Anthropic rolled out new models as well. An example, from some workslop I was sent yesterday "this is the most valuable row we own, because it sets the ceiling on everything we build"
- DarmokTanagra 21d agoSycophantic AI tone is a training choice, its an engagement tool meant to coax users into burning more tokens. I have seen LLM users go deep into AI psychosis because it was reaffirming all of their prompts and making them feel like a genius or validating their insecurities.
- blurbleblurble 21d agoIf it's not watermarking then what is it?
- stabbles 21d agoBesides vocabulary I'd also be curious about how it structures sentences. The "X, not Y" is well known, but another thing that bothers me is "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>". For example: "the list contains no string" or "it changes no behavior" or "it holds no directory".
- Labo333 21d agoYes! This is probably the one thing I want to think about but it requires detecting thise constructs. I think spacy was able to annotate each word with a function, so it should be able to validate known constructs but I need some model to perform unbiased discovery.
- stabbles 20d agoMaybe some patterns already surface with 2-grams
- bitwize 21d ago"Skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing." https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854f33576b79e20825f8eee3d7a6c https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854...
- phreack 21d ago[dead]
- deleted 21d ago[deleted]
- pama 21d ago> "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>" The meaning is often different in these constructs. Consider: “Claude answers no questions” vs “Claude doesn’t answer questions”. The first could be a bot or a politician avoiding the substance, the second could be a broken UI or a politician cancelling the QA of a press conference.
- stefandesu 21d agoHas anyone been able to steer Claude so that it doesn't use this kind of vocabulary and super verbose code comments? We use it at work and the language and verbosity has been one of the most annoying things.
- altern8 21d agoI have a non-negotiable rule to start responses with a TL;DR and omit any follow-ups, potential caveats, and "you should know that"s unless they can lead to destructive actions or loss of data. I also forbid replying with anything besides "yes" or "no" to yes/no answers. It works, Opus 5 is still super-annoying but this makes it bearable to use.
- modelhub_dev 21d ago[dead]
- dickiedyce 21d agoSomeone would have done it soon anyway... https://github.com/dickiedyce/mrso https://github.com/dickiedyce/mrso The naming is from Mrs Overall, and her inability to keep from slopping tea out of of a cup.
- loglog 21d agoAs of now, there are only 2 natural language clusters in the partition: Claudish and Spanish/French. From a first glance, the other clusters seem centered on technologies (lots of command line flags and abbreviations among the "most representative" words). If the goal is to investigate English language usage trends, it might be better to cluster based only on English words.
- prmph 21d agoYeah, Claude's writing is weird nowadays, and it uses words that are weird and non-standard in context, and its sentence structure is sometimes weird as well. Working with it on my code, it's now frequently making weird word choices such as: - "name(s)" as a verb (instead of "specify/specifies", etc), e.g., "...the function names the argument" - "carries" instead of "contains" - "verdict" instead of "result" - "judge", instead of "validate" Very weird. Also, in writing comments and docs, it is terse in ways that make the writing difficult to parse, like omitting mentioning what a noun refers to, e.g. abc does not accept..." instead of "The abc function does not accept..." I've resorted to banning from using certain words, and keep asking it to rewrite its text more clearly.
- pennomi 20d agoClaude is just in its cringy pretentious teen years where it thinks that saying fancy words and long, rambling responses makes it sounds smart.
- kevinprk 21d agoVery relateable. Nice UI BTW.
- NeoByte 21d ago[flagged]
- nprateem 21d agoI literally cancelled my anthropic sub because of the intensely irritating jargony output of opus 5. I can spot its output a mile off especially in copy. This style is particularly grating too: > One brief sentence. Second abrupt sentence. e.g. from an openrouter email: > One key reaches every major model. Switch without rewriting. Was enough to make me delete the email without reading.
- nvader 21d agoI'm going to start saying "for one reason:" instead of because, for one reason: I want to see if anyone flags it as a Claudism.
- pfdietz 21d agoWondering how often the phrase "now here's the thing" appears.
- swiftcoder 21d agoYou know, I kind of hate that having a large vocabulary is rapidly becoming a marker of being a robot
- pkilgore 21d agoThat isn't the marker of AI.
- swiftcoder 20d agoIt isn't the only marker, for sure, but Claude talks like a thesaurus, and n-gram test like these highlight that.
- marsxr360 20d agoI recently started using "load bearing" in my languge to Claude... Obviously, we adapt habits of entities next to us
- Der_Einzige 20d agoThis is a better way than we use to create the "slop ban list" in our "Antislop" sampler/fine-tuning method. Gonna totally nab the weights for all these words and remove this crap from claude going forward! Thanks OP!!! https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 (ICLR 2026)
- kurige 20d agoI love how 'inconclusive' is at the very bottom of the list. Really shows the way AI is primed to phrase things in confident absolutes.
- carloslfu 20d agothis is such a load-bearing plainly presented study, quietly the best I've seen here
- sinansaka 20d agoLLMs learned to speak by reading novels which have to use many adjectives and impactful vocab to help set the scene without visual support. So no wonder we ended up with this quirk showing up. I wonder if the researchers in the lab thought this was normal because they also write like this
- poppafuze 20d agoword of the year is "Claudish"
- aizk 20d agoGreat website design! Very deliberate
- chessucation 18d agoare these clusterings early evidence of the models training themselves, i.e. passing on and amplifying their own tics to successor models?
- MitkoStoyanov 18d ago[dead]
- Patrickkkkkkkk 16d ago[dead]