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Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io

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Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#31

Post by jimmaswell »

sosull wrote: post #26

I 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.

> 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.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#32

Post by Jordan-117 »

I 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?

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#34

Post by tel »

jimmaswell wrote: post #31
sosull wrote: post #26

I 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.

> 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.

I 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).

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#36

Post by fny »

Labo333 wrote: post #13
fny wrote: post #3

While 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.

I'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.

PhD was a joke.

My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#37

Post by Labo333 »

b0ringdeveloper wrote: post #35

I'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?

Sadly 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...

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#38

Post by tesin »

tengbretson wrote: post #33

Why 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.

It 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.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#39

Post by beering »

tengbretson wrote: post #33

Why 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.

ItMs 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).

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#40

Post by hedgehog »

fny wrote: post #36
Labo333 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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.

PhD was a joke. My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds.

It's me, it's the reams of sessions I share back with a five star rating that are just Claude Code talking to itself about debugging its own generated code in jargon that has slowly diverged from anything a human would understand.
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