“Smoking gun”
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#32It'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.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#33In 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…
Agreed. I think we’re entering an era where some level of specialization for general LLMs is a good thing. Particularly between tuning for agentic use cases (where you want agency with a ton of guardrails and control) and writing which is more creative - you want the model to take the occasional risk and not sound like a monotonic robot. Having trained models first-hand, I can see the distinct use-cases clearly that are odds with one another.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#34I 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
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#35I 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.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#36I 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…
References: Information hazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel 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,…
I would add https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
("It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug" -- Orwell predicts the LLM)
and also https://www.jstor.org/stable/25515288 "The Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Cliché" itself is rather hard to find online, but he's a very funny writer so it's worth the effort.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#37I 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
‘Landed’ and ‘honest’ are also words it seems to overuse.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#38I 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!
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#39Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#40In 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…
> 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.
It's not that the writing style is bad; in fact LLMs write actually pretty well. It's just too much overfitted. And even a style that, in itself, is pleasurable to read, becomes annoying when the same figures of speech are used over and over again.