Live data from Hacker News

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

jola.dev

141–150 of 650 posts

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#141
post #98

"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.

Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.

I’ve heard (and used) the term “API surface” a lot…

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#142
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What, if anything, do people do for writing? I use a keyboard, personally.

Amen. At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible. My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy becaus…

I wish my company would do this. A coworker pulled an all nighter before a vacation and just left me with a million line claude summary of their work then just fucked off. The message was two-part due to size and lacked basic stuff like, "how to run".

He's going to be annoyed that none of that work was used. But the reality is, at least 75% of claude generated text is pointless.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#143

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.

> but we don't find it irritating

Yes we do! My wife keeps saying "100%" and after I pointed it out she's stopped.

Also I talk to dozens of different people in my life and they all have different overused phrases. Much less tedious when there's variety.

Finally most human don't do it nearly as often as AI, and they're not quite as LinkedIn as AI.

We don't find it more annoying because it's a machine - it's simply more annoying.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#145
post #98

"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.

Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.

It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#147
post #98

"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.

Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.

About a decade ago I worked with a product manager who used that phrasing constantly, so it kind of stuck with me.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#148
post #37

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

‘Landed’ and ‘honest’ are also words it seems to overuse.

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.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#149

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 fo…

What was Concise Style? Not a skill, but something built in?
Post reply on HN