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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

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Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#171
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.

"reconciling" is the most annoying one, in my opinion.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#174
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.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#176

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.

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!

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.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#177

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.

We do find it irritating at times. Office jargon, corporate buzzwords, etc. Claude communicates like the worst, most irritating project manager I’ve ever worked with, obscuring the most straightforward conclusion with layers upon layers of stuff so that its point is almost lost. I’ve largely gotten it to avoid that behavior with me, but bits of it sneak through. It couldn’t stop talking about “scaffolding” for a few weeks before I hammered it into submission.

Edit: fixing a dumb meatbrain typo

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#178
post #108

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.

it’s not a psychological phenomenon. If a human engineer constantly used pompous language to deliver unvetted information (the number of claude slop root-cause analyses i’ve read where “the smoking gun” is a red herring) we’d rightly consider them a moron

I didn't articulate it, but what I meant was that I think we could swap these expressions out for _anything_, and we'd still find them irritating.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#179
post #170
post #99

I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`... 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 fu…

> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself") Could you please provide an example of what you mean?

This is a method of manipulating the LLM, it doesn't have to be true.

I've given LLMs religion before to manipulate their behavior, that doesn't mean I believed in the great spaghetti goddess.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#180

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?

It might have been a prompt originally.
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