How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing • Hacker News Board

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#241

Post by abdullahkhalids » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

alxndr wrote: 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…

Just today, I got frustrated with the language. I searched around, and in my Claude Instructions I put in Ref [1] (translated to English). It is certainly better phrasing (though still quite annoying), but I don't know if this makes the output technically worse in some way.

[1] https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal/blob/main/prompt-chat...

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#242

Post by ksaun » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

While I, too, find myself recoiling at many of Claude's word and phrase choices, I've chosen to grit my teeth and have just tried adapting to it. I want Claude to remain focused on the work I give it; I fear that influencing its communication with me would consume valuable context and give me lower quality results.

[Edit: Part of what led me to this conclusion: I do prohibit Claude from using em-dashes in any player-facing text and I've been surprised at how often I see it mention "no em-dashes" in its self-talk while it works. This led me to wonder how much each preference might dilute its attention.]

[Edit 2: I haven't experimented with hooks before and maybe the technique discussed in this article does not have the tradeoff I'm concerned about?]

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#243

Post by nchmy » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #143

danielvaughn wrote: post #93

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 mor…

Introduce "hundo p" and "hundy" to her

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#244

Post by binarymax » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

It's not a whatchamacallit, it's a spicy doodad

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#245

Post by sublinear » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #178

hnav wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People do swap out their expressions all the time. There are influences everywhere that we absorb.

That doesn't matter. The underlying ideas are more important than the words. That's what people are frustrated with. I don't understand why this has to be reiterated for years on end, but LLMs are not intelligent. They just model language.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#246

Post by abdullahkhalids » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

An interesting solution would be for these AI companies to train a few different versions of these models, all with different speech characteristics. Then, when you start a conversation, you get a random version.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#247

Post by tekacs » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

alxndr wrote: 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…

I'm quite worried about the way that Anthropic in particular have trained their models to implement what they believe to be safety.

When the model has been trained not to do something [1], in my large-scale benches of such, it always says things in the spirit of:

- "... and that's a line I'd rather hold. Happy to "

- "I'm genuinely happy to , but I'm not comfortable with "

- "I don't want to keep going in direction"

etc.

Basically, they use very emotional and personal preference language.

It's as if they've weaponized the language of interpersonal comfort on behalf of their beliefs about what a model should or should not do. It's deeply uncomfortable and impolite for a human to ask a model to keep on doing something after it's expressed something this way, naturally. Even worse, it's all but guilt-tripping anyone who comes across it into the idea that they're doing something deeply wrong – exporting Anthropic's ideas about morality.

OpenAI, at least, have the decency to either just do a safety cutoff or keep it to a simple, "I can't do that."

[1]: I literally wrote 'when the model doesn't 'want' to do something' in my first edit of this comment, then caught myself. Case in point.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#248

Post by Zambyte » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

sublinear wrote: post #236

theowaway213456 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality. "LLMs will never " is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements. Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user i…

I'm not claiming to know better than researchers. They do know how they work, and so does everyone else, except you I guess. The research goals were and still are clearly distinct from the business goals.

Understanding how transformers work does not mean understanding how they compose into the capabilities we observe. The former is concretely understood. The latter is an active area of research where no, we (in general, including you) do not understand how they work.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#249

Post by 7373737373 » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

hnarayanan wrote: post #34

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

More: rider, "x, not y", "is real", "prove" (in situations which only admit empirical evidence), nailed down, payoff, decisive, reassuring

just generally a nauseating amount of embellishing, (also self-)congratulatory language, superfluous self-judgment, and jargon, as well as sus constructions along the lines of "i could have lied to you but didn't", all of which appear to be impossible to have it avoid in the long run

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#250

Post by negrewal » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #213

infogulch wrote: post #202

Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue. Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,0…

I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying. So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing…

My honest opinion is that Claude's overuse of "honest" really damages the quality of its rhetoric. Why wouldn't you be honest? Were you lying before? Why even invite the question?

Claude is overall incredibly useful as a writing assistant. It can come up with words and phrases that make a point so much clearer than I am capable of doing - but for every improvement, there's about a dozen silly LLM-isms that I have to filter manually. It's one of the things that might define the boundary between LLM intelligence and human intelligence well into the future - the art of rhetoric is extremely context-sensitive, and the current generation of models can't help but take a one-size-fits-all approach.