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

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#281

Post by esikich » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

infogulch wrote: post #254

LLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases. This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced s…

They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#282

Post by nextzck » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

ianmurrays wrote: post #207

yetanotherjosh wrote: post #109

The real problem is not terms like "load-bearing," which communicate clearly enough. It's the constant invention of cryptic shorthand terms and phrases that have no referent, and end up acting like a puzzle to be decoded. This is often paired with hyphenation, but not always: "The current behavior paper" -> The behavior in the running system that was previously described as papered over. "Marker transport over-claim"…

I have this exact problem with 4.8 and Fable. Sometimes I can barely understand what it’s saying. I’m no english first-language speaker, but I don’t consider myself bad at English either, and it’s gotten increasingly hard to understand Claude’s claims and explanations.

Take it to sonnet 5 or gpt and ask it to explain this to a layman. If you still don’t get it ask it for the why it matters or the how it relates.

You can also ask fable/4.8 to do it but I find it helps to keep the working model surrounded by the complexity rather than drawing it out. Simplifying text is something that takes relatively low effort in comparison to technical tasks. Sometimes I use Gemini, deepseek, grok, and recently meta just to see if they have any added perspectives, sometimes they do. Meta is really good at turning a technical mess into a story that paints a picture in my head.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#283

Post by alwa » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:30 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…

The ones that strike me are the ones exaggerating certitude, to an inappropriate degree and with a certain degree of excitement:

“Exact” “Honest” “Load-bearing” “Root cause”

I know there are more that are slipping my addled mind. But what stands out to me is a sense of a junior who’s very proud that they’ve conquered the murk and messiness and achieved True Certitude in their pursuit of their task. Compensating, with emphatic tone and bravado, for the uneasy feelings and self-doubt of battling chaos with the tools of reason.

…Even as it’s usually my job to let them down gently as I puncture their tidy analysis and reintroduce complications… you want a root cause analysis, Claude old boy, let’s make a root cause analysis…

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#284

Post by costco » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:31 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…

If you put important Anthropic blog posts like the Fable announcement or J-Space through Pangram, you get 100% human written. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the code there is written by AI, I think this is an admission that AI writing is slop and AI code is pretty good.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#285

Post by demosthanos » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:35 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…

Claude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, and it uses the word "honest" or a derivative 57 times, including having a whole section on it.

> Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty to be tactful, graceful, and infused with deep care for the interests of all stakeholders, we also want Claude to hold standards of honesty that are substantially higher than the ones at stake in many standard visions of human ethics.

https://www.anthropic.com/constitution

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#286

Post by rrr_oh_man » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

deagle50 wrote: post #278

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once. "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest." I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself. I actually took a single technical writing class in college…

The road to hell was paved with adverbs.

I honestly agree

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#287

Post by actionfromafar » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #266

yreg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Humans easily anthropomorphize things that are not humans, ascribing human attributes like motive and comprehension and emotion to objects and processes that are not people who can have those attributes. Claude is not a human. It is overwhelmingly easier to anthropomorphize Claude or Siri or an LLM that communicates with you more eloquently than your boss than it is to anthropomorphize a cranky, tired starter motor.…

A cranking starter motor is doing its job. :)

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#288

Post by nprateem » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

jihadjihad wrote: post #144

What is arguably worse is hearing these phrases from humans who have been inculcated with the notion that their usage is idiomatic and appropriate. And we thought "robust", "circle back", and "to leverage" were grating...

Some YT videos are almost impossible to watch as people read out this shit from scripts

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#289

Post by mplewis » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

That's not what cooked means.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#290

Post by sebastiennight » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #261

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…

How can their internal representation represent "concepts" when the training data is all words? There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.

This is a wild argument.

If I use the word "semantic", do you have a concept of what it means?

If so, can you please share which of your senses have shaped the world experience that inform this concept? What have you smelled, tasted, caressed, that informed this concept outside of words?

If I make up the word "polysemantic", do you need to recall a personal experience of polyamory to understand it, or could you possibly use your concept of "poly" and your concept of "semantic" to figure out this new concept?