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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

#381

Post by jghn »

PcChip wrote: post #376
jghn wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.

I've used it since that simpsons episode "it's a load bearing poster..."

I'm pretty sure that's not the source for me but most of my vocal quirks have origin stories like this so it's entirely possible. They're almost always things that I heard which either amused me or I thought sounded cool at the time and just stuck with me.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#383

Post by ryandrake »

kokanee wrote: post #356
bensyverson wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#384

Post by huem0n »

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

You're absolutely right to flag these. We could enhance the authors method by using hooks and claude.md as a belt-and-suspenders approach— with hooks behaving as a robust load-bearing idempotent production-ready sidecar. The comments here provide the smoking gun that sharpen my previous conclusions about Claude's vernacular. I'll get started on a quick smoke-test of this system and let you know when it's landed.

Want me to take a first pass looking at the blast-radius this vocabulary change could effect?

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#385

Post by wren6991 »

wrs wrote: post #150
drmajormccheese wrote: post #2

And there’s the smoking gun.

The gun is not smoking; it’s an honest footgun that will be load-bearing when it lands.

You're right to push back on this. The honest take is it's not a smoking gun -- that's a sharp critique.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#386

Post by phoghed »

ryandrake wrote: post #383
kokanee wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.

If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?

I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them.

I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through.

When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page you known it’s gonna be bad day

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#387

Post by ChipopLeMoral »

I analyze in the company I work for, the number of commits with "wire" or "wiring" in the description, and it's a direct correlation to Claude usage, more so than any other Claudism I tested. My honest take, and I'm going to give it to you straight: No one was using "wired" a year ago, now it's in like 10% of commits.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#388

Post by schrodinger »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #372
cafebeen wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.

Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.

I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory.

Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#389

Post by coffeemug »

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 disagree with the first part (that this is merely a voice). There is a distinct difference between an author's unique voice and slop. It may be hard to tease out exactly what the difference is, but it seems self-evident to me it's there. (I'll need to think more how to make the distinction explicit; it's not immediately obvious to me how to discriminate between the two.)

EDIT: ok, here are two ways:

1. if it's merely a voice, I want to hear it. If it's slop, I want it taken out.

2. voice is signal, slop is noise; thus low-signal sentences are slop.

Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

#390

Post by greedo »

rpdillon wrote: post #353
doctoboggan wrote: post #309

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize…

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
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