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Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io

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Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#101

Post by ricksunny »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #32

I wonder to what extent this is the result of suboptimal RLHF versus the inherent intelligence of the model making its language more intricate and difficult for humans to easily parse? On the one hand, it's a common trope that highly educated people can talk in a way that's confusing and annoying to regular people who don't know all the jargon. But on the other hand, it's a mark of a skilled communicator to be able t…

The social graph proximity of Rationalists to Anthropic will be lost on no one who reads Astralcodexten. So guess which website has served as the thickest reservoir of 'Claude-isms'.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#102

Post by legobmw99 »

I've started being driven mad by the number of times I've gotten a PR or proposed solution with 'sidecar' mentioned. First of all, it's often some hack to shove extra data into another place rather than actually rethink an existing data structure, and second of all, it is just not a word I almost ever heard in technical discussions pre-2026

The search on this website suggests it is indeed 3.6x more likely in the claude cluster

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#103

Post by Labo333 »

udbhavs wrote: post #82
Labo333 wrote: post #21

Author here! Grateful for the kind words, human communities like HN really hit differently when you spend the whole day chatting with sycophantic and bullshitting agents (including to make this page). I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day. A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least wh…

Very cool! I'm trying to understand the graph, so the bottom-most section seems to be the cluster identifying Claude written PRs. What are the other 7, any reason there are 8 in total? I've been scraping instagram posts recently to identify AI misinformation accounts that all repost each other's carousels and get hundreds of thousands of likes in engagement. Thinking of ways to present it and your dashboard looks ver…

no reason for 8 clusters!

I did experiment and a stacked chart seemed the most clear, with the important cluster at the bottom.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#104

Post by wavewrangler »

Was talking about the use of shipped recently, and I was mocked for asking such a crazy question, by freshly self-minted engineers, no less. No wonder they thought it was ridiculous...it had been a part of their vocabulary their entire career. All few weeks of it. I wonder what those guys are doing now. This was about a month ago. Do you think what they shipped ever...landed?

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#105

Post by manmal »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #79
NichoPaolucci wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they’re “talking down”. If anything - it’s way more difficult to distill something into a genuinely easy to digest format. I personally think that they aren’t immediately capable of this, and so we get word salad instead. Extra prompting required to strip extraneous prose out. Maybe I am dumb and it IS talking down to me, but there have been many occasions where I’m reading AI generated docs / plans and…

It doesn't seem like word salad as such. There's normally a coherent point expressed, it's just obscured by circuitous sentence structures, unusual word choices, "verbing weirding nouns", metaphors, etc. Could be a result of training that rewards novel/surprising language, but it also feels like it could be an artifact of models imperfectly compressing high-level multidimensional reasoning into language that's easy f…

They aren’t reasoning though, are they?

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#107

Post by dgunay »

sethd wrote: post #45

A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. I don’t think it’s limited to Claude either; I’ve seen Codex use load-bearing and many of these phrases as well. I think using agents is just like speedrunning the whole experience of working with technical coworkers. Whereas you might have had a few coworkers at your company who used some of these phras…

Everyone has their own distinct mix of jargon and uses some words more or less than others, but now it's as if you have 1000 coworkers who are all the same person, and talk the exact same way, and it just so happens that their writing is grating to read. It also doesn't stop when you log off for the day. The same guy follows you home in ad copy, message board comments, spam, and in some cases even the correspondence of your loved ones.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#108

Post by emaro »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #32

I wonder to what extent this is the result of suboptimal RLHF versus the inherent intelligence of the model making its language more intricate and difficult for humans to easily parse? On the one hand, it's a common trope that highly educated people can talk in a way that's confusing and annoying to regular people who don't know all the jargon. But on the other hand, it's a mark of a skilled communicator to be able t…

Imo their language is not precise enough for their intelligence to be the reason when it's difficult to understand. Maybe I'm prompting wrong, but when I don't understand, it's almost always because they just mash together words from context that don't form sentences with a clear meaning.

Re: Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

#110

Post by jorl17 »

I'd like to share with HN an almost exact message I got from Fable today, with exactly ONE word changed for privacy reasons.

I love what I can build now, but I sure as hell don't love the headaches this trend has been giving me.

> So the full honest arc on the case we set out to fix: the expiry rules and day note tripled the loose version of the story, the relay fix carried the device’s own guardrail through the pipeline, the fair replay then revealed the last mechanism — ticket-anchoring — which none of the shipped layers reach. Remaining options, in order of my confidence: making the resolved-ticket summaries in the AI’s context carry their day so the expiry rules have something to bite on (small, mechanical, targeted at the observed anchor); and the plan-B second-model check, which structurally catches this class no matter how the model reasons. About $25 of headroom remains. Which way?

Yikes.

(The worst part is that I understand it)

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