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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

#141

Post by datadrivenangel »

incrudible wrote: post #117
datadrivenangel wrote: post #113

so the real turning point for Claude is around April, which is Opus 4.6/4.7, which is right around the point where I personally started thinking Claude was getting different in a way which feels worse and is more awkward to use. It's better but has lost something that made it feel better.

Is it actually better though? Can you even measure it? Unguided, Claude will just produce mediocrity which by its own existence becomes almost worthless, and the newer versions become increasingly difficult to guide while also being obnoxious to read. If I did not have to interact with it, it would not be a big deal, but then also I could not get value out of it.

It's a little smarter and more effective in some ways, especially those that can be benchmarked. I suspect that they've lost something that is hard to benchmark for.

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

#142

Post by chucksmash »

rsanheim wrote: post #71
threecheese wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions. I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be…

"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example ( https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit... ). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday. "load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.

+1, useful read!

Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.

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

#143

Post by Labo333 »

SalariedSlave wrote: post #118
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…

Great work, thanks for sharing! The design is really impressive. Beautiful and dense, yet very understandable. How did you come up with this particular design? It's really nice and everything fits, the colors, the layout, all of it. Were you inspired by anything in particular? I feel like this reminds me of something, but I don't remember what exactly.

Thank you!

I asked Claude for a few original designs, then iterated a lot for the UI. It called this design "Rasterfeld", which is a word that means "field of grids", a term used in swiss design https://docs.mew.design/blog/swiss-design-style/ as @alwa said.

The 3 primary colors refer more to pop art and Bauhaus.

I'm really eager for a nice book about "design" that would document all those styles, if someone has a recommendation.

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

#144

Post by black_rabbit_ »

Labo333 wrote: post #11
nater5000 wrote: post #4

I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their…

Author here :) Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!

You did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos!

One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.

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

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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?

Its not the latter; its just excessively verbose wirh awkward word choices, the same as many poor writers. (And, like many such writers, the particular bad choices fall into recognizable, regularly recurring patterns.)

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

#147

Post by jverce »

SalariedSlave wrote: post #121

I've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible. Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation? Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content? If the ratio of…

That's most likely what's happening. SNR will constantly decrease as LLM content is so much quicker and cheaper to generate, which makes it more statistically significant, which will make it more "relevant" for future models. A positive feedback basically.

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

#148

Post by orbifold »

SalariedSlave wrote: post #121

I've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible. Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation? Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content? If the ratio of…

They are increasingly being trained on generated tasks and even (parts) of the pre-training data is 'distilled' (e.g. Clibmix as an open-source example), so there are many ways in which the vocabulary can seep into the model.

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

#149

Post by nonethewiser »

sroussey wrote: post #2

I'm surprised vacuous is not on the list. The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.

Im surprised by "provenance." I see it all the time. Except I've brought this up before and have never had it corroborated. I'm starting to think it's just my Claude.

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

#150

Post by mplanchard »

viccis wrote: post #125
nater5000 wrote: post #4

I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their…

>I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like " added the color to the ticket here" meaning that someone added details to a ticket. I've started seeing Opus 5 talk about "hermetic testing" when it just means "unit testing", so I hope that doesn't catch on...

One of my coworkers uses “load-bearing” ironically constantly now, it’s very funny
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