Reading the comments here - I can't help feeling I've missed this bubble.
How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
451–460 of 650 posts
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#452The 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.
I hope it's actually talking to itself at higher bandwidth, and hope this is because of training that succeeds better given quality inter-agent communication.
For those who care to read everything rather than walk away, Fable can be extraordinarily dense. I suspect they'll pull the promo before I learn to read it.
Still, I feel I must read rather than correct it, as results are that much better if I let it do this "with" itself: orchestrator to agents back to orchestrator.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#453I 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…
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."
The name for the phenomena could be Ananthropsis, noticing something is not from human
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#454I like to think that the reason it's so noticable is that Claude has recognized some important semantics that we ourselves lack a good word for or at least under-appreciate. What term is used in English (or other languages) with the same meaning as claude's "load-bearing"? operative? key? critical? decisive? The honest conclusion is that none of those are as good as "load-bearing". And yet the concept being referred…
> the concept being referred to is clearly extremely important and valuable to refer to
On the contrary, stock words pop up more easily when it has less confidence.
Stock phrases are a correctness smell.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Claude's affected my language in two ways. one is that, for a long time, Claude in particular responded more to feedback if I swore at it, which caused me to swear at it more. this vicious cycle generalized to the point where I now have to consciously remind myself not to swear when doing something as simple as buying a coffee or asking somebody what time it is. it was difficult to even write that sentence without th…
It's good to know that Claude knows its place then. By contrast, I have to watch myself with Siri, because calling it the *&^#@$ it is seems to trigger refusal a lot of the time.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#456I 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 used to religiously read Percona's blog posts because I considered them an authority on MySQL and worth listening to. They started using LLMs to write the posts and I can't read them anymore
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#457Does anyone have a theory for what causes Claude to speak this way? A few months ago OpenAI came out with a bit on "gremlins". It's strange IMO that Anthropic hasn't addressed how irritating, dare I say oppressive, Claude can be. Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope they fix it soon. If product folks at Anthropic think it's charming, it's not, it's terrible.
Fairly certain it's when its confidence level is too low on the right word, it hits a stock phrase instead.
When you see the metaphor or euphemism or simile is off, the selection is not quite apt, it seems the stock phrase or term is rather more probable however askew than the precise phase, and it was already low confidence about what it's trying to say, so – as it's never said – Bob's your uncle.
"Honestly/honest" is, um, absolutely (ahem) one of those and if one listens carefully, one will notice humans use "Honestly? Blah blah…" that way as well.
It taps into load-bearing speech to prop up (see, that works) unsupported claims.
All the words I just used are correct in that sentence, doing exactly (ahem) the work they're supposed to. It doesn't have that level of nuance, isn't sure, so tries to sound like what's probably right.
They're a verbal shrug.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#458How do you manage to make Opus follow any rules? Maybe it’s a windsurf thing but I have a ton of custom rules and Opus just ignores most of them. GPT on the other hand follows them like it’s a cult - if I have a rule I can’t ever force it to ignore it. Opus just doesn’t care. If I ask why it’s not following rules it will apologise and suggest creating a rule for it …
The presentation of the idea steers it into it.
Early on, it mattered to say "Avoid" (an active word) "action", rather than "Do" (affirmative) "not" (negation) "action" (affirmative again).
These days I take a pass on the rules to remove the bad thing from the rule and rephrase in terms of the desired behavior instead.
So it doesn't have to try to do not think about the pink elephant.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#459It'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.
> humans do this too
Here, look at this amazing pathfinding algorithm you should use. It takes you to the wrong place 30% of the time but humans do it too so that's ok.
Re: How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
#460I feel like it's mocking me. I literally have in my claude.md file a line that says: "Never ever under any circumstances use the phrase 'smoking gun'. Say 'found an issue' instead, but don't ever use the phrase 'smoking gun'" Lo and behold, the absolute imbecile says: "Found the smoking gun!(Oooops, I meant to say "found the problem")" Like, is this some kind of joke to you?
It talks out loud to hear itself think. So, it doesn't fully know what it thought until it's said it. No joke.
To overcome it seeing your phrase and using it more, try to convey the concept you want it to say "found an indication suggesting there may be a problem underneath" in response to. That works better than telling it to do not use terms you remind it of.
Btw, you're in good company…
With both OpenAI and Anthropic, from time to time you see it stream a response to you that then changes and rewrites under your very eyes.
Those are things they, themselves, where they sit in the token supply chain, can't get it to not say until it's said it.