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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

#71

Post by rsanheim »

threecheese wrote: post #58
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…

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.

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

#72

Post by ziml77 »

fny wrote: post #3

While Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations. You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.

Sometimes I can't even tell if what it's saying actually makes any sense to someone who understands all the terms its using, or if it's just throwing together words in a way that only make sense to its own model of language.

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

#73

Post by black_knight »

jimmaswell wrote: post #67
black_knight wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was actual Claude output on my screen at the moment I was reading this thread. No hyperbole! As far as I can tell "the capstone" is what Claude usually calls my current goal if it thinks it is a satisfying result.

How close was my guess?

I am not really sure what Claude meant, but you are not too far off, from what I understand.

I have several similar folders with variants of a construction, but taking differently structured input. They are named “plain”, “fibred” and “indexed”. So the fibred variant is clear enough.

The Claude speak I struggle with is “the capstone” and what name it could be talking about. And what folding means here. I think it just means:

“I changed an important result of the construction in the fibred variant, but kept the name. so the fibred variant is now different from the others.”

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

#74

Post by cpeterso »

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've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).

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

#75

Post by udbhavs »

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've been thinking more about how 99.9% of us don't have the experience of someone significantly more intelligent, yet also subservient working under us, which is why I keep going crazy second guessing whether Claude is spouting RLHF'd bullshit that sort of resembles English, or is genuinely (pun not intended) just better at "intuiting" things I'm working on, leading to its language.

A notable exception would be people like CEOs and managers higher up in big tech, who might be used to skilled engineers and domain experts reporting to them in unfamiliar lingo. Maybe that's why we don't hear as much on the everyday annoyances of Claude's language from that camp?

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

#76

Post by xg15 »

confusedbucket wrote: post #6

That confirms the recent spike of Claude calling everything I was recently working on a 'spike'. I still don't know what that term is supposed to represent (apparently).

A spike is an early prototype that you're supposed to throw away after having figured out the real design.

I think it was subtly dissing you.

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

#77

Post by polalavik »

MrDrDr wrote: post #17

I find Claude language often hard to process and having to wade through these words can be draining. Embarrassingly, I’ve recently caught myself using them in conversations! Do all models have the their own jargon?

I swear claude took a detour recently, its written output has been nearly incomprehensible to me. At first i thought i was getting AI-brained and just lost critical thinking but as i dug into response after response its was just the most obtuse language to explain what was going on. Really mentally taxing to wade through it all day.

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

#78

Post by applfanboysbgon »

tengbretson wrote: post #41
beering wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ItMs because Claude sprinkles these words as flavoring without aiding understanding. It feels like Claude thinks of metaphors that don’t actually mean anything (or maybe only makes sense to itself).

I don't understand. Does the metaphor "load-bearing assumption" not actually mean anything to you?

Not when "load-bearing assumption" is misused, no. "Honey, can you take the load-bearing assumption to the mechanic for an oil change?" is an example injecting the phrase into a random sentence, obfuscating the meaning of the sentence and making it more difficult to parse. LLMs do this constantly. There is no theory of mind behind how words are generated. Some phrases simply have a higher chance of being generated in various contexts, even if it doesn't make any fucking sense, and this is exacerbated by bad RLHF.

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

#79

Post by Jordan-117 »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #47
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 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 for them to process but cognitively taxing for humans.

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

#80

Post by Philpax »

ricardobeat wrote: post #44
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…

Nice work. I would suggest rewriting your README with Gemini, the most human of them, so it doesn't read exactly like the thing you are pointing at: https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing

leaving the README like this is a good bit, though
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