Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.

I understand it's not active yet, and when it will be, it should only nudge the chances between choices that are anyway likely and are already randomized today via temperature.

Watermarking is not the reason Claude talks like that.

I understand there are other reasons (overdone RLHF, for example) why claude is wedged into this weird way of writing that takes the joy out of conversing with it, but this is one as well.

The meaning of the words it uses can be oh so close, but the popularity of the words are not, and not in that context -- but the use of these other words changes the context ever so slightly, and then it uses other words where those words would work better.

I had something in code that related to people over time periods, and once it switches to a vacuous word choice, i found it starting talking using all ERP terms. I had to google the whole sentence to understand that, individual words were fine they just didn't make any sense to me.

You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.

I am not sure whether it's a consequence of learning to reason from its traces or some RLHF that trips it into using weird terms to sound smarter to the humans who rate it.

"The fibred side folded its capstone into the existing name, so the kinds are asymmetric."

What on earth does it mean to fold a capstone into a name‽

So there's a "fibred side".. the most likely candidate seems to be "fibred categories" which I hadn't heard of before, and it's talking about one side of some mapping between two sets such that if f is the primary function and f(x)=y then there exists an inverse function g(y)=x? Was it something that converted some data bidirectionally with a different algorithm on both sides?

The capstone of the inverse function would be the most important thing about it maybe?

My best guess is "In the process of working on the inverse function, the existing name (of the inverse function itself maybe?) was made to reflect the operation of the inverse function, so now the name does not follow the same naming convention as the name of the primary function (which does not contain its 'capstone')."

Its original wording is certainly dense and harder to follow for us, but it's fascinating how the model finds this the best fit for what it's trying to express IMO. Like it arrives at its own ways of overloading words/concepts, and things we would refer to in different ways in different contexts all get compressed to the same more-useful/complete idea.

Codex has never said anything nearly so alien as the Claude examples I've seen floating around, interestingly. I wonder if it just has a better training on choosing its words to present to the user or if it inherently arrived at a somewhat different mapping that favors 'plain language' more.

As far as I can tell "the capstone" is what Claude usually calls my current goal if it thinks it is a satisfying result.

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.”

My intuition is that Claude is trained to communicate to itself while coding. You see this in how bizarrely granular it is when explanation prior work, you also see this in the comments it leaves behinds.

https://www.bullshitgenerator.com/

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles

1. Adds a small prompt to each turn with the agent[1]. 2. Is like a band-aid on a bullet wound, properly solving it would mean retraining the model and they probably are already working on it.

[1] https://x.com/_can1357/status/2090360068529111530

Does anyone have an output style nailed down that actually works? If so, please share!

alwayshasbeen.jpg

Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.

I’ve noticed that Sol is pretty good most of the time, but with long contexts it’ll start to devolve into Claudish.

I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>

I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.

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!

Basically when scrolling, the frame around words will have a stable top edge to avoid flickering, and it took me a few iterations to make it work.

I tested multiple designs, some of them inspired by word clouds and the size variation stuck afterwards.

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.

I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels.

If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea:

    document.querySelector('.wall').addEventListener('wheel', e =>
      console.log(e.deltaMode, e.deltaY.toFixed(2), e.defaultPrevented ? 'PAGE' : 'native'), true)

> Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

Hyperscroll - special mode turned on with a button next to scroll that turns off scroll friction and let's you scroll into infinity (wheel keeps turning after you lift your finger).

I was focused on the data initially scrolling through until I suddenly realised, wow, this is really nice!

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 “Karen”.

I can’t say that Claude invented this; the same type of terminology cycling happens every few quarters based on what leadership is reading/being told by Gartner.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html

Claude is using it a bit liberally, but not totally incorrectly.

"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.

http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Ye_Flask

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.

"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.

The kind of quirks you see came from crowd-sourced human-in-the-loop fine-tuning, with not very good work conditions or level of qualification (so resulting in "what non-writers thought good writing looked like", before people had developed the flair to detect these patterns) as well as feedback loops during agentic reinforcement learning and RLVR.

I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like "<person> 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...

"Load bearing", not so much. Ick.

The problem is once a fun phrase is, uh, coloured by "Claude" or some other LLM, it just turns to AI slop.

Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?

Why would you consider using lists an "LLM" language thing? I really don't understand this concept. Like even this project, the top words I can see are:

1. load-bearing 2. plainly 3. quietly 4. refusal 5. survived

How are they LLM words? I used them all the time before ChatGPT was a thing.

Like if your claim is you use "etc." more because you talk to an LLM, I think you're just discovering human language, no? Like it's not a unique LLM thing that magically dropped and is now going to make people do it. It's a legit thing that most human writers have used for a long time -> which is why LLMs copy it. It's not backward.

A better claim than "people will start writing like LLMs" could be that people will become more literate in expressing themselves. But that literacy is not alien or AI to us, it is basic human language only used properly.

Granted picking apart single words outside of context doesn’t give the full picture. (well except “load bearing” which is turning into a meme at this point)

What's somewhat interesting to me is that "load-bearing" was already a common thing to say in certain communities, like lesswrong.com. Whether it breaks out from that subculture with Claude as the vector, or disappears from there because nobody wants to sound like Claude, we'll have to see. How many children are called "Elvis" these days?

> "The name Elvis was not among the top 1,000 US baby names in 2010, the first year it had not made the list since 1954, the US government said." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13302517

Most recent famous Elvis on Wikipedia is Kosovan footballer Elvis Letaj, born 2003 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(name)#People_with_the_n...

So for me they are differentiated enough, but could be that I am just used to it.

Spikes are explicitly time-boxed to keep the team focused on the red-green-refactor churn which is the software engineering process in XP.