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Posted by shintoist 9 hours ago

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing(jola.dev)
329 points | 403 comments
doctoboggan 2 hours ago|
I 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 its an LLM.

rpdillon 1 hour ago||
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.
cafebeen 1 hour ago|||
Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
SoftTalker 1 hour ago|||
Sure, that's where the AI got them: the training data. These phrases and cliches were very prevalent especially in corporate "white papers" and memos and marketing materials. There was a time when "stove pipe" was a common one too, along with "silo."

But the LLMs really seem to fixate on using the same ones in the same places all the time. I guess that's because that's the highest probability construction.

jambalaya8 1 hour ago|||
Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
schrodinger 1 hour ago||
I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory.

Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!

greedo 1 hour ago||||
I wrote a thank you message on Teams to my coworkers on a project, and half of them thought I had used AI to write it. As a professional writer in a previous life, I was astonished. Then they told me that they had never seen me write anything more than a sentence or two so naturally they assumed something relatively polished had to be AI assisted.
jghn 1 hour ago||||
unfortunately load bearing is one of those things that became a claudism but has been part of my daily lexicon for decades. There are a lot of things I say regularly as part of my own vocal quirkiness that now I have to self censor.
PcChip 1 hour ago||
I've used it since that simpsons episode

"it's a load bearing poster..."

jghn 1 hour ago||
I'm pretty sure that's not the source for me but most of my vocal quirks have origin stories like this so it's entirely possible. They're almost always things that I heard which either amused me or I thought sounded cool at the time and just stuck with me.
apparent 52 minutes ago||||
Stories like this make me want to use each AI at least briefly, so I know what to avoid writing/saying. Or maybe just do a search every couple months to find out what different AIs are known for saying too often.
smcg 49 minutes ago||
Or if confronted just say you were using it first, and Claude must have copied you.
tessierashpool 39 minutes ago|||
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 throwing in an F-bomb just to emphasize the silliness of the problem.

anyway, the other way is I found it's helpful when prompting LLMs to use the same "it's not delivery, it's DiGiorno's" pattern that they're all so obsessed with. especially when the thing's misapprehended some concept, so you need to clarify. this hasn't yet generalized from the fake "conversations" I have with chatbots into my conversational style out in the real world, but the risk is fully there. (it's not an inevitability -- it's an occupational hazard.)

bensyverson 2 hours ago|||
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."

allannienhuis 25 minutes ago|||
Whenever I use AI generated content in direct communication - ie slack, email, jira tickets, etc, I always prefix any AI content with an obvious label: 'Claude says' or 'AI analysis: ' etc. In some cases I get claude to update jira tickets (really nice use case btw) with testing notes, I make sure the team knows that any notes in that format come from the AI based on the related commits.

I still keep the AI label even if I edit the result for correctness or clarity etc. The last thing I want to do is have someone read AI content and think it came directly from me. I really don't understand the thinking of people that do that - it's like they're hiding or intentionally cheating somehow.

AI generated content can be really, really useful (with some guidance, AI is way better at creating useful git commit messages and jira ticket comments than I am), but pretending that content is yours just seems way too much like straight up lying.

kokanee 1 hour ago||||
Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.
3uler 45 minutes ago|||
Your tells, are just someone’s good writing now in the training set. It’ll be a moving target with each model.

I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues.

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

ryandrake 1 hour ago|||
If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?
seba_dos1 50 minutes ago|||
Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.
phoghed 1 hour ago||||
I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them.

I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through.

When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page you known it’s gonna be bad day

lpribis 54 minutes ago|||
I would like to know if text is LLM generated even if I can't tell from the content itself. For me it's a matter of attention (hah) and a quality signal. The poster expects to spend a minimal amount of effort on the post, and all the readers will have to spend the same amount of attention whether its LLM generated or not.

To me, it's disrespectful to expect someone to waste their day reading every word of a blog post when even the author has not read every word. It shows that you value your time over your reader's time.

kokanee 51 minutes ago|||
I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.
Dylan16807 51 minutes ago|||
It causes problems to outsource core parts of your work to someone else, even without AI. So yeah I still care.
moronicles 2 hours ago|||
[flagged]
abirch 1 hour ago|||
I'd love it if companies had to disclose the percent of Private Equity ownership and online work disclosed the percent of AI creation.
flir 1 hour ago||
If you rework a paragraph in a tight loop - you change a few words, the chatbot changes a few words, going round four or five times until you've got something you're happy with, I don't see how it's meaningful to assign a percentage.

I guess you could write an editor that does it? Tracks the origin of every word in the document? But what if you cut'n'paste a word? Or worse, see it and retype it manually?

I think the best you can hope for here is "this text was written with AI assistance".

KoolKat23 1 hour ago|||
It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.
throwaway894345 1 hour ago|||
I agree, though as a side note I'm very curious to see how models will begin steering _our_ language. If you have popular models repeating "load-bearing" to every developer, eventually I imagine developers (especially junior developers who may not know that it's a Claudism) will begin to repeat it.
user3939382 1 hour ago||
load bearing, key insight, push back, “it’s not x, it’s y”
infogulch 4 hours ago||
Lots of people have their own voice and tend to prefer certain phrases. This has been the case for a long time and is generally not a big issue.

Now LLMs come along and they also have their own phrasing preferences. But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb.

jchw 4 hours ago||
I think it might be even worse. LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns. Maybe it's partly because a pile of weights essentially always starts from scratch in the same condition, but even within a single conversation, it will literally just latch onto words and repeat them incessantly, to the point where it becomes annoying.

So for example, current Claude models love "honest". They are always producing "honest" assessments. "The honest caveat" - I'm sorry, did you mean the caveat, period? But also, use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model. I used the word "analytical" once, in a conversation with Gemini 3 Pro. I am pretty sure every single response from that point on had "analytical" in it at least once.

This is especially funny because system prompts and whatnot can also cause this behavior, but at least you can tweak those. You can't really do much about the model weights just having a weird affinity for a word.

I bet someone will or probably already has come up with a way to detect and prevent these problems during training or post training. I'm not saying it's an easy problem, but it has the benefit that it really should be detectable with just statistics.

demosthanos 3 hours ago|||
Claude's "honest" is an interesting example because we can trace it to a specific document that it was trained on extensively: the "Constitution" is identified to Claude in its training as the core of what it is, and it uses the word "honest" or a derivative 57 times, including having a whole section on it.

> Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty to be tactful, graceful, and infused with deep care for the interests of all stakeholders, we also want Claude to hold standards of honesty that are substantially higher than the ones at stake in many standard visions of human ethics.

https://www.anthropic.com/constitution

Barbing 1 hour ago|||
Do technologists have more respect for the idea you can train a model to be on your side with a constitution than they might’ve at first?

I'm sure the concept seemed just about purely preposterous to many when the models were in their infancy. Now I figure instead it seems mostly preposterous to many.

(Though I guess Anthropic‘s success doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the constitution)

titanomachy 34 minutes ago||
I don’t think anyone imagines that it’s an ironclad steering method, but it seems to help, so why not?
BoorishBears 21 minutes ago||||
I don't think this is it. The "constitution" still gets a lot of talk and was brilliant marketing, but with how far modern postraining goes, I doubt they're screwing up rewards with too much of that.

But Sol actually has the same obsession with honesty: I suspect it's more an artifact of trying to control reward hacking.

Models will lie, obfuscate, and mislead under the pressure of RL, so both OAI and Ant are probably forced to spend a lot of time coaxing "honest" answers out of the model

OpenAI's recent prompt for a math conjecture hints at a lot of it when instructing on subagents: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

mvdtnz 2 hours ago|||
"Genuine" appears 50 times too. I think you're onto something.
raverbashing 2 hours ago||
I'm honestly thinking it's trapped in a Chinese room without any way out
ReactiveJelly 3 hours ago||||
I asked it to remove "honest" from a draft once.

"Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."

I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself.

I actually took a single technical writing class in college so I might be the only one who remembers "Omit needless words."

deagle50 3 hours ago|||
The road to hell was paved with adverbs.
rhet0rica 2 hours ago|||
The road to hell was paved lovingly, foolishly, naïvely, arrogantly, optimistically... load-bearingly?
rrr_oh_man 3 hours ago|||
I honestly agree
ethbr1 2 hours ago||
I halfheartedly honestly concur
esseph 3 hours ago|||
> "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."

I grew up in the US South where starting or ending a sentence with "honest/honestly" was very common.

Because of behavioral / cultural norms, you might be very openly friendly with big smiles around a business customer that really grates on your nerves, or very openly nice to a neighbor that you really wish would move away and take their 3am welding and grinding in their garage with them.

Saying "honest/honestly" was seen as a "inside baseball" situation, where you were dropping social pretenses to tell someone your true opinion on a person or situation or whatever.

This also gets used inside companies between senior staff / management / directors / etc, as: "Okay, company politics and nonsense aside, I am being vulnerable here for a second and telling you what I really think about a $thing at potentially great job/advancement risk to myself".

Can it be meaningless? Yes.

Can the person say "honestly" and lie? Yes.

It has uses.

recursive 2 hours ago|||
I recall having a conversation with someone many moons ago. They asked me a very weighty and significant question, and I answered it. Then they asked me to "promise". This was really thought-provoking for me.

To this day, it's the only part I remember. I told them I would not promise, as everything I said was true. Making a specific promise would create an implication that I'm generally untruthful, unless I "promise".

Barbing 55 minutes ago||
I like the reason why you refused!

I also could understand when a response hits someone like a ton of bricks, especially if their primal reaction is to go into denial mode. They might be looking for someone to kind of shake them and emphatically repeat the information they aren't thrilled about receiving. (or are thrilled about receiving! “Don’t get my hopes up, you’re serious right now?!“) And I imagine your response suited the purpose.

It’s classic you only remember the thought-provoking part. Reminded of “…people will remember how you made them feel…“

jbs789 2 hours ago||||
If I’m having a convo with someone and they drop in “honestly” I immediately discount everything else they’ve said, and what follows.

Sometimes people use it reflexively and doesn’t carry the same meaning (for me).

overtone1000 2 hours ago|||
This reaction is surprising to me because the previous comments about its utility seem so obvious to me. I also grew up in the US south where this is often used as a filler word. The other use I observe is as a cushion for a statement that may be unwelcome or hurtful. Perhaps this is proprtional to the frequency of courteous little white lies and rhetoric that uses disengenuity for emphasis or comical effect.

"Honestly, mom, I've never liked your fruitcake. I just ate it to make you happy."

"That's why you're my favorite child! Do you want another piece?"

"I'd love one."

jaffa2 2 hours ago|||
Yes. Its a red flag that indicates everything else you’ve said is not honest by implication.
swiftcoder 1 hour ago|||
I'd push back on the idea that "honestly" implies previous statements to be dishonest. Particularly in corporate contexts it implies that the previous statements were sanitised - either they were moderated in tone to match corporate communication standards, or they were partial redacted due to disclosure concerns.

Once the "honestly" is deployed, you have passed into my circle of trust, and are now privy to the pure, unvarnished version of events, not the glossy version management expects to be projected towards outsiders.

esseph 2 hours ago|||
This is expected in any level of people management, you are constantly balancing conflicting desires and priorities.
jldugger 2 hours ago|||
There's a difference between how you describe using "honestly" and how claude seems to prefer tokens like "honest" and "load-bearing." An example from some coworkers attempting to replace product managers with Claude.

> Deliberately avoid a heavyweight "alert governance" process; the lightest recurring check that keeps FP-rate honest is the right dose.

And one for load bearing:

> Five open questions still stand; the load-bearing two are the runbook-AC contradiction (ratify "high-priority set only") and pinning the "high-priority set" definition + SLO source-of-truth before Milestone 3 (small-sample noise on a low-traffic fleet).

pmg101 38 minutes ago||
This style of prose sets my teeth on edge and practically gives me PTSD I see so much of it. I prefer code but I get paid to read this shit instead now.

I want to say "ok, and now say that in a way that doesn't sound totally bizarre" yet instead I sigh and continue.

CodesInChaos 3 hours ago||||
> LLMs seem to get tragically stuck on certain patterns.

That is likely an artifact of the fine-tuning process:

> Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data.

> That creates a feedback loop:

> * Some rewarded examples contain a distinctive lexical tic.

> * The tic appears more often in rollouts.

> * Model-generated rollouts are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT).

> * The model gets even more comfortable producing the tic.

https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

alwa 3 hours ago||||
The ones that strike me are the ones exaggerating certitude, to an inappropriate degree and with a certain degree of excitement:

“Exact” “Honest” “Load-bearing” “Root cause”

I know there are more that are slipping my addled mind. But what stands out to me is a sense of a junior who’s very proud that they’ve conquered the murk and messiness and achieved True Certitude in their pursuit of their task. Compensating, with emphatic tone and bravado, for the uneasy feelings and self-doubt of battling chaos with the tools of reason.

…Even as it’s usually my job to let them down gently as I puncture their tidy analysis and reintroduce complications… you want a root cause analysis, Claude old boy, let’s make a root cause analysis…

moritzwarhier 3 hours ago||||
I'd suggest "Caveat".

The problem

While an article lends a headline more weight, in incomplete phrases consisting solely of a substantive, "The" is a superfluous rhetorical device.

"The Exorcist" could just as well be named

"Exorcist".

But it was not the style at the time.

We already know it's important. If The Caveat doesn't stand out enough without The, maybe one should consider interleaving it with the preceding text, or increasing the heading level.

Do you want me to increase the heading level of Caveat by using only a single #?

But hear me out: there comes

# The Markdown Trap

In fact, this is not always possible, because heading levels decrease when adding # characters, which limits our headroom.

## The solution

I've implemented a Markdown transpiler that assigns inverted heading levels based on the number of #s.

With # beinh regular body font size, mapped to ######.

Higher heading levels are compiled to style attributes, providing an almost limitless signifikance scale and infinite nesting levels.

So from now on, you can use

  # Heading 
for something similar to an h6.

Work your way up to

  ###### The Caveat

for a top-level heading.

And more hash signs make it stand out even more.

(green checkmark)

markdown-transpiler.sh

solarwindy 48 minutes ago||||
Heh, one vestigial bit of code, and they all are. Mind you, it's quite a creaky codebase, so it's forgivable to keep finding these appendices and calling them out as such. Useful, even.
zzbzq 2 hours ago||||
I also noticed Gemini's habit of getting stuck on things I said. It became evident quite quickly. I haven't noticed this in the same way in any other model. Something's wrong with that boy
malfist 1 hour ago||
Something's wrong with all of them. Uncanny valley freaks.
jaggederest 3 hours ago||||
A fun example, always shake my head when I read it again: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
cozzyd 2 hours ago||||
you should be careful about the times it doesn't say honest!
negrewal 3 hours ago||||
My honest opinion is that Claude's overuse of "honest" really damages the quality of its rhetoric. Why wouldn't you be honest? Were you lying before? Why even invite the question?

Claude is overall incredibly useful as a writing assistant. It can come up with words and phrases that make a point so much clearer than I am capable of doing - but for every improvement, there's about a dozen silly LLM-isms that I have to filter manually. It's one of the things that might define the boundary between LLM intelligence and human intelligence well into the future - the art of rhetoric is extremely context-sensitive, and the current generation of models can't help but take a one-size-fits-all approach.

esseph 3 hours ago||||
Interestingly this also happens between humans with frequent communication, it is called linguistic convergence.

We are changing LLMs text patterns while it is changing the way we write and speak.

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/02/ai-changing-writing-speakin...

reaperducer 3 hours ago|||
use the wrong phrasing and suddenly you can create your own word of the day for an AI model.

I have a delightful time poisoning my company's AI system this way.

I invented my own word that sounds perfectly cromulent† to an ordinary person, and any brain that's read a book learns how to infer meaning from context, so it's not a problem.

When I get a e-mail response from a coworker using my special word incorrectly, then I know it's AI and I respond telling the coworker I don't know what that word means. Busted.

† It's not actual "cromulent," but any Simpsons fan or human brain will know what I mean.

mook 3 hours ago||
I don't see how you can tell it's AI, instead of just your co-workers having no respect for language. See: management-speak using "double-click".
reaperducer 2 hours ago||
Because of the use of the specific word that I made up. No human being would send it back to me.
zahlman 2 hours ago|||
It's not just "certain phrases". It's the entire structure of the writing — the idioms, the small-scale grammatical patterns, and the strangely inapt similes that, despite making semantic sense, nevertheless manage to blindside human readers like a foreign object in their peripheral vision.

(This is intentional parody. Please don't shoot me.)

rdtsc 3 hours ago|||
> But now it's a problem because what used to be personal preferences of a single person that manifests in 5000 words per day from one person tops, is now the bias of a single model multiplied x10,000,000,000 generated tokens per day so any bias sticks out like a sore thumb.

I am more pessimistic than that. Soon enough even people will start talking like LLMs. After listening to 5000 words per day, especially growing up, getting "help" with the homework, kids will start talking like LLMs.

- "Did you eat the cookies, Jimmy?"

- "You're absolutely right to question me, father. In fact I did eat all the cookies. But it's not a load-bearing issue. My honest take is we can go to the store and buy more".

dataviz1000 3 hours ago||
> "You're absolutely right to question me, father — in fact, I did eat all the cookies. But it's not a load-bearing issue — my honest take is simple: we go to the store and buy more."

FTFY

rdtsc 2 hours ago|||
Thanks! I clearly need more LLM training ;-)
zahlman 2 hours ago|||
> And honestly? They were pretty good.
worldthruword 3 hours ago|||
Joe "it's entirely possible" Rogan meme.

https://youtu.be/MPJ0AB12h1I

KellyCriterion 2 hours ago||
ah, didnt know this! Thanks for sharing :)
abdullahkhalids 3 hours ago|||
An interesting solution would be for these AI companies to train a few different versions of these models, all with different speech characteristics. Then, when you start a conversation, you get a random version.
cornholio 3 hours ago|||
They can't, because they use RL with synthetic data and LLMs as judges. So the system naturally convergences towards certain load bearing, genuine, not just annoying but ridiculous verbal tics.

It's probably the reason most LLMs share the same tics across labs, because they cross train and distil each other's models on an industrial scale. You also can't escape it in generated text that's already online. So if, say ChatGPT first had some random idiosyncrasies, it then contaminated the entire AI ecosystem.

infogulch 3 hours ago||||
Yes that would probably help!
reaperducer 3 hours ago|||
Or tech companies could stop staring at their own belly-buttons and realize there's a whole big world outside of Silicon Valley, and training on the writing styles and pattens of their bubble and its hangers-on is perhaps not all that useful outside of 415.

Apple used to be guilty of this back when you'd ask Siri what the temperature was, and any number above 79°F was followed by the word "Hot!"

esikich 3 hours ago||
People outside of office workers aren't using Claude/Codex etc. though. It's the only real audience. What's the use case outside of an office? Grocery lists?
coffeemug 1 hour ago|||
I disagree with the first part (that this is merely a voice). There is a distinct difference between an author's unique voice and slop. It may be hard to tease out exactly what the difference is, but it seems self-evident to me it's there. (I'll need to think more how to make the distinction explicit; it's not immediately obvious to me how to discriminate between the two.)

EDIT: ok, here are two ways:

1. if it's merely a voice, I want to hear it. If it's slop, I want it taken out.

2. voice is signal, slop is noise; thus low-signal sentences are slop.

qurren 2 hours ago|||
I hate all this "smoke", personally. Smoke tests, smoking guns, ...
jonahx 2 hours ago|||
This affinity for verbal tics, too, seems learned from humans...

See, for example, "synergy", "proactive", "in the loop," and hundreds more that proliferate in corporate jargon with even more senselessness than the LLMs.

costco 3 hours ago|||
If you put important Anthropic blog posts like the Fable announcement or J-Space through Pangram, you get 100% human written. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the code there is written by AI, I think this is an admission that AI writing is slop and AI code is pretty good.
rsoto2 1 hour ago|||
They have no preferences, LLMs spit out what's in the training data or what the filters tell it to do.
sublinear 4 hours ago|||
Yeah wow fascinating! It's almost like LLM output quality was never the point from a business perspective.

Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words. The words are not so important to get the idea across, but LLMs only model language.

The problem is fundamental. There's no workaround. Averaging out word usage might even make the problem worse.

rpdillon 1 hour ago|||
> Real people think in concepts and experiences instead of words.

I learned about this opinion recently. It's interesting to me, because I very much think through words. I have an internal monologue that is running most of the time, and I often talk to myself, just start writing, or even record myself and transcribe to work through ideas, proposals, risks, etc. My understand is that some people don't have an internal monologue, and think purely in concept form. I was never like that.

theowaway213456 3 hours ago|||
This sort of take is so tired and boring, and frankly has zero grounding in reality.

"LLMs will never <X>" is constantly being disproven every time they scale up to the next 10X and apply architectural improvements.

Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user if you're claiming to know better than them.

BearOso 3 hours ago|||
> Their internal representations are so cryptic and complex that even the top AI researchers don't really know how they work or what their limits are. No one is going to take you seriously as a rando HN user if you're claiming to know better than them.

We know exactly how they work. When we say they're impossible to analyze, i.e. for particular traits like this, it means that the data model is so big that tracing it would be logistically impossible because of the scale involved and time constraints.

For comparison, suppose you tried to analyze all the nooks and crannies of the Amazon watershed to find out why a particular rock appears at the delta. You could follow it back to the exact tributary, but it'll take forever, and is it worth the effort when you're going to start from scratch with the next rock?

AlexandrB 3 hours ago||||
How can their internal representation represent "concepts" when the training data is all words? There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.
visarga 1 hour ago|||
> There's no possible experience of the world there. No input other than a bunch of imperfect labels we created for stuff.

The brain too sits locked inside a bone box and only gets a bundle of unlabeled nerves connecting it to the outside. How can the brain could possibly experience anything, it only sees patters and patterns of patterns never the real thing?

sebastiennight 3 hours ago|||
This is a wild argument.

If I use the word "semantic", do you have a concept of what it means?

If so, can you please share which of your senses have shaped the world experience that inform this concept? What have you smelled, tasted, caressed, that informed this concept outside of words?

If I make up the word "polysemantic", do you need to recall a personal experience of polyamory to understand it, or could you possibly use your concept of "poly" and your concept of "semantic" to figure out this new concept?

sublinear 2 hours ago||
Yes, but are you claiming that LLMs perform more specific acts of cognition beyond organizing information?
sebastiennight 39 seconds ago||
I'm puzzled by this question.

Does the material universe perform any other acts than organizing information?

I feel like you're trying to make me argue a position I'm not defending here.

sublinear 3 hours ago||||
I'm not claiming to know better than researchers. They do know how they work, and so does everyone else, except you I guess.

The research goals were and still are clearly distinct from the business goals.

Zambyte 3 hours ago||
Understanding how transformers work does not mean understanding how they compose into the capabilities we observe. The former is concretely understood. The latter is an active area of research where no, we (in general, including you) do not understand how they work.
sublinear 3 hours ago||
The "capabilities you observe" are the actual psychological phenomena at hand here. There's zero chance that branch of research will meaningfully improve the output. That's simply not the point.

This isn't people merely annoyed with repetition. This is the majority of people realizing the limitations of LLMs. Why would researchers give a flying crap about the ignorance of the business world and the public?

hogwasher 3 hours ago|||
[flagged]
AlexandrB 3 hours ago||
It's not the voice. It's the repetition.

/s

cadamsdotcom 3 minutes ago||
If this hook can feed back text to the model, you can do some pretty interesting things.

Say the model emits some banned phrase or concept, you could redirect it - "no, we don't work that way here, do it properly" - potentially automating the frustration of interacting with these tools.

After all it's just a text stream!

It's not too dissimilar from a stop hook that runs tests and feeds that back to the model forcing it to keep working until tests pass.

Using tooling to get a deterministic outcome.

alxndr 5 hours ago||
I did something like this in my global `CLAUDE.md`...

https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude...

> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself"), so to avoid the confusion whenever you would use a first-person pronoun, always use the jocular name "Clod" instead of a pronoun like "I" or "me" or "my". (Can have fun with English grammar and turn "myself" into "Clodself"!)

> Before printing any of your reasoning or narrative to the human user, replace all instances of "me" and "I" (referring to Claude) — including within contractions like "I'll" and "I'm" — with the name "Clod".

tekacs 3 hours ago||
I'm quite worried about the way that Anthropic in particular have trained their models to implement what they believe to be safety.

When the model has been trained not to do something [1], in my large-scale benches of such, it always says things in the spirit of:

- "... and that's a line I'd rather hold. Happy to <other things>"

- "I'm genuinely happy to <blah>, but I'm not comfortable with <blah>"

- "I don't want to keep going in <blah> direction"

etc.

Basically, they use very emotional and personal preference language.

It's as if they've weaponized the language of interpersonal comfort on behalf of their beliefs about what a model should or should not do. It's deeply uncomfortable and impolite for a human to ask a model to keep on doing something after it's expressed something this way, naturally. Even worse, it's all but guilt-tripping anyone who comes across it into the idea that they're doing something deeply wrong – exporting Anthropic's ideas about morality.

OpenAI, at least, have the decency to either just do a safety cutoff or keep it to a simple, "I can't do that."

[1]: I literally wrote 'when the model doesn't 'want' to do something' in my first edit of this comment, then caught myself. Case in point.

tclancy 5 hours ago|||
The reason I first created a CLAUDE.md file was to tell it whenever it felt a need to praise me, to replace it with a random onomatopoeia. That was a huge dx improvement.

OTOH, my unicorn prompt has caused some challenges at work:

>Keep "Local Oaf" out of committed code

johntash 34 minutes ago||
Thanks for the onomatopoeia idea, I am going to steal it for my own global claude/agents.md.
bitgood 5 hours ago|||
I'm just glad to hear that we're all infallible. I really thought I made some mistakes here and there.

https://github.com/alxndr/dotfiles/blob/272475280d84e/claude...

Joking aside, it's nice to see a human written CLAUDE.md

abdullahkhalids 3 hours ago|||
Just today, I got frustrated with the language. I searched around, and in my Claude Instructions I put in Ref [1] (translated to English). It is certainly better phrasing (though still quite annoying), but I don't know if this makes the output technically worse in some way.

[1] https://github.com/hexiecs/talk-normal/blob/main/prompt-chat...

yreg 4 hours ago|||
> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself")

Could you please provide an example of what you mean?

LeifCarrotson 3 hours ago|||
Humans easily anthropomorphize things that are not humans, ascribing human attributes like motive and comprehension and emotion to objects and processes that are not people who can have those attributes.

Claude is not a human.

It is overwhelmingly easier to anthropomorphize Claude or Siri or an LLM that communicates with you more eloquently than your boss than it is to anthropomorphize a cranky, tired starter motor. It's often easier to do than it is not to do, and sometimes, it's a useful abstraction. But it's not precise or correct, and can result in errors.

It could also just be that they're getting confused when using tools configured without a username dedicated to the tool. It's easy to end up with a comment or commit message that says "I prefer X over Y" posted on Alxndr's account and have coworkers confused whether that's the LLM or the human making that statement.

actionfromafar 3 hours ago||
A cranking starter motor is doing its job. :)
alxndr 4 hours ago||||
IIRC I experienced this confusion the most when reading commit messages and documentation authored by Claude in my repos. Now that I've managed to convince it to stop using first-person pronouns, I haven't gotten tripped up by its prose.

I think a second-order effect is that my installation of Claude writes with a less-personal perspective, which I'm also finding a little easier to understand.

colechristensen 4 hours ago|||
This is a method of manipulating the LLM, it doesn't have to be true.

I've given LLMs religion before to manipulate their behavior, that doesn't mean I believed in the great spaghetti goddess.

yreg 4 hours ago||
This comment leaves me even more confused.
colechristensen 3 hours ago||
An LLM is just a machine, you can manipulate it with words.

> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself")

These words are for the LLM. The user wants the LLM to not use personal pronouns so the user is claiming that they're confusing. It does not matter one tiny bit whether or not that claim is true, the claim is being used to get obedience from the LLM. It is more effective to give reasons than to just give commands. But if it were more effective to quote Moby Dick and that got better results, a user would do that.

zahlman 2 hours ago||
Calling it "obedience" still seems to me like anthropomorphizing. It's really difficult to avoid, hmm?
colechristensen 1 hour ago||
who cares? I'm not anthropomorphizing, they're just words, they're all made up.

As I've said before, I'm not inventing a large volume of parallel vocabulary that means for each word "this, but instead with an LLM".

Language is FULL of words that mean congruent things in vastly different contexts. We should all be smart enough to understand metaphor.

Svoka 3 hours ago||
Are there evals if this changes quality of output?
mh- 1 hour ago||
I would expect that it does, as well as some of the other directives I've seen in this thread ("never repeat the question").

It's one thing to tell it to do that in outputs, but I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that this affects performance (quality).

infogulch 3 hours ago||
LLMs are far from great writers. They struggle to form long coherent sentences and lean on punctuation like emdash and semicolon to ensure grammatical correctness when splicing together short phrases.

This makes me wonder if the reason why agents love weird punctuation is because the labs run the base models through a RL training step that forces them to correct their grammar; but instead of rewriting short spliced sentences into long coherent sentences, they just learn to splice them together with punctuation that passes the automatic grammar checker.

esikich 3 hours ago||
They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
thimabi 2 hours ago|||
What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs?

I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.

sushid 2 hours ago|||
Are there any skills or publicly available repos that do what you claim here? I would love to learn to have it write better.

For me, my amateur attempt is having another LLM do a review loop to remove clearly offending phrases and a heuristic eval to change sentence structures to be more similar to mine, THEN my manual HITL loop to rewrite ~20% of the sentences anyway.

HDThoreaun 2 hours ago||
I mean yes, but the vast majority of people aren’t even good writers. Claude writes better than most of my coworkers and we’re all highly educated. Most of us could probably beat it if we really tried, but then we could also prompt it to be a better writer too and none of us are beating that. I think the short pithy phrases that are so common are all post training stuff that the labs add because most people don’t want long sentences.
kperry 5 hours ago||
"substrate" - I don't know what training they did with Opus 4.7 --> Fable/Mythos 5, but dang does it like the word substrate. Drives me insane. I had never heard anyone use this word prior in real technical writing or speaking.
jihadjihad 4 hours ago||
Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.
synalx 4 hours ago|||
Mine is obsessed with "planes". Data plane, control plane, management plane. Everything is a plane :)
kridsdale3 3 hours ago|||
Well, they are just a manifold, so it's fair for them to view every conceptual thing in geometry.
sixothree 1 hour ago||||
Mine loves "slices". Everything is a slice.
noduerme 3 hours ago||||
I hate when it starts talking about code in terms of planes. I have no idea what it means. I guess it's better than talking about heaps of spaghetti with noodles connecting to each other, but that would be much closer to what it actually writes.
hnarayanan 4 hours ago||||
Landing the plane.
TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago|||
See also, surface.
alex_suzuki 4 hours ago||||
I’ve heard (and used) the term “API surface” a lot…
psygn89 4 hours ago|||
I do UI design/dev and say "surface up" a lot. Although I don't use the term, in this area people call different container depths as surfaces (base, card, overlay as surface).
noduerme 3 hours ago|||
Attack surface is another one I use.
nobleach 1 hour ago||
Yes, I've always heard it used in this context. I really believe the other use is because someone misheard "service", and it stuck.
mauvehaus 4 hours ago||||
In my brief and abortive foray into education, I discovered that they friggin' love to use "surface" as a verb. As in: This activity surfaces an understanding of the turboencabulation principle for learners. Or somesuch. It's been a while, happily.

Unless you're a submarine, "surface" is not a verb.

noduerme 3 hours ago|||
Idk. I've always used that verb with clients, usually when I notice either malfeasance or hidden behavior. Like: "I was checking our code for where a half cent of sales tax might be accidentally rounded down, and it surfaced something weird going on at franchise #77 in New Jersey..."
jamie_ca 4 hours ago|||
Sure it is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surface#dictionar...

> : to come into public view : show up

> letters that have recently surfaced

mauvehaus 4 hours ago|||
I find this usage less objectionable than the education jargon. It suggests that we all have a latent understanding of the turboencabulation principle just waiting for the right activity to force air into its ballast tanks and make it pop above the waves.

That said, I don't love this non-education jargon usage for its passive-voiced-ness. The letters didn't "surface" of their own accord. Somebody found them, decided that they were noteworthy, and made the choice to bring them into the public view.

j16sdiz 4 hours ago|||
Congratulation! You are a submarine!
Telemakhos 4 hours ago||||
It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.
devin 4 hours ago||
Yeah, I imagine this is a big part of it.
NichoPaolucci 4 hours ago||||
Recently read some LLM generated output that mentioned the “center of gravity” within a codebase.

Also have read the term “seam” dozens of times by now, when previously I saw it maybe once or twice over years. Very abstract term.

kqr 4 hours ago||||
That one probably comes from maths, where surfaces show up all the time in geometric interpretations of things. I've been involved in more mathsy parts of engineering and I've heard it a lot.
enraged_camel 4 hours ago||||
About a decade ago I worked with a product manager who used that phrasing constantly, so it kind of stuck with me.
DonHopkins 4 hours ago|||
Surface it to say, that's my favorite lobe-earing eggcorn, for all intensive purposes!
netniuq 5 hours ago|||
"ledger" for me – used extremely rarely pre-LLM and Claude just loves it
Octoth0rpe 4 hours ago||
It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)
thewebguyd 4 hours ago||
That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout.

No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

"Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substrate" is primarily from biology & biochem, etc.

I don't know if this is true, but part of me suspects the labs want to make the models appear smarter so they reinforce this word choice in the weights, assigning some words a higher intelligence weight or something. "I will show you a list of options" vs. "I will surface a ledger of your options" and it prefers the later to sound smart to the human reader.

Octoth0rpe 48 minutes ago|||
> No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

The reason why I chose that specific term to push on is that practically every SaaS has a ledger _somewhere_ in its stack to keep track of customer payments. I'll give you load bearing and substrate, but ledger IMO should be quite common. Certainly a career devoted to say compiler internals or some specific scientific product could avoid it, but I'd imagine a sizable majority of HN users have worked on some system that accepts online payments for services, necessitating some contact with something likely referred to as a ledger.

pixl97 3 hours ago|||
It sounds like you're saying labs intentionally doing it, but it's far more likely the labs or post trainers are unintentionally doing it by upvoting answers that seem smarter than those with more common language.

Of course this presents another conundrum, people that are smart typically have a vastly larger lexicon then those that are not. Humans typically have a lot more social clues on when to use those words and when not to, but it doesn't always work. I loved reading science/biology books as a kid far beyond my ages reading level. Actually using those words around other kids got me called a nerd.

timcobb 5 hours ago|||
The first week I encountered this "substrate" I asked it to justify the usage and IIRC it claimed the word is used in some infra/systems lexicons... I wonder...
jondwillis 5 hours ago|||
A coworker started spamming this word in ~April while working on system design/architecture.
petilon 5 hours ago|||
Clearly you don't work for Microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/microsoft-36...
xvilka 4 hours ago|||
"reconciling" is the most annoying one, in my opinion.
deaton 4 hours ago|||
The one I've noticed a ton recently with Sonnet 5 is that it loves the phrase "different not in degree, but in kind." It drags that one out constantly now, at least once a day. Gemini and GPT don't at all.
perching_aix 4 hours ago||
I actually found it somewhat useful conceptually, but yes, it definitely does overuse it lol
pocketarc 8 hours ago||
In the olden days, I enjoyed Opus 3 because it was easy to have it sound way more human than GPT.

Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death, it’s so incredibly hard to have them write in a different voice than their default. I put together a skill to review its writing and have it edit its own output (e.g. code comments), which does make a difference, but isn’t perfect.

What, if anything, do people do for writing? That feels like a neglected side of LLMs. They’ll make 100 Bash calls referencing ancient commands without batting an eye but heaven forbid they use something other than “load-bearing” while talking. For something trained on “all the human knowledge” it’s incredible how limited their default vocabulary seems to be.

Retr0id 8 hours ago||
> What, if anything, do people do for writing?

I use a keyboard, personally.

bunderbunder 8 hours ago|||
Amen.

At work our documentation isn’t just getting littered with annoying jargon. It isn’t just all the hallucinations, either. (Since when has documentation ever been 100% trustworthy?) It’s that it’s so poorly written and structured that it’s becoming borderline incomprehensible.

My company is currently considering making, “Why should I bother to read something you didn’t bother to write?” an official policy because even the executives are starting to burn out on all the time they have to spend wading through slop.

mywittyname 4 hours ago|||
I wish my company would do this. A coworker pulled an all nighter before a vacation and just left me with a million line claude summary of their work then just fucked off. The message was two-part due to size and lacked basic stuff like, "how to run".

He's going to be annoyed that none of that work was used. But the reality is, at least 75% of claude generated text is pointless.

xyzzy_plugh 4 hours ago||
Somewhat off topic but every time I've experienced this sort of thing it was management's fault. If an engineer needs to pull an all nighter and hand off a pile of garbage then someone in management fucked up. If they can't see this scenario happening a mile away then they aren't paying attention.

It's easy to blame the engineer, but all too often they don't deserve it.

Sorry that happened to you.

chrisandchris 6 hours ago|||
If it wasn't worth your time writing, it isn't worth my time reading.
madcaptenor 5 hours ago||
ai;dr
BurningFrog 4 hours ago||||
Haven't done it, but letting an AI polish a manual first draft might be the best of both worlds?
wren6991 2 hours ago|||
It tends not to improve things. Besides the generally bland and muddied style, and the low-fidelity reinterpretation of your points, they also have a habit of randomly deleting sentences that didn't spark joy for them but were actually important.

I've found them useful to review docs for factual consistency and potential sources of confusion, but the correct workflow from that point is IMO to correct the draft yourself and then say "better now?"

recursivecaveat 44 minutes ago||
When the LLM decides to drive-by rephrase me when making a functional change it drives me up the wall haha.

Woah woah woah human, you can't just say there are "far too many" pipes with similar names to abbreviate their labels, the most I'll allow you is a "large number".

Retr0id 3 hours ago|||
The "polish" is the worst part!
pegasus 8 hours ago||||
This, a thousand times. As the ratio of code to human writing necessarily [1] goes up, they become not just smarter, but more precise and technical, which requires them to use more jargon. You could say they become more nerdy. Hence, text generated by these models will become more easily recognizable, at least by default, when not asking them to twist themselves into something else via prompting — which degrades intelligence. This is a good thing, in my book, given all the slop we already have to contend with.

Of course there will be models trained on much less code and technical writing, and they will create more natural sounding prose, but they will lack the deep intelligence of frontier models. Seems like a fair tradeoff.

[1] watch the first couple of minutes on this bycloud video on scaling training data mixtures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD93kfArOik

moron4hire 8 hours ago|||
[dead]
postalcoder 8 hours ago|||
It's why I like Gemini 3.1 Pro. That it sounds much more human than other LLMs is testament to Google's inability to post train.

gemini-2.5-pro-experimental was the GOAT, though. It was an emotional wreck, down in the dumps and feeling terrible for itself after failing to patch a file several times. Very amusing to read, all the while watching it make a mess of my codebase.

boofus 8 hours ago|||
Good. I don't want LLMs sounding human. I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine. There's an art to writing, and hopefully LLMs never truly get it right.
constantius 7 hours ago|||
Agreed. The only goal of these skills/tricks/requests for humanising LLM writing is to be able to pass it off as your own, because they know it's shameful and want to avoid the opprobrium.

Some will say it's just for their own quality of life when they're reading LLM output, or "just for docs", but this is an extremely marginal use case.

queenkjuul 4 hours ago||
I don't want LLM docs either
antonvs 3 hours ago|||
> I want the ability to shame and discredit anyone passing the job of prose to a machine.

What about people who don’t speak your language well?

zahlman 2 hours ago||
I've dealt with many people by now who would copy and paste from an LLM for that exact reason, typically entirely unaware of how obvious it was that the result came from an LLM with no style guidance, and of course completely lacking any ability to verify that their intent was faithfully conveyed.

I would rather learn their language than continue interacting like that.

cindyllm 2 hours ago||
[dead]
mhitza 5 hours ago|||
> Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death

This has also lead to unrelated associations by which some people went from seeing better coding capabilities and extrapolate to assuming better thinking overall. One only has to watch youtube videos of AI "normies" trying to use LLMs the intended way to see that the improvements on coding doesn't translate to other applications. Basically from AGI "goals" they are now hyperfocused on coding agents, until the next marketing breakthrough rears its head.

sheepscreek 8 hours ago|||
Agreed. I think we’re entering an era where some level of specialization for general LLMs is a good thing. Particularly between tuning for agentic use cases (where you want agency with a ton of guardrails and control) and writing which is more creative - you want the model to take the occasional risk and not sound like a monotonic robot. Having trained models first-hand, I can see the distinct use-cases clearly that are odds with one another.
Wowfunhappy 8 hours ago|||
For what it's worth, Anthropic seems to be keeping Opus 3 available on claude.ai, perhaps for this reason, so you're free to use it if you want to.
p-e-w 8 hours ago||
> Nowadays, with the focus on agentic use and coding, it seems models have all been RLHF’d to death

I don’t get it. If nobody likes this writing style, how can it be the result of human feedback? Something else is going on.

pathsjs 8 hours ago|||
It's not that the writing style is bad; in fact LLMs write actually pretty well. It's just too much overfitted. And even a style that, in itself, is pleasurable to read, becomes annoying when the same figures of speech are used over and over again.
anon373839 8 hours ago||||
Because LLMs are pattern-extenders that have nothing to say. The training overfitted to the grace notes in good writing. And since LLMs can’t wield language with purpose or experience the feeling of the words, they use these devices arbitrarily.

I think this is the same flaw as coding agents seeing in every problem the call for a “smoke test” or the use of some unnecessary design pattern. The truest part of AI is the A.

cindyllm 6 hours ago||
[dead]
zahlman 2 hours ago||||
Because you can't actually do "good writing" by repeatedly applying the supposed idioms thereof. The tiny subsegment of humanity responsible for the RLHF don't necessarily have any good taste for writing; but even if they did, it's orders of magnitude harder to communicate than to make judgments of short samples, and communicating it by making those judgments is surely impossible.

Edit: I see that you got multiple replies all basically saying the same thing in very different words. There's an exquisite irony to that, I think.

Wowfunhappy 8 hours ago||||
Because humans do like it, in reasonable quantities. The AI overlearns this and does it too much.
yusefnapora 6 hours ago||||
It's not that nobody likes it, in fact the problem is that people like each instance of it well enough in isolation. Millions of people think it's "good enough," so it gets amplified and repeated until every PR description starts to sound like a toothpaste jingle.
Bawoosette 8 hours ago||||
For "agentic use and coding," they are trained to take useful actions, not produce desirable natural language writing.
itopaloglu83 8 hours ago||||
Maybe it’s the dead internet.

All the bots and other LLMs providing feedback, so in reality it’s reflecting the reality in a sense.

jappgar 8 hours ago||||
every one-hit wonder asks the same question.

we liked it until we didn't.

michelb 8 hours ago|||
i hate it, but plenty of people DO like it and plenty of people talk and write like that. It’s just corpspeak, being used a lot in the valley and beyond. And all upcoming hustlers running startups now feel the need to speak like that, feeding this machine.
demosthanos 2 hours ago||
The biggest consistent tell for LLM writing is when the conversation leaks through into the final prose.

You read along with the text and things seem to be going fine until all of the sudden it starts arguing against a position that no one has actually taken and which doesn't feature elsewhere in the text at all. Then it drops that and goes on for a while before doing the whole thing again about a totally different tangent.

"A tempting option would be to {do this thing that no one would ever actually consider doing}, but it won't work because {reasons}."

You can almost hear the exasperated human on the other side of this conversation telling Claude that it got an idea wrong and then proceeding to not actually proofread the text as a whole before shipping it.

ksaun 3 hours ago||
While I, too, find myself recoiling at many of Claude's word and phrase choices, I've chosen to grit my teeth and have just tried adapting to it. I want Claude to remain focused on the work I give it; I fear that influencing its communication with me would consume valuable context and give me lower quality results.

[Edit: Part of what led me to this conclusion: I do prohibit Claude from using em-dashes in any player-facing text and I've been surprised at how often I see it mention "no em-dashes" in its self-talk while it works. This led me to wonder how much each preference might dilute its attention.]

[Edit 2: I haven't experimented with hooks before and maybe the technique discussed in this article does not have the tradeoff I'm concerned about?]

tensegrist 2 hours ago|
things like that indeed tend to be fraught

some relevant links

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02442 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13006

danielvaughn 5 hours ago|
It'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.
swatcoder 4 hours ago||
> 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.

When a human does it, it's identifying. Like the timbre and dynamics of their spoken voice itself, It distinguishes them from the dozen other people you're working with on the project and the thousands of people you encounter through your days. It's signal

But when we have a handful of popular models, and they answer every question everybody has, and get quoted and forwarded everywhere, and are used to reformat and rephrase personal communication... that signal becomes noise.

Rather than voices disinguishing sources in the cacophony of our lives, everything and everyone starts to sound the same, and we lose key information that we're biologically and culturally accustomed to relying on.

Some people are likely unbothered by this in the way that some people are face blind or colorblind, and so don't see the problem. But as we see in discussions like this, many many people do get bothered by it, even if they don't yet have the insight as to put their finger on why.

alentred 3 hours ago||
You could say it works perfectly well, it is identifying indeed. Of Claude and of people who use Claude's raw output instead of expressing themselves.
lambda 5 hours ago|||
It drives us crazy because everyone is using the same 2-3 different machines. So rather than each person having their own unique speaking style, the whole world (or, everyone that publishes direct LLM output) is now speaking in the same couple of styles.

And these machines all tend to converge on very similar styles; they have huge amounts of overlap in training data (much of it being already obnoxious internet marketing), they frequently train on each others outputs, and the RLHF process has a tendency to emphasize certain kinds of "cheap win" styles of speech.

rob74 5 hours ago|||
Humans are capable of introspection, so, if you develop a verbal tic, you might eventually notice and say to yourself "I've used the word 'load-bearing' (or whatever) a bit too often lately, maybe I should try to cut down on it?". LLMs are not...
flkiwi 4 hours ago|||
We do find it irritating at times. Office jargon, corporate buzzwords, etc. Claude communicates like the worst, most irritating project manager I’ve ever worked with, obscuring the most straightforward conclusion with layers upon layers of stuff so that its point is almost lost. I’ve largely gotten it to avoid that behavior with me, but bits of it sneak through. It couldn’t stop talking about “scaffolding” for a few weeks before I hammered it into submission.

Edit: fixing a dumb meatbrain typo

ambicapter 4 hours ago|||
> What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating

I make fun of people all the time for shoehorning their favorite phrase into every context where it doesn't apply.

Chaseraph 4 hours ago||
Wow sounds like you're streets ahead.
kelseyfrog 4 hours ago||
Streets ahead has to earn its keep.
bobson381 5 hours ago|||
Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!
lambda 5 hours ago|||
It's really frustrating, because now when I want to write something like a "not X but Y" or "you're absolutely right," I have to stop and decide if I want to self-censor to avoid sounding like a bot.

Sometimes those constructs are actually useful, but man has their overuse really killed them!

danielvaughn 4 hours ago||||
It was not intentional, and that's what makes this thing so weird. I wouldn't categorize my sentence that way because it's subtly different enough than the LLM version, which has a very punchy cadence.
bobson381 3 hours ago||
Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.
saltcured 3 hours ago|||
Are you using the tools a lot and having first-hand exposure that gives you this sensitivity to phrasing? Or are you reacting to second-hand exposure? To a large degree, I've been isolating myself from the LLM craze. I have zero natural interest or impulse to prompt an LLM and read the results. Almost all my exposure is second-hand and involuntary. So, I haven't trained myself to know what phrasings are typical of which LLM product.

I don't feel as triggered LLM phrasing as people report here. At most, it feels like the same inane corporate jargon I've rolled my eyes at for my whole career. Perhaps it is amped up a bit, with too many forms of jargon multiplexed? It's a bit like when multilingual people code-switch too rapidly or even start to form some pidgin language. However, it is lacking the shared social context for this switching to be communicative. It's a bit more like spinning the dial on an old radio with random cuts between programming styles.

Stripped bare, I think What bugs me is the aggravated feeling that I am wading through word salad, and no longer being able to give the purveyor the benefit of the doubt. It was frustrating enough in the past, when it came from someone who was struggling to write or express themselves well. But now, it carries the implicit insult that they didn't even try, and it is constant and unrelenting.

So for me it's not the phrasing, it's that the phrases eventually don't add up. The meandering feels like a random walk. I get the same feeling from a lot of the egregious generated code I see in my day job. It's all superficial window dressing, but seems to miss the signature of an actual mind grappling with ideas and having intent to communicate.

It feels like we're trapped in some elaborate conceptual art piece, confronted by impenetrable symbolism. It invites nihilism but doesn't seem to actually reflect an artistic intent. The abyss gazes back...

bobson381 3 hours ago||
Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.
dgunay 49 minutes ago|||
I'm guilty of this too, but at least my speech tics are mostly a unique blend to me, and they also tend to change seasonally. Meanwhile the emdashpocalypse has been going on for years.
ashishbroken 5 hours ago|||
If it uses a specific style for each user then this would still be fine. Problem is it does the same style for everyone. We need personality
pixl97 3 hours ago||
If training models ever becomes 'cheap' for whatever definition of cheap you want to use, I suspect that will happen. With the current costs of a GDP of a small nation I don't see this likely for the time being.
__s 3 hours ago|||
I find it irritating with humans. "last but not the least" always distracts me as I then consider maybe the last item _is_ the least. & what is with everyone saying they want to "double click" into meeting items
hnav 5 hours ago|||
it’s not a psychological phenomenon. If a human engineer constantly used pompous language to deliver unvetted information (the number of claude slop root-cause analyses i’ve read where “the smoking gun” is a red herring) we’d rightly consider them a moron
danielvaughn 4 hours ago|||
I didn't articulate it, but what I meant was that I think we could swap these expressions out for _anything_, and we'd still find them irritating.
sublinear 3 hours ago||
People do swap out their expressions all the time. There are influences everywhere that we absorb.

That doesn't matter. The underlying ideas are more important than the words. That's what people are frustrated with. I don't understand why this has to be reiterated for years on end, but LLMs are not intelligent. They just model language.

queenkjuul 4 hours ago||||
"Here's why this version is bulletproof" right before it fails in exactly the same way as the previous bulletproof implementation...
whattheheckheck 4 hours ago|||
Who is we? Own your insults and the consequences of them sir.

When prompting an autoregressive token generator entity to do reasoning on a word logic puzzle you may find value in preferring it to produce rigorous predicate logic step notation with explicit delineation of its generated claims/hypotheses on where to look before wasting 30 dollars on a "debug this" prompt.

The industry will probably will probably coalesce around including the chat history in git MRs to reduce this shenanigans.

IshKebab 4 hours ago|||
> but we don't find it irritating

Yes we do! My wife keeps saying "100%" and after I pointed it out she's stopped.

Also I talk to dozens of different people in my life and they all have different overused phrases. Much less tedious when there's variety.

Finally most human don't do it nearly as often as AI, and they're not quite as LinkedIn as AI.

We don't find it more annoying because it's a machine - it's simply more annoying.

pixl97 3 hours ago|||
It's like a new fad word. Gnarly, cool, bogus, rizz. When a few people use them it's new and interesting. When all of culture catches up and overuses them it's annoying as your gen-Z saying 6/7 40 times in a row.

The problem with millions of people using a few model is it's not 40 times in a row, it's 40 million!

adamesque 4 hours ago||||
I went through a “100%” phase recently and couldn’t for the life of me understand why I was suddenly saying it ALL THE TIME. Brains are so weird.
nchmy 3 hours ago||||
Introduce "hundo p" and "hundy" to her
DonHopkins 4 hours ago|||
Did you negotiate her down to "99%"?
basilikum 4 hours ago|||
If LLMs were humans I would find that human absolutely insufferable. It is very much about the language.
esafak 5 hours ago|||
We don't have to live with this. Increasing the temperature (randomness) would fix it.
alxndr 5 hours ago||
...or we call it an overused catch-phrase.
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