Some of my greatest joys in life have come from putting string replacement plugins on other people's browsers. I mostly just applied it to news sites.

s/big/super massive/g s/cardiac arrest/cataclysmic diarrhea/g

I mean, it's really endlessly entertaining. I'm wiping away tears just thinking about it.

I mourn the removal of Claude's Concise Style. I'd provide it a roughly drafted paragraph, ask concise-Claude to "rewrite for clarity", out comes the same paragraph, but cleaned up and perfect for grant writing.

BTW, this approach also tends to prevent certain phrases like "load-bearing", because it is working directly with something I wrote first. It also still says what I wanted to write (not writing the science for me), but saves me a lot of time reworking sentences into a final form.

I tried to recreate concise mode with a skill, but I am not convinced it does as well.

I analyze in the company I work for, the number of commits with "wire" or "wiring" in the description, and it's a direct correlation to Claude usage, more so than any other Claudism I tested. My honest take, and I'm going to give it to you straight: No one was using "wired" a year ago, now it's in like 10% of commits.

What is arguably worse is hearing these phrases from humans who have been inculcated with the notion that their usage is idiomatic and appropriate.

And we thought "robust", "circle back", and "to leverage" were grating...

And there’s the smoking gun.

I've put a few lines in my CLAUDE.md to have it not do that, and avoid the top tedious rhetorical devices (super helpful when I have it write documentation). Still fighting with its natural tendency to insanely overcomplicate everything, that one seems really integral somehow.

I've wrestled with this lately. I partially solved with a very specific instruction saved to claude.md regarding the style of responses, but prior to this, the dense yammer coming back was getting impossible to parse. I mean REALLY nonsensical euphemistic phrases. My next instruction will be having it replace incessant "honest assessment" and "genuine result" and crap like that with something, I don't know, less extremely weird and concerning.

    replacements = {
        "seam": "whatchamacallit",

That seems like it would work whatchamacallitlessly.

I had claude write itself a post-message hook that regex's the message for any variant of "You're right" and launch a full-screen transparent confetti effect.

Is this a belt-and-suspenders solution?