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Comment by FloorEgg | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I had ever heard the phrase "x is doing a lot of work here" until about a year ago, from Claude, which seems to say it's lot.

Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it?

Are you Claude?

Or just a coincidence?

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It is a common phrase and has been for a very long time though has increased over the last 6 years or so.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=is+doing+a+lot...

It's a common enough expression. It has an entry in Wiktionary (sense 2):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_a_lot_of_work

A random example from 1991:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Object_oriented_Program...

Of course Claude picked it up from usage; it didn't invent the phrase. But I don't see any indication that it's uniquely Claude-y. I use the phrase on occasion myself.

"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.

The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.

It's an ancient phrase.

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