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Comment by hnarayanan | Hacker News Reader

I maintain a list of phrases I beg it not to use that it frequently ignores:

- smoking gun - blast radius - landed - spine - earned its keep - grammar - spike - cutover - bake - sprint, epic, story points (all Agile vocabulary) - paper-cuts - amazing, incredible, perfect

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You're absolutely right to flag these. We could enhance the authors method by using hooks and claude.md as a belt-and-suspenders approach— with hooks behaving as a robust load-bearing idempotent production-ready sidecar. The comments here provide the smoking gun that sharpen my previous conclusions about Claude's vernacular. I'll get started on a quick smoke-test of this system and let you know when it's landed.

Want me to take a first pass looking at the blast-radius this vocabulary change could effect?

‘Landed’ and ‘honest’ are also words it seems to overuse.

Claude is obsessed with making things land. More than once I've reminded it that it's not a pilot.

It’s a common metaphor for merging a branch to the trunk. Probably because multiple in-flight development branches create a sort of air traffic control problem.

Yes, this and "belt-and-suspenders" are the ones that I notice the most. I also have non-native English speaking coworkers who have started using these terms/phrases recently, which makes me think that they're outsourcing all their writing.

More: rider, "x, not y", "is real", "prove" (in situations which only admit empirical evidence), nailed down, payoff, decisive, reassuring

just generally a nauseating amount of embellishing, (also self-)congratulatory language, superfluous self-judgment, and jargon, as well as sus constructions along the lines of "i could have lied to you but didn't", all of which appear to be impossible to have it avoid in the long run

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