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Comment by svara | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably going to be going against the grain here, but I think it's not as bad as it looks at first.

I was similarly frustrated a few months ago, but have noticed I've started to learn the idiom.

Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.

After a while it gets much easier to read and even becomes somewhat efficient, I think, since the odd metaphors it uses often have a precise meaning in Opus-ese (Fable speaks a really similar dialect).

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One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.

You're absolutely right, it would be a load-bearing mistake to adopt LLM jargon as a human speaker.

You're right to pushback. This isn't just a grammatical problem -- its a conversational one, too.

This is the key seam that proves the investigation.

Two things to flag:

Honest take, you genuinely forgot to flag the flags ...

I'm going to be honest with you, I've hacked the pentagon and used their super computer to complete your todo list.

[And this folks is the true reason we are out of ammo in the middle east ...]

I’ve gone ahead and worked through the entire todo list and the police are currently en route to your residence.

Sitting with you in this.

honestly, it's really load bearing and boiling the ocean which we don't want. There is no edge!

To avoid speaking vibe'ish I start to speak in 3 words sentences. Like this typical dialogue

How are you? that's not/very good. I think too. ...

Even complexity works. everything is expressible! Just try it.

All is sayable? With three words? That seems unlikely. At least, annoying.

Just like the boy in wheelchair in "Malcolm in the middle" series used to talk :)

(Why down vote? People can't take sarcasm tags any more.. how the hell are they going to understand irony?)

want to space. go to there. me, preferably now. build big machine. several large problems. can't breathe there. very far away. must fly fast. no air there.

- fuel tanks heavy. far too heavy. we drop them. drop when empty. solves heavy problem.

- gas in air. we breathe "oxygen". take with us. good seals important. solves breath problem.

- very far away. need big machine. small weight added. machine much bigger. take less weight. else can't build.

- no air there. can't use propellor. can't use wings. must use rocket. engines get hot. cool with fuel. dangerous but effective. build complex pipes. solves cooling problem.

- must fly fast. air slows machine. it's called drag. speed increases drag. must reduce drag. make machine pointy. much less drag. solves speed problem.

now problems solved. you come with?

Thanks for offer. I stay garden. Tend to garden. Name the animals. Pranks on Eve. Disrespect all gods. Fight all gods. Kill all gods. Make little cupholders. But no cups. Just to spite. Some take issue. We discuss it. All becomes clear. All friends now. Sometimes look up. Wonder about you. Wish you well. If cold, come. We make tea.

I mostly agree. Though sometimes the models come up with useful concepts that I'm happy to be introduced to, like the "shape" of a problem (probably like intelligence being "spiky", and Kiki & Boba). I still don't quite 'grok' what the 'seams' concept is yet though.

But I have noticed that while "loosely held" is a convenient shorthand for uncertainty, I don't like that one slipping in to my daily language. Except maybe to communicate with models, but even then, it feels weird to be speaking in neuralese.

It's all starting to feel like the movie Arrival.

I suspect you're right that those concepts are now more widespread because of LLMs, but they didn't originate with LLMs. The word "Grok" came from Heinlein in the 60s and using it as "to understand" goes back to at least the 80s. Talking about the "shape of a problem" goes back decades. Ditto for "loosely held", though it's not about uncertainty; it's about being open to ideas and/or evidence that may conflict with your strongest opinions and beliefs.

Now, I'll grant that those concepts weren't common outside of techy circles. Just clarifying that the LLMs are amplifying them, not synthesizing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

https://wiki.c2.com/?ChadwickBoggs

Good point, and I probably shouldn't have put grok in quotes there, because I was using it in the Heinlein usage long before Musk hijacked it.

It's interesting then that LLMs are making these pre-existing ideas seem alien in the way they amplify them. I guess I must have known about "shape of a problem" and "loosely held" before Claude, but something about the way I'm using & absorbing those concepts from AI interaction feels weird & memetic. I'm saying that as someone who is pro-AI.

Definitely a good response. Thanks for replying!

For sure, I find many of the LLM-isms to be useful writing techniques and terms (although there's something uncanny-valley about the repetition and density of them).

But what I was more thinking about are truly unique jargon terms / phrases that get generated when deep in a problem. As an example of both of such a term and the phenomenon itself, Claude calls this "fluent compound coinage." They usually make sense in the original context, but get confusing when thrown around otherwise.

Allow me to offer a complementary point: I understand exactly what the poor "thing" means - and perhaps through some deformation or another I have done so since having had to read it - but something functional in the modus is still "off".-

... not to mention the fact that it stops making sense, beyond some point: If it takes us more cognitive load to understand the tools we use, meant to save us from intellectual work, what's the point?

I may have to apologize, quite a bit, for what might only be a small part or perhaps an outsized influence if weighted highly (I can’t be sure, could have been mv dev/null’ed)… well, it’s this— my own style of not-kept-in-check by the need to be comprehensible (legible in Claude-speak) to others is, I’m afraid, to rather allow prose to sprawl and go everywhere and even sometimes nowhere at all until it just drifts off and sort of wakes itself up snoring in the weeds of an unintended topic.

Ruthless pruning is unneeded with an LLM and it can take me twice the time to say half as many words.

And, early in the ‘GPT era, I hadn’t unchecked the “allow your chats to be used in future training etc” box, and definitionally they are longer and denser than others’ prompts in such raw scrapings of training materials…

Sorry.

When reading text like, this, I quickly start glazing over and my thoughts become cloudy. Really unsettling feeling, like I _actually_ become dumber after reading it.

And for certain text that seems to make sense, I am unsure if the text is just junk, or I am unbearably daft. Either way,, nasty feeling.

> Ruthless pruning is unneeded with an LLM and it can take me twice the time to say half as many words.

Right, but LLMs use one word where they need ten; by your own admission you do the opposite. I don't think you owe anybody an apology.

I was in a meeting presenting a whitepaper. And I went - “And this is the load-bearing part of the paper.”

I think I need a break from Claude.

“Filters, including no filters. The request carries whatever filter object the page already has.

…

No step here involves choosing based on meaning. It is a filter, a sort, and a slice.”

This is from Opus five minutes ago. I can certainly derive meaning from these kinds of statements in isolation, but paragraph upon paragraph of this is unintelligibly dense when trying to work with Claude to come up with a plan.

The worst part is that it can’t even make its responses make sense when asked to summarize in simple English or < 200 words. It simply cannot be steered to make its prose legible.

Before long Claude will be writing continental philosophy.

Claude is the Deepak Chopra of computer programming. Reviewing PR's created by it is 90% digesting the meaningless word salads in the comments, and the rest is figuring out that it has nothing to do with the code it is commenting.

Because it is somehow incapable of separating the conversation with its human operator from the code it is generating and commenting on. Incidentally, this is also why prompt-injection works.

No one wants to know about the three other approaches tried when reading the first sentence of a function's documentation. No one cares that the implementation was planned in six phases and "Phase 3" will implement this interface in a concrete type. But the LLM internalizes absolutely everything and you have no idea that it is producing slop because you included some "load-bearing" phrase that sent it on some unwanted tangential vector in its latent space. And you will not be able to debug the problem with closed models because you cannot see it referencing this phrase in its internal traces.

I don't understand why this isn't the highest priority for the big labs to fix. This is anti-productive.

> No one wants to know about the three other approaches tried when reading the first sentence of a function's documentation.

Worse: Possibly the three other approaches that weren't actually tried--but are the kinds that someone could easily have put in a similar comment for some similar code.

Spot on

And worse yet, you'll find the code peppered with comments relating to 'phase 3' and 'section 11', ephemeral stuff that had meaning in the moment but now enshrined forever. And what happens when the LLM stumbles on this and working off a whole different phase 3 or section 11?

I turned that to my benefit. I use that design-doc pattern where you first ask it to make a ticket with a formal section list (why, how, etc) and then I ask it to use comments with permalinks. I put it all in policy files. As a result, comments have clickable links to coherently worded tickets.

Still, this requires a second pass, typically. In its default-mode it often ignores the policies and does all the usual Claude stuff.

I’m starting to think this is why Opus suddenly started making 4-5 line comment blocks. They justify why a change was made and gives the next agent something to go on. I delete them and move on, but no amount of “don’t over comment” “match comment style” makes it persistent.

I am definitely guilty of wondering why past me made such a harebrained decision, and why past me didn’t think to write any notes, but does it matter? It’s in the commit history and we can bisect or revert if we find a regression.

I noticed the increase in comments too and it’s really weird.

Or adding notes to docs of what this doc isn’t when I corrected it. Eg I told it “keep the deployment manual and readme separate, they’re not the same thing”, then Claude added “this is the deployment document and not the README. They should be handled as separate documents and are not the same thing” to the deploy doc lol

> Its use of "dense jargon" and "stilted metaphor" is actually surprisingly consistent - it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.

This dialect is idiosyncratic to you and Claude based on your session history and memory.

I've noticed Claude's output mimics my writing style.

> Registers the board implements but whose behaviour is not modelled

Right down to my preferred spellings.

As several comments I've read on HN suggest, this jargon which can be so precise in the mind of one person, tends to rapidly fall apart when multiple people try handling it.

I concur. It even follows some idiosyncratic punctuation if you have it.-

Ha, interesting.

My Claude has developed similar (but not identical) idiosyncratic punctuation as well. Slightly intentionally, but it was still interesting to see it emerge, in both directions of the conversation.-

You're just lucky that your preferred spelling happens to align with Claude's. It is categorically impossible to get any Anthropic model to consistently use American spelling in the last few releases.

It told me to correct a spelling mistake in some content I was sanity checking earlier..

It was British English.

that is not my experience at all; I never write the way Claude does or use its vocabulary.

I also find myself regularly editing its code comments, which do not match my expectations of succinct, clear, not over explained, etc. I ask it to read my edited comments to improve its writing, which has helped _somewhat_. (The code itself that it writes is decent, though it still overcomplicates things. I find myself writing "keep it simple" repeatedly even though of course I have it in AGENTS (which it regularly ignores, such as attempting to commit something when I've told it never to commit).

The only solution I’ve found that works is asking Mistral medium to rewrite all of Claude’s documentation and comments, then I review and rewrite the final draft for anything mistral misunderstood.

I find Claude has become very difficult to work with and incapable of writing clear documentation, even when directly prompted or provided samples.

As for code, I think each function requires 3-4 passes with Fable to actually get to a point I accept as good code. I am picky though.

The other Claudism that drives me crazy is when it writes comments and commit messages that track how you arrived at an decision instead of what it is.

> The other Claudism that drives me crazy is when it writes comments and commit messages that track how you arrived at an decision instead of what it is.

yes, this is part of what I'm continuously removing from its comments; I've told it multiple times "that belongs in a ticket, not in the code" but to little avail :/

> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it

Same experience. It’s not very “human” but once you have agents talking to each other the shared dialect and verbosity makes things much smoother in my experience. Fighting against the default feels like an uphill battle with no meaningful benefit.

"agents talking to each other"? Are you for real dude?

If one agent is spawning several subtask agents to work in parallel, they need to be able to communicate. That's built-in to Claude Code now.

Yes, I run continuous hybrid agent loops with message dispatch, mcp tools, and subagent capabilities. IMHO it’ll be table stakes in a couple years.

Yeah, I think what helps is I just have a running conversation on the Claude app open where I said:

> "I frequently use Claude Code and often find the phrasing and language to be hard to understand. I've noticed it's largely broken down into frequently used 'Claude-isms'. I'd like to use this conversation as a running log to ask you about these phrases when I see them. Understandably you don't have the context of the Claude Code session itself, but that's okay because this is largely about understanding the most common and widely use Claude-isms."

And then I just copy and paste small except and ask about things like "smoke" or "load-bearing" or "tripwire". The responses are surprisingly clearly and plainly explained.

I decided not to get used to its communication style. It encourages it to invent terminology and drift away from simple and proper engineering in my opinion. Also, it is pretty simple to change as long as you’re not using the Claude code CLI or desktop app.

Indeed I think much is shared across sessions and projects. I say we learn The Machine Vernacular [1].

[1] https://www.themachinevernacular.net/

We should push back on this rubbish.

I agree to some extent about the jargon (Claude has a bigger vocabulary that me, if it knows a useful word I don't I'm fine with learning it), but often times the way information is laid out across sentences just doesn't make any reasonable sense. At least its consistent in the ways its atrocious, sure, but like...

You can get used to it and it still be rage inducing.

the only thing that still kind of annoys me is constantly being told what something is not, but even that statement is load-bearing (see what I did there) because it records how it ended up with this decision, because it's not that other choice that it mentions.

FWIW, I also think the constant chorus about how new models are worse than old models is a human hallucination. They're certainly not perfect but every one becomes more steerable in terms of actually completing more and more complex work.

> it's speaking its own dialect, and you get used to it.

Some might, I didn't - it just filled me with a sense of frustration and rage, alongside disgust because there is no good reason for that slop writing to drag everything down. You don't need that to write software or talk about any topic. That's what pushed me to Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 - still not ideal, but better.

It's almost like learning sdk every time new model is released.

It's ironic how initially it was sold as "coding in plain English", and now we are back to sdk ))

> you get used to it

And once everyone gets used to it, we'll chide people for writing things themselves, like we're chiding them for writing with AI now, and the ouroboros of life will continue.

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