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Comment by tengbretson | Hacker News Reader

Why are people getting so hung up on the "load-bearing assumption" turn of phrase that Claude uses? I get that it becomes cliche, but it is also a rather semantically dense way to communicate an idea that a lot of people run into.

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Generally the claude jargon is valid jargon I’ve seen real people use, it just uses jargon so much more often than a human would. And because it has particular jargon it likes, and claude is widely used, you see so much of that particular jargon that you get sick of it.

It’s like having one coworker with a very particular writing style which is mildly annoying, but then it suddenly feels like half the internet was written by that one person and it becomes a lot more annoying.

It might be, when used sparingly, but when it's the first sentence in a wall of text as Claude goes way off the deep end on a two page description it becomes the easiest readily available tell that you're about to be frustrated.

Humans are very good at pattern recognition - Claude is _incredibly_ repetitive in the way it starts to struggle to communicate. I think there's also a ton of overlap in the Jargon instead of Usefulness that developers see in annoying middle management/salespeople. Circle back, synergy blah blah.

I don't think the individual turns of phrase are inherently problematic - but the process is triggering.

ItMs because Claude sprinkles these words as flavoring without aiding understanding. It feels like Claude thinks of metaphors that don’t actually mean anything (or maybe only makes sense to itself).

I don't understand. Does the metaphor "load-bearing assumption" not actually mean anything to you?

It doesn't mean anything at all, since any assumption that is not 'load-bearing' is irrelevant and unlikely to be discussed at all. It's just noise.

Not when "load-bearing assumption" is misused, no. "Honey, can you take the load-bearing assumption to the mechanic for an oil change?" is an example injecting the phrase into a random sentence, obfuscating the meaning of the sentence and making it more difficult to parse. LLMs do this constantly. There is no theory of mind behind how words are generated. Some phrases simply have a higher chance of being generated in various contexts, even if it doesn't make any fucking sense, and this is exacerbated by bad RLHF.

"Load-bearing" is maybe not the best example, but Claude uses these anthropomorphized decorative synonyms everywhere. Claude's structs don't have fields, they _carry_ them. Its programs don't log, they _narrate_. Its arguments are not provided on the command line, they _ride_ it. Its modules don't depend on other modules, they _sit_ on them, etc.

That's the problem for me: "semantically dense". Sometimes a single paragraph is filled with several of this expression, one after the other, and there's a real mental effort to get what Claude is saying.

Is "load-bearing" better than e.g. "critical" or "crucial" here? I'm not convinced.

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