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Comment by sethd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. I don’t think it’s limited to Claude either; I’ve seen Codex use load-bearing and many of these phrases as well.

I think using agents is just like speedrunning the whole experience of working with technical coworkers. Whereas you might have had a few coworkers at your company who used some of these phrases regularly, you now have a “coworker” who uses all of them regularly at a much faster pace.

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Everyone has their own distinct mix of jargon and uses some words more or less than others, but now it's as if you have 1000 coworkers who are all the same person, and talk the exact same way, and it just so happens that their writing is grating to read. It also doesn't stop when you log off for the day. The same guy follows you home in ad copy, message board comments, spam, and in some cases even the correspondence of your loved ones.

I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.

I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code

so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model

just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"

AI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.

I checked this, and Claude says "it's a real term of art from Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code (2004), where he defines it as a place you can alter a program's behavior without editing in that place."

While I agree the model doesn't have insight into how it was trained I do think the history of the term itself is interesting.

yeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?"

I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them

Those books are definitely in the training set if the model can mention them, but why exactly these terms are so commonly used is not necessarily because the book is in the training material. The model does not itself know how its trained.

I've read that book and it's one of the very core concepts that relates to introducing tests in legacy code ("finding a seam").

The jargon isnt even the worst part. The phrasing is just downright incomprehensible sometimes. And its not even "academic". It's just extremely awkward, bad writing. And it is much worse than say Opus 4.6-8.

Actually I have found the copy that Claude Design spits out is way better than using the same model directly. I have no idea why. It has its flaws but it sounds like it's written by a human who uses derivative language. But usually the models just soudn incoherent.

I couple of days ago I wondered whether I was having a stroke. Looking at the wall of text and understanding nothing.

> A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. --- The difference in distribution between how often LLMs use them and how often people use them in PR descriptions is almost the entire content of the link.

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