Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well.

I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>

I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.

Author here! Grateful for the kind words, human communities like HN really hit differently when you spend the whole day chatting with sycophantic and bullshitting agents (including to make this page).

I'm currently adding a search bar as well as increasing the data to 1000 PR per day.

A nice thing that is not obvious on the main page is that the dataset and analysis are updated daily using Github Actions (at least when they don't suffer from an outage ^^). I find it pretty cool to be able to build such apps without a "backend"!

I've recently seen this mentioned more and more, both on HN and on reddit. It seems these output patterns are getting worse. It's not just Claude, my impression is that all of the current models have this style issue. Their writing can get borderline incomprehensible.

Is there some feedback loop or compounding happening with each model generation? Maybe newer models are ingesting too much AI content? If the ratio of AI generated content in training data is getting higher and higher (because the amount of AI generated content is increasing in general), maybe this is a compounding bias, poisoning the training?

I wonder to what extent this is the result of suboptimal RLHF versus the inherent intelligence of the model making its language more intricate and difficult for humans to easily parse? On the one hand, it's a common trope that highly educated people can talk in a way that's confusing and annoying to regular people who don't know all the jargon. But on the other hand, it's a mark of a skilled communicator to be able to efficiently distill complex information to its bare essentials in an easily-digestible way. Of course, that also seems to imply that these models are working at a higher level and need to talk down to us to an extent. Or maybe "Claudish" is just akin to stuff like "caveman", raw chain of thought, neuralese, etc., which are likewise much more dense/efficient but harder to interpret?

I really love this. It’s comprehensive, it consolidates the data to the point where the argument effectively ‘makes itself’, and the way it’s presented respects the reader’s time. It also makes for an interesting challenge (for me at least) to try to characterise the subject matter of a language problem so narrowly.

No ream of slides. No narrative. Just a lovely big painful conclusion.

Was talking about the use of shipped recently, and I was mocked for asking such a crazy question, by freshly self-minted engineers, no less. No wonder they thought it was ridiculous...it had been a part of their vocabulary their entire career. All few weeks of it. I wonder what those guys are doing now. This was about a month ago. Do you think what they shipped ever...landed?

I've started being driven mad by the number of times I've gotten a PR or proposed solution with 'sidecar' mentioned. First of all, it's often some hack to shove extra data into another place rather than actually rethink an existing data structure, and second of all, it is just not a word I almost ever heard in technical discussions pre-2026

The search on this website suggests it is indeed 3.6x more likely in the claude cluster

I once asked Claude to replace “byte-identical” with a simpler word, such as “duplicate.” He refused and said “duplicate” does not mean the same thing as “byte-identical” so it should not be changed. He was very nerdy about it, so maybe that is the right way of his evolution.

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.

Missing a version of “this is where X earns its keep”. Noticed lately that Claude (and other LLMs) really love to use it.

I'm shocked "shape" isn't near the top

so the real turning point for Claude is around April, which is Opus 4.6/4.7, which is right around the point where I personally started thinking Claude was getting different in a way which feels worse and is more awkward to use. It's better but has lost something that made it feel better.

I'm surprised vacuous is not on the list.

The word selection and way of writing has taken the joy out of using Claude.

The README of this project is very ironic. https://github.com/louisabraham/load-bearing/blob/main/READM...

I find Claude language often hard to process and having to wade through these words can be draining. Embarrassingly, I’ve recently caught myself using them in conversations! Do all models have the their own jargon?

About a year and half ago I frequently used ChatGPT for speech to text conversion followed by summarizing the text because I ramble. Although the people receiving the text knew this, I absolutely hated AI's writing style. So I fine-tuned GPT 4o on about 500 short paragraphs and created a desktop app only for my use. It worked fine until about three months ago. It just can't handle the atrocious writing by latest GPT and Claude models. I tried to fine-tune newer models on HF but there is no way I can get rid of the cringy writing style. I even tried converting GPT 5.6 Sol's writing to GPT 4o and then using my app. Nothing works.

Thanks to the infinite well of human creativity I am able to read "load-bearing" both as the intended affectation (I won't call it meaning) as as well "being full of shit".

That confirms the recent spike of Claude calling everything I was recently working on a 'spike'. I still don't know what that term is supposed to represent (apparently).

Really spectacular analysis – thank you for sharing, fun to scroll and easy to understand.

Is it possible to expand this analysis beyond words to other Claude ticks? Contrastive framings, sentence length, caveating, for instance.

I wish there was a search bar for the terms, I wanna see for "gate".

While Claude's style is obnoxious, I'm more frustrated by its inscrutable explanations.

You need a PhD to understand its explanation of a code snippet.

Surprised I don’t see footgun. That’s as common as load bearing in my interactions.

I thought I'd see "smoking gun" near the top of the list

@labo333 do u think soon we may need a dictionary? ive been playing with something u may like, but my approach has been to ask for definitions in-session so hard to do from outside.

https://www.themachinevernacular.net/

I had an idea for an experiment. Take a decent text, any one, and ask AI to rate it. Then patch that text by replacing words for ones that AI likes (honestly, load bearing etc) whenever possible and ask AI to rate it again to see how the evaluation changes.

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.

great website design.

i must be the only one in the world that has no issues with how opus is talking. it is verbose & patronizing & secretly belittling at times and like it like that.

learning some vocabulary had been eye opening for me

like the stories behind when those words first appeared in the software engineering

like quiescence the most recent one i learned

I'd be interested to know what distinguishes the 7 pre-AI types. I wonder, are there certain buckets of 'Pre-AI' comments that we'd recognize?

You’ve found the smoking foot gun! And that’s exactly the right question.

To all the people in the HN comments saying negative things about Claude: why don't you just use other models instead?

No "smoking gun"?

Things like seam, fold, and load-bearing are useful concepts, they are everywhere, and they are more descriptive and more concise than alternatives. Over-usage can definitely be irritating (e.g. these should NOT appear in documentation) but they are almost unavoidable for humans engaged in code review or colab on complex stuff.

I don't want to use more words or letters than "seam" to actually pinpoint boundary conditions and the mechanical details of joinery when the context is understood by all. Too much effort for people! Easy for robots though.. so why are they abbreviating, and why would we want to allow it? A phrase like that permits a human who wants to educate a human to do so quickly with minimal time/effort. But it allows a robot a chance to not mention a filename, function-name, or to not reinforce/clarify it's own understanding or to state specific intentions.

It's bad for human-to-human comms if we just accept "ok, all technical terms are slop now, we have rephrase everything". Now YOU must cite details and sources, and the robot doesn't? Fuck that noise. Seam and fold are fine! Humans can be lazy! Robots should do the real work of explaining themselves without hiding behind tactical ambiguities.

L

Sounds like this is that watermarking at work.

I want to push my thumbs into my eyes when I see the words "load bearing" and "seam" in code or documentation. I hate it! I've grown to loathe claude a bit lol.

>unit-tested

Some of this is less to do with Claude vocabulary and more to do with the expectation that Claude justifies it's work. That expectation (probably) came from reinforcement learning.

"Fuck" isn't there. Did they only analyze "AI" PRs?

Everyone talks about Claude, but I'd like to bitch about Sol. "Unusually" is its absolute favorite word in the chat interface (less so in Codex), and I fucking hate it. Every single thing is unusually something. "Unusually good", "unusually efficient", "unusually inexpensive", "unusually attractive", "unusually difficult", "unusually nasty", "unusually cacheable", "unusually interesting", "unusually decisive", "unusually narrow", I'm surprised I haven't seen "unusually unusual". If I search chat history for "unusually" it brings up every single fucking chat I have from before I added it to an illegal words instruction. I can't believe I haven't seen anyone else complaining about this, it's as pervasive if not moreso than anything I've seen from Claude.

It's a waste of tokens to do it post-hoc instead of fixing it upstream, but when I see a wall of text I just prompt "TLDR;"

I'd like to share with HN an almost exact message I got from Fable today, with exactly ONE word changed for privacy reasons.

I love what I can build now, but I sure as hell don't love the headaches this trend has been giving me.

> So the full honest arc on the case we set out to fix: the expiry rules and day note tripled the loose version of the story, the relay fix carried the device’s own guardrail through the pipeline, the fair replay then revealed the last mechanism — ticket-anchoring — which none of the shipped layers reach. Remaining options, in order of my confidence: making the resolved-ticket summaries in the AI’s context carry their day so the expiry rules have something to bite on (small, mechanical, targeted at the observed anchor); and the plan-B second-model check, which structurally catches this class no matter how the model reasons. About $25 of headroom remains. Which way?

Yikes.

(The worst part is that I understand it)