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.

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.

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).

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'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?

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.

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.

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?

@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.

I'm surprised vacuous is not on the list.

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

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".

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".

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;"