Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.

I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something

This highly depends on the context of the conversation. Were you by any chance talking about walls?

yeah? it’s not that weird of a term