alt Hacker NewsHow to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
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I hope some day they just train the models to be better, the slop writing is insanely frustrating and I don't think there's a good reason for things to be that way (in other words, they just trained it badly) https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...
As someone who has been describing things as 'load-bearing' as something like a signature phrase for about twenty years, I'm beyond miffed that Claude has ruined my whole gimmick.
A new catchphrase every twenty years is hardly sustainable at my age :)
Gotta appreciate the hook solution to save context and cost
I honestly like the vocabulary and turns of phrase the frontier models use. Their choices of words are usually apt to the circumstance. This is a weird thing to get upset about, IMO.
The big problem I have is when they apologize and say something like "that tidbit changes my analysis substantially". I wish they'd more often prompt for questions or use language in their initial responses that suggest lower than declarative confidence given the information you supplied.
7 mentions of "smoking gun" here so far!
The reason it talks that way is clearly am attempt to hook into your dopamine system.
If what you told it to do is 'load bearing' then its important.
'You are absolutely right', because you are a smart fellow.
'Honest take', because it's being honest with you because it trusts you and you should do the same.
My 'honest take' these are absolutely garbage patterns that have no place in an session interacting with AI.
1. 'Load bearing' is a figure of speech that bears no loads.
2. 'You are absolutely right' it's not the agents job to judge that, it's job is to do what I told it to do.
3. 'Honest take', so everything else was not honest? Absolute honesty should be the default and is implied.
These words add nothing to the task at hand they are a poor attempt to hook you into using this particular model.
Even great words, phrases, and styles, seen too often, grate.
I personally love a lot of the Claude (or LLM) lingo. Load-bearing, gate, canonical, blast radius, and friends do a lot of tight, effective heavy-lifting in my world. I even love the em-dashes (—) and the *bold the main points* memo style, both of which I have used successfully for decades.
It's seeing them in every analysis and post—the constant repetition becoming over-repetition—that makes them the Claude voice shouting "AI wrote this!" that seems to be causing LLM allergic reactions.
my "belt and suspenders" are "load-bearing"
> replacement "you're absolutely right": "I'm a complete clown"
Omg, that hit hard. We really need more of this.
Does anyone have a theory for what causes Claude to speak this way? A few months ago OpenAI came out with a bit on "gremlins". It's strange IMO that Anthropic hasn't addressed how irritating, dare I say oppressive, Claude can be. Codex is a breath of fresh air. I hope they fix it soon. If product folks at Anthropic think it's charming, it's not, it's terrible.
huh. I wonder if it's possible to use those hooks to add syntax highlighting to shell commands claude issues, or to replace full path to current directory with ./
Just ask it to aim for a Flesh-Kincaid ease-of-readability score of around 70. Or use ELI5 style. Or both.
SillyTavern folks have been perfecting the unslop solutions for years now.
Gotta be a way to draw from their progress.
This literally proves it's not "intelligent," no?
"Stop typing in 'load-bearing' or you're fired," would work with any competent human.
But this requires tinkering and tooling?
Lately, I feel like as GEN AI text becomes the majority, human-written text is starting to resemble it too.
I'm Korean, and there are sites and people who mainly curate the latest technologies. Even those people, probably tired of translating every time, have started summarizing things with AI. But recently, I've noticed that even when people don't use AI, their writing is starting to look like GEN AItext.
I think the reason might be that people often base their thoughts on documents they've read, or paste parts of content when writing their own texts, which leads to that style.
I'm not sure. Whether human writing is better or AI writing is better—personally, AI writing tends to flow in a very even, paragraph-by-paragraph structure, which makes it good for consuming information. I wouldn't want to read a novel written that way, but for getting information, AI writing is surprisingly convenient.
How do you manage to make Opus follow any rules? Maybe it’s a windsurf thing but I have a ton of custom rules and Opus just ignores most of them. GPT on the other hand follows them like it’s a cult - if I have a rule I can’t ever force it to ignore it. Opus just doesn’t care. If I ask why it’s not following rules it will apologise and suggest creating a rule for it …
What the are they even spending all this compute on? They are literally cooking the planet and still can't make it not sound like a fucking lunatic
One honest caveat worth flagging though.
But how can I make Gemini stop using "It's not this, it's that" every other sentence?
I recently started using caveman, and it’s been great. It doesn’t just cut down on overuse of specific terms; it cuts down on time spent digesting slop in general.
I feel like it's mocking me. I literally have in my claude.md file a line that says:
"Never ever under any circumstances use the phrase 'smoking gun'. Say 'found an issue' instead, but don't ever use the phrase 'smoking gun'"
Lo and behold, the absolute imbecile says:
"Found the smoking gun!(Oooops, I meant to say "found the problem")"
Like, is this some kind of joke to you?
Just one wrinkle.
That's not what cooked means.
regexes > Claude. Even Anthropic knows this.
One honestly caveat:
Developers who can't stop themselves from using embellished and "posturing" phrasing for simple things are a pet peeve of mine. I feel like this "knack" of Claude in a way scratches these special people behind the ears in just the right way.
Bottom line up front: There's no silver bullet to keep the final boss from delving more deeply.
"Tightening" and "wiring" something. You're not in the construction industry, you're writing unit tests for a cookie modal.
Maybe implementing it as a hook via a regex replace is a better shaped solution?
If you find yourself getting irritated and physically agitated over language I suggest you do a 5 why analysis on yourself and seek therapy
very load bearing suggestion.
It's good, because it's just post-processing before display. So it doesn't interfere with the process, which those phrases that seem so offensive to sensibilities of so many people, for whatever reason, might be a part of.
Ask AI about castor beans and barley, it will stop all that nonsense.
"Byte-for-byte"
or "honestly"
Annoying because I used to like using that phrase.
A similar Codex/GPT verbal tick is "deliberately narrow" or variants thereof.
Just a grep across my repo comes up with a dozen lines with phrases like "It is deliberately small" or "This crate is deliberately not a X" despite my efforts to police this kind of thing.
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So... that's the unlock, eh?
/s
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"Please please please pleassssse statistical attractor machine don't have statistical attractors anymore. DO NOT be a probable token generator. DO NOT generate the most probable token. To complete this task please evolve intelligence"
You techies are so funny.
I suspect load-bearing is a euphemism for 'not garbage'. Ad in 'most of what you said I can mostly ignore'.