5 ms·

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of

I do not mind when I am coding with Claude and it uses all the typical claudisms. I am much more bothered when I am reading a blog post, email, or other form of prose and I see those same claudisms. I guess they are not annoying since I know I am talking to an LLM and expect the typical responses. When I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM.

bensyverson 3mo ago
Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."
- moronicles 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- kokanee 3mo ago
  Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?
    - phoghed 3mo ago
      I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them. I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through. When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page you known it’s gonna be bad day
      - lpribis 3mo ago
        I would like to know if text is LLM generated even if I can't tell from the content itself. For me it's a matter of attention (hah) and a quality signal. The poster expects to spend a minimal amount of effort on the post, and all the readers will have to spend the same amount of attention whether its LLM generated or not. To me, it's disrespectful to expect someone to waste their day reading every word of a blog post when even the author has not read every word. It shows that you value your time over your reader's time.
      - kokanee 3mo ago
        I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.
        phoghed 3mo ago
        You still won’t know even if it’s labeled though. Someone could put an incredible amount of effort into writing something, not be satisfied with some aspect, and have an LLM refactor it for example. Now you’ve got a lot of em dashes and you issue a shallow dismissal. There was an HN submission recently where the author spent a lot of time and effort working with an LLM to write a story and get the LLM to follow a specific style and whatnot. Wish I could recall it offhand. Many commenters were very upset when they found out it was LLM generated, even though they couldn’t tell while reading it. Basically what matters to me is some combo of how much effort went into it, and how accurate it is.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Dylan16807 3mo ago
      It causes problems to outsource core parts of your work to someone else, even without AI. So yeah I still care.
    - seba_dos1 3mo ago
      Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.
      - drgo 3mo ago
        I believe that the “thought process” of humans is just another automatic process albeit more sophisticated because it is running on a far more powerful processor that has evolved over millions of years and was honed by many more years of fine tuning in a complex social system. The difference is only a matter of degree.
        seba_dos1 3mo ago
        Sure, but there's so much more going on in a human than "a thought process running on a powerful processor" that current models do not even begin to approximate. We're not some brains steering meatmechs they're trapped in, we're complex machines consisting of interconnected systems running continuous processes with feedback loops that brains are only a single part of (and LLM-like processes in our brains are also only one of many things that happen in a brain). So-called "agents" are nowhere close to having actual agency yet. Once that changes, I may become actually interested in their outputs and opinions in other contexts than technical curiosities, but I'm not convinced that I'll still be around when that happens (if it even happens before we manage to make ourselves extinct anyway).
        staticman2 3mo ago
        The comment you replied to was making the point that when humans communicate the writing can reveal their thought processes. Outsource that to AI and that thought process is concealed. This has almost nothing to do with your reply.
  - 3uler 3mo ago
    Your tells, are just someone’s good writing now in the training set. It’ll be a moving target with each model. I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues. https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer
  - antihipocrat 3mo ago
    I agree, long may the 'its not x, not y, it's z' phrasing persist.
- allannienhuis 3mo ago
  Whenever I use AI generated content in direct communication - ie slack, email, jira tickets, etc, I always prefix any AI content with an obvious label: 'Claude says' or 'AI analysis: ' etc. In some cases I get claude to update jira tickets (really nice use case btw) with testing notes, I make sure the team knows that any notes in that format come from the AI based on the related commits. I still keep the AI label even if I edit the result for correctness or clarity etc. The last thing I want to do is have someone read AI content and think it came directly from me. I really don't understand the thinking of people that do that - it's like they're hiding or intentionally cheating somehow. AI generated content can be really, really useful (with some guidance, AI is way better at creating useful git commit messages and jira ticket comments than I am), but pretending that content is yours just seems way too much like straight up lying.
- mattjoyce 3mo ago
  The name for the phenomena could be Ananthropsis, noticing something is not from human
  - hexasquid 3mo ago
    I googled that word and Anthropic.com was the first hit. Head -> desk
- rhet0rica 3mo ago
  I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!
abirch 3mo ago
I'd love it if companies had to disclose the percent of Private Equity ownership and online work disclosed the percent of AI creation.
- flir 3mo ago
  If you rework a paragraph in a tight loop - you change a few words, the chatbot changes a few words, going round four or five times until you've got something you're happy with, I don't see how it's meaningful to assign a percentage. I guess you could write an editor that does it? Tracks the origin of every word in the document? But what if you cut'n'paste a word? Or worse, see it and retype it manually? I think the best you can hope for here is "this text was written with AI assistance".
rpdillon 3mo ago
I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.
- cafebeen 3mo ago
  Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
  - jambalaya8 3mo ago
    Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
    - schrodinger 3mo ago
      I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory. Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!
    - stingraycharles 3mo ago
      What do you mean? AI is being trained on all data available, so obviously it’s being trained on data from 2017/2018 as well. Or do you mean that the patterns that AI is showing today were already present in communication around that time? That seems obvious as well, as AI has a lot of repetitive patterns that come from all kinds of periods, of which “load-bearing” is just one.
KoolKat23 3mo ago
It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.
- grimcompanion 3mo ago
  Yep, I've heard humans use load-bearing twice in the past week, versus approximately never in a software eng context before that.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
throwaway894345 3mo ago
I agree, though as a side note I'm very curious to see how models will begin steering _our_ language. If you have popular models repeating "load-bearing" to every developer, eventually I imagine developers (especially junior developers who may not know that it's a Claudism) will begin to repeat it.
user3939382 3mo ago
load bearing, key insight, push back, “it’s not x, it’s y”
ClikeX 3mo ago
> hen I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM. Because it just feels lazy. It triggers my "If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why do you expect me to spend my time reading it" allergy.
- tzs 3mo ago
  Let's turn this around. I don't use any paid AI or any agents. I just use some of their free interactive question answering interfaces. There have been some times where I've been doing a project in a language or environment that I do not use a lot, and maybe need to use language or environment features I've never had occasion to learn. I don't ask AI to write it for me, or even to write any particular functions. I might ask it some syntax questions, or what data structure in the language's standard library is usually used for a particular task. Mostly I use it as an interactive manual that is really good at generating examples if I need clarification on how something works. If you were working on a similar project and posted asking questions about it, there is a decent chance I could write a useful answer for you. Suppose the questions would have fairly involved answers, and it might take me 30 minutes to write up something entirely in my own words. That is still going to include knowledge that I got from the AI when I questioned it earlier. I could also cover the same points, except for parts of it where what I'd be saying is mostly just writing in my own words what the AI taught me (and which I verified is correct before using), so might have to only spend about 4 minutes writing original material, and another minute doing some selected copy/paste from the AI (maybe with some editing). That 5 minute answer would be exactly as useful in answering your questions as the 30 minute answer. I don't know you. I have no reason to try to help you other than a general "it is nice to help people" thing. If you can't be bothered to read it because I didn't spend 500% more time than was necessary to fully answer your questions (time that benefits me in no way whatsoever), why should I bother answering at all?
  - thunderfork 3mo ago
    I feel like "having enough useful context to be jumping in and answering the question in question" and "needing an LLM to shave off 25 minutes of writing on the subject" feel like they're incompatible premises. I would prefer you give me whatever part of your answer takes you five minutes and then I can work from there on my end, in the method and with the tools I see fit. In other words - give me the prompt. Totally possible I'm misunderstanding the situation you're presenting, though.
unknownfuture 3mo ago
Honestly--and I say this as a flesh-and-blood human--I continue to be pissed off that AI has ruined load-bearing parts of my vocabulary. You're absolutely right that it's starting to trigger me when I read random blog posts and come across these linguistic ticks, but I can't help but be resentful. Humans invented language and now robots are coopting it.
hybrid_study 3mo ago
I’m trying to figure what’s so bad about humans using LLMisms. They seem quite useful at quickly conveying meaning using well-accepted terms.
dwedge 3mo ago
I used to religiously read Percona's blog posts because I considered them an authority on MySQL and worth listening to. They started using LLMs to write the posts and I can't read them anymore
keithnz 3mo ago
I get claude to use my voice when making emails, works out pretty well.
protocolture 3mo ago
Something that's coming up repeatedly for me is that there seems to be 2 distinct AI cultures forming. AI as Personal AI as Public. Personal AI users adapt to the tool, but they keep the "sausage" bits private. And often recoil at seeing them in public. Public AI users want to show everyone everything about how they use the tool, and dont care if their content is obviously generated. I definitely fall in the private camp myself, very rarely sharing anything generated even with close friends.
plasticchris 3mo ago
Breakthrough! I’ve found it! The load bearing smoking gun is clearly how annoying this is.
biztos 3mo ago
There is a quite popular poster on Twitter/X that I was following, and really enjoying his content. He did what you might call shallow dives into pretty interesting topics, several hundred words. After about a month of reading his stuff I started to notice the Claudisms. And once you see them you can't unsee them, they start to pop up everywhere. I have no idea if he was using an LLM to "improve" his writing, or was "vibe-authoring" the whole thing. I unfollowed, and now I have this creeping feeling that much of what I see in any given day on the Internets is actually AI slop, and I just haven't seen the signs yet.
aizk 3mo ago
You're absolutely right!
nottorp 3mo ago
The problem is it adds those claudisms in comments. The generated code may be ok, but I always have to edit the comments to reduce the signal/noise ratio and make them sound like english.
Lendal 3mo ago
The thing I did not expect is when watching a Youtube video, I cannot tell if the voice narration is an AI-generated voice, but I know for a fact if the entire script was written by AI.
port11 3mo ago
I agree with you, but after the 14th load-bearing thing in a day, it does get a bit tiresome; especially since words have meaning. I’d expect OpenSSL to be load-bearing; but no, that one-line function isn’t load-bearing. It might be important or even widely used throughout the codebase, but it’s not bearing the load of everything above it. What?

bensyverson 3mo ago

Exactly this. For whatever reason, Claude likes to talk about the "shape" of "load-bearing" "seams," but if that's the internal jargon it needs to plan and execute its work, who am I to judge? But if I'm reading what is supposed to be someone's original thoughts, it's a huge bummer to see an obvious AI tell. You might say that "it's not just disappointing—it's disrespectful."

moronicles 3mo ago
[flagged]
kokanee 3mo ago
Hot take -- I'm glad that LLMs still tend to have recognizable communication patterns, because they're often the only clue I have to filter AI content.
- ryandrake 3mo ago
  If the next generation of AI content produced no recognizable LLM patterns, and was indistinguishable from an actual human author, would you still care and try to determine whether the content was AI produced?
  - phoghed 3mo ago
    I’ve asked essentially the same question many times to many people, the short answer is “yes” because it’s a matter of ideology not logic for them. I get just as mad about shitty human output as I do about shitty LLM output. The bad thing about LLMs is that they have increased the volume of shit most people have to sift through. When you open a requirements doc and it’s got 13 load bearing em dashes on the first page you known it’s gonna be bad day
    - lpribis 3mo ago
      I would like to know if text is LLM generated even if I can't tell from the content itself. For me it's a matter of attention (hah) and a quality signal. The poster expects to spend a minimal amount of effort on the post, and all the readers will have to spend the same amount of attention whether its LLM generated or not. To me, it's disrespectful to expect someone to waste their day reading every word of a blog post when even the author has not read every word. It shows that you value your time over your reader's time.
    - kokanee 3mo ago
      I want to know when I'm consuming AI content because the source of information matters. I want to know what was at stake for the author, what motives they had and didn't have, what biases I should be aware of, and, for example, whether I'm reading content farmed slop that exists solely to attract ad impressions.
      - phoghed 3mo ago
        You still won’t know even if it’s labeled though. Someone could put an incredible amount of effort into writing something, not be satisfied with some aspect, and have an LLM refactor it for example. Now you’ve got a lot of em dashes and you issue a shallow dismissal. There was an HN submission recently where the author spent a lot of time and effort working with an LLM to write a story and get the LLM to follow a specific style and whatnot. Wish I could recall it offhand. Many commenters were very upset when they found out it was LLM generated, even though they couldn’t tell while reading it. Basically what matters to me is some combo of how much effort went into it, and how accurate it is.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 3mo ago
    It causes problems to outsource core parts of your work to someone else, even without AI. So yeah I still care.
  - seba_dos1 3mo ago
    Of course. The "content" is how humans communicate with each other, it doesn't just exist for its own sake (except in some degenerate cases). If you know that a human has authored it, you can infer their intent and thought-process from various choices they made across it. There's no such thing as intentional choices when the content is generated though.
    - drgo 3mo ago
      I believe that the “thought process” of humans is just another automatic process albeit more sophisticated because it is running on a far more powerful processor that has evolved over millions of years and was honed by many more years of fine tuning in a complex social system. The difference is only a matter of degree.
      - seba_dos1 3mo ago
        Sure, but there's so much more going on in a human than "a thought process running on a powerful processor" that current models do not even begin to approximate. We're not some brains steering meatmechs they're trapped in, we're complex machines consisting of interconnected systems running continuous processes with feedback loops that brains are only a single part of (and LLM-like processes in our brains are also only one of many things that happen in a brain). So-called "agents" are nowhere close to having actual agency yet. Once that changes, I may become actually interested in their outputs and opinions in other contexts than technical curiosities, but I'm not convinced that I'll still be around when that happens (if it even happens before we manage to make ourselves extinct anyway).
      - staticman2 3mo ago
        The comment you replied to was making the point that when humans communicate the writing can reveal their thought processes. Outsource that to AI and that thought process is concealed. This has almost nothing to do with your reply.
- 3uler 3mo ago
  Your tells, are just someone’s good writing now in the training set. It’ll be a moving target with each model. I use the humanize skill to clean up AI written work before handing it over to colleagues. https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer
- antihipocrat 3mo ago
  I agree, long may the 'its not x, not y, it's z' phrasing persist.
allannienhuis 3mo ago
Whenever I use AI generated content in direct communication - ie slack, email, jira tickets, etc, I always prefix any AI content with an obvious label: 'Claude says' or 'AI analysis: ' etc. In some cases I get claude to update jira tickets (really nice use case btw) with testing notes, I make sure the team knows that any notes in that format come from the AI based on the related commits. I still keep the AI label even if I edit the result for correctness or clarity etc. The last thing I want to do is have someone read AI content and think it came directly from me. I really don't understand the thinking of people that do that - it's like they're hiding or intentionally cheating somehow. AI generated content can be really, really useful (with some guidance, AI is way better at creating useful git commit messages and jira ticket comments than I am), but pretending that content is yours just seems way too much like straight up lying.
mattjoyce 3mo ago
The name for the phenomena could be Ananthropsis, noticing something is not from human
- hexasquid 3mo ago
  I googled that word and Anthropic.com was the first hit. Head -> desk
rhet0rica 3mo ago
I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!

abirch 3mo ago

I'd love it if companies had to disclose the percent of Private Equity ownership and online work disclosed the percent of AI creation.

flir 3mo ago
If you rework a paragraph in a tight loop - you change a few words, the chatbot changes a few words, going round four or five times until you've got something you're happy with, I don't see how it's meaningful to assign a percentage. I guess you could write an editor that does it? Tracks the origin of every word in the document? But what if you cut'n'paste a word? Or worse, see it and retype it manually? I think the best you can hope for here is "this text was written with AI assistance".

rpdillon 3mo ago

I didn't use Claude for a long time, but my coworkers did, so I got infected through a side channel: I ended up reading their vibed docs, noticed "load-bearing", kind of liked it, and started using it in conversation, until I got feedback that I was "talking like Claude", so now I avoid the phrase entirely. The intersection of language and social norms is interesting.

cafebeen 3mo ago
Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.
- jambalaya8 3mo ago
  Actually, AI was learning these 'AI-isms' even back in 2017/2018 (probably even earlier). I think a lot of people who just jumped on the imaginary AI bandwagon more recently don't realise the mannerisms AIs are adopting are not really new. At some point the bleed between 'you' or 'you' and AI will just become so transparent it will be obliterated, more likely than not.
  - schrodinger 3mo ago
    I believe you and OP are in agreement — they were saying that the 2019 book had them, therefore the terms _do_ predate AI. Your point that AI was being trained on material than is load-bearing (lol) but in agreement with OP, not contradictory. Only mentioning because your "actually" may imply you thought you were disagreeing, when in fact it's one big happy family!
  - stingraycharles 3mo ago
    What do you mean? AI is being trained on all data available, so obviously it’s being trained on data from 2017/2018 as well. Or do you mean that the patterns that AI is showing today were already present in communication around that time? That seems obvious as well, as AI has a lot of repetitive patterns that come from all kinds of periods, of which “load-bearing” is just one.

KoolKat23 3mo ago

It's going to be more difficult to distinguish as humans are now using those terms.

grimcompanion 3mo ago
Yep, I've heard humans use load-bearing twice in the past week, versus approximately never in a software eng context before that.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

throwaway894345 3mo ago

I agree, though as a side note I'm very curious to see how models will begin steering _our_ language. If you have popular models repeating "load-bearing" to every developer, eventually I imagine developers (especially junior developers who may not know that it's a Claudism) will begin to repeat it.

user3939382 3mo ago

load bearing, key insight, push back, “it’s not x, it’s y”

ClikeX 3mo ago

> hen I am reading prose online that I previously would have expected a human to write, it can be quite jarring to realize its an LLM. Because it just feels lazy. It triggers my "If you couldn't be bothered to write it, why do you expect me to spend my time reading it" allergy.

tzs 3mo ago
Let's turn this around. I don't use any paid AI or any agents. I just use some of their free interactive question answering interfaces. There have been some times where I've been doing a project in a language or environment that I do not use a lot, and maybe need to use language or environment features I've never had occasion to learn. I don't ask AI to write it for me, or even to write any particular functions. I might ask it some syntax questions, or what data structure in the language's standard library is usually used for a particular task. Mostly I use it as an interactive manual that is really good at generating examples if I need clarification on how something works. If you were working on a similar project and posted asking questions about it, there is a decent chance I could write a useful answer for you. Suppose the questions would have fairly involved answers, and it might take me 30 minutes to write up something entirely in my own words. That is still going to include knowledge that I got from the AI when I questioned it earlier. I could also cover the same points, except for parts of it where what I'd be saying is mostly just writing in my own words what the AI taught me (and which I verified is correct before using), so might have to only spend about 4 minutes writing original material, and another minute doing some selected copy/paste from the AI (maybe with some editing). That 5 minute answer would be exactly as useful in answering your questions as the 30 minute answer. I don't know you. I have no reason to try to help you other than a general "it is nice to help people" thing. If you can't be bothered to read it because I didn't spend 500% more time than was necessary to fully answer your questions (time that benefits me in no way whatsoever), why should I bother answering at all?
- thunderfork 3mo ago
  I feel like "having enough useful context to be jumping in and answering the question in question" and "needing an LLM to shave off 25 minutes of writing on the subject" feel like they're incompatible premises. I would prefer you give me whatever part of your answer takes you five minutes and then I can work from there on my end, in the method and with the tools I see fit. In other words - give me the prompt. Totally possible I'm misunderstanding the situation you're presenting, though.

unknownfuture 3mo ago

Honestly--and I say this as a flesh-and-blood human--I continue to be pissed off that AI has ruined load-bearing parts of my vocabulary. You're absolutely right that it's starting to trigger me when I read random blog posts and come across these linguistic ticks, but I can't help but be resentful. Humans invented language and now robots are coopting it.

hybrid_study 3mo ago

I’m trying to figure what’s so bad about humans using LLMisms. They seem quite useful at quickly conveying meaning using well-accepted terms.

dwedge 3mo ago

I used to religiously read Percona's blog posts because I considered them an authority on MySQL and worth listening to. They started using LLMs to write the posts and I can't read them anymore

keithnz 3mo ago

I get claude to use my voice when making emails, works out pretty well.

protocolture 3mo ago

Something that's coming up repeatedly for me is that there seems to be 2 distinct AI cultures forming. AI as Personal AI as Public. Personal AI users adapt to the tool, but they keep the "sausage" bits private. And often recoil at seeing them in public. Public AI users want to show everyone everything about how they use the tool, and dont care if their content is obviously generated. I definitely fall in the private camp myself, very rarely sharing anything generated even with close friends.

plasticchris 3mo ago

Breakthrough! I’ve found it! The load bearing smoking gun is clearly how annoying this is.

biztos 3mo ago

There is a quite popular poster on Twitter/X that I was following, and really enjoying his content. He did what you might call shallow dives into pretty interesting topics, several hundred words. After about a month of reading his stuff I started to notice the Claudisms. And once you see them you can't unsee them, they start to pop up everywhere. I have no idea if he was using an LLM to "improve" his writing, or was "vibe-authoring" the whole thing. I unfollowed, and now I have this creeping feeling that much of what I see in any given day on the Internets is actually AI slop, and I just haven't seen the signs yet.

aizk 3mo ago

You're absolutely right!

nottorp 3mo ago

The problem is it adds those claudisms in comments. The generated code may be ok, but I always have to edit the comments to reduce the signal/noise ratio and make them sound like english.

Lendal 3mo ago

The thing I did not expect is when watching a Youtube video, I cannot tell if the voice narration is an AI-generated voice, but I know for a fact if the entire script was written by AI.

port11 3mo ago

I agree with you, but after the 14th load-bearing thing in a day, it does get a bit tiresome; especially since words have meaning. I’d expect OpenSSL to be load-bearing; but no, that one-line function isn’t load-bearing. It might be important or even widely used throughout the codebase, but it’s not bearing the load of everything above it. What?