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- Hacker News
- As of now, there are only 2 natural language clusters in the partition: Claudish and Spanish/French. From a first glance, the other clusters seem centered on technologies (lots of command line flags and abbreviations among the "most representative" words). If the goal is to investigate English language usage trends, it might be better to cluster based only on English words.by loglog
- 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
by legobmw99 - It has some vintage. Kubernetes deployments (containers) may have sidecars.by alchemism
- 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.
by sethd - > A lot of these “Claudeisms” are simply jargon I’ve seen or heard firsthand myself while working at tech companies. --- The difference in distribution between how often LLMs use them and how often people use them in PR descriptions is almost the entire content of the link.by empath75
- The jargon isnt even the worst part. The phrasing is just downright incomprehensible sometimes. And its not even "academic". It's just extremely awkward, bad writing. And it is much worse than say Opus 4.6-8.
Actually I have found the copy that Claude Design spits out is way better than using the same model directly. I have no idea why. It has its flaws but it sounds like it's written by a human who uses derivative language. But usually the models just soudn incoherent.
by nonethewiser - I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.by smj-edison
- Everyone has their own distinct mix of jargon and uses some words more or less than others, but now it's as if you have 1000 coworkers who are all the same person, and talk the exact same way, and it just so happens that their writing is grating to read. It also doesn't stop when you log off for the day. The same guy follows you home in ad copy, message board comments, spam, and in some cases even the correspondence of your loved ones.by dgunay
- Besides vocabulary I'd also be curious about how it structures sentences.
The "X, not Y" is well known, but another thing that bothers me is "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>".
For example: "the list contains no string" or "it changes no behavior" or "it holds no directory".
by stabbles - Yes! This is probably the one thing I want to think about but it requires detecting thise constructs. I think spacy was able to annotate each word with a function, so it should be able to validate known constructs but I need some model to perform unbiased discovery.by Labo333
- > "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>"
The meaning is often different in these constructs. Consider: “Claude answers no questions” vs “Claude doesn’t answer questions”. The first could be a bot or a politician avoiding the substance, the second could be a broken UI or a politician cancelling the QA of a press conference.
by pama - 20 years ago idlewords wrote[1] "Despite - or perhaps because of - sucks" and coined the term "linguistic kudzu" for annoying idioms spreading and spreading. I suggest it as a good term for LLM-isms despite, or perhaps because of, the way it doesn't quite fit.
[1] https://idlewords.com/2003/04/despite_or_perhaps_because_of_...
by jodrellblank - "Skipping their no-op fuel starves nothing." https://github.com/phpstan/phpstan-src/commit/a9260cb3584854...by bitwize
- 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?by wavewrangler
- "shipped" was a pretty common term before AI though. It does show as 17x more common on github in this dataset but it was used a lot more in product management than in PRs previously.by nl
- Yeah, Claude's writing is weird nowadays, and it uses words that are weird and non-standard in context, and its sentence structure is sometimes weird as well.
Working with it on my code, it's now frequently making weird word choices such as:
- "name(s)" as a verb (instead of "specify/specifies", etc), e.g., "...the function names the argument"
- "carries" instead of "contains"
- "verdict" instead of "result"
- "judge", instead of "validate"
Very weird. Also, in writing comments and docs, it is terse in ways that make the writing difficult to parse, like omitting mentioning what a noun refers to, e.g. abc does not accept..." instead of "The abc function does not accept..."
I've resorted to banning from using certain words, and keep asking it to rewrite its text more clearly.
by prmph - Claude is just in its cringy pretentious teen years where it thinks that saying fancy words and long, rambling responses makes it sounds smart.by pennomi
- 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?by Jordan-117
- I've been thinking more about how 99.9% of us don't have the experience of someone significantly more intelligent, yet also subservient working under us, which is why I keep going crazy second guessing whether Claude is spouting RLHF'd bullshit that sort of resembles English, or is genuinely (pun not intended) just better at "intuiting" things I'm working on, leading to its language.
A notable exception would be people like CEOs and managers higher up in big tech, who might be used to skilled engineers and domain experts reporting to them in unfamiliar lingo. Maybe that's why we don't hear as much on the everyday annoyances of Claude's language from that camp?
by udbhavs - It's easy to think "it's not talking down, because I don't understand it, and I'm intelligent". But how is less intelligent being supposed to fully understand a more intelligent one, honestly speaking? All I know is that Claude understands Claude perfectly. I have the common session pause/resume setup that sometimes produces completely incomprehensible markdown files, but a new Claude session picks them up perfectly, down to the smallest details. What if what we consider excessive circular gibberish is actually highly precise set of instructions needed to minimize error cases for that unreliable human?
If Claude understands Claude, Claude understands human, and human doesn't understand Claude, that doesn't argue well for "Claude is a caveman".
by sergey_v - My unprovable pet theory is that, especially for writing about technical topics, the RL process has an open-ended way to weight things for quality: textbooks and first-party docs preferred to old stackoverflow answers and obscure blog/forum posts, and so on. The open-endedness of that quality gradient results in something in the RL process (maybe HF, maybe not) massively over-weighting some very small corpus of “quality = near infinite” content. The distribution of quality scores that inform the degree to which RL affects output has some extremely influential outliers, in other words.
Whatever that small corpus is, it contains some very specific grammatical tics, and that’s how we get Claudish.
Anyone who thinks a company/project as big as Anthropic/Claude wouldn’t make such a big mistake should take a look at how Azure cross-account federated login used to work.
by zbentley - The social graph proximity of Rationalists to Anthropic will be lost on no one who reads Astralcodexten. So guess which website has served as the thickest reservoir of 'Claude-isms'.by ricksunny
- I don’t think they’re “talking down”. If anything - it’s way more difficult to distill something into a genuinely easy to digest format. I personally think that they aren’t immediately capable of this, and so we get word salad instead. Extra prompting required to strip extraneous prose out.
Maybe I am dumb and it IS talking down to me, but there have been many occasions where I’m reading AI generated docs / plans and it makes absolutely no sense, but looks really in depth at a glance.
- Imo their language is not precise enough for their intelligence to be the reason when it's difficult to understand. Maybe I'm prompting wrong, but when I don't understand, it's almost always because they just mash together words from context that don't form sentences with a clear meaning.by emaro
- > 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?
Its not the latter; its just excessively verbose wirh awkward word choices, the same as many poor writers. (And, like many such writers, the particular bad choices fall into recognizable, regularly recurring patterns.)
by dragonwriter - I think it's model collapse - excessive feedback and excessive RL.
What RL does is narrow the variety generated by the model by steering the output towards the goal being rewarded. It's a bit like putting blinkers on a horse.
Of course RL is a very crude tool - it affects the entire model, even if you are just trying to make it better at some specific task(s), or trying to imbue a certain kind of personality (OpenAI's recent goblin problem).
- 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.
by sosull - > the argument effectively ‘makes itself’
What argument? I don't know what to take away other than "Claude likes certain words". Some of them are kind of amusing, but I'm not convinced the vocabulary is bad or that this is a problem, just from looking at this.
by jimmaswell - Thank you so much! The presentation was really my goal here, more than the model itself.by Labo333
- 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?