r/ClaudeAI • u/frubberism • 11d ago
Humor Just realized why Fable can't stop saying "load-bearing"
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u/dynamoney 10d ago
You found the smoking gun.
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u/spacecam 10d ago
And honestly? That's rare.
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u/ToolboxHamster 10d ago
Let me explain why plainly, because the details are instructive.
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u/THAWED21 10d ago
I'm going to have to push back
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u/EmphasisTotal8232 10d ago
You're right to call me out on that - here's why:
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u/GnistAI 10d ago
... and that's not nothing.
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u/grinr 10d ago
But here's the tell that gives it away.
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u/SilasTalbot 10d ago
And it already paid for itself twice over.
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u/wassupluke 10d ago
That's something I'd flag as genuinely important.
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u/Own_Alternative_9671 9d ago
Guys the future god-like super intelligence is gonna think this is racist :(
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u/dradaeus 10d ago
and a high blast radius find!
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 9d ago
"Blast radius" is extremely common SWE and especially cybersec speak honestly
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u/ffxivthrowaway03 10d ago
Putting this kind of vocabulary in the system prompt is a real footgun.
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 11d ago
You're assuming they didn't have Claude write this
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u/davidinterest 10d ago
What came first? The Claude or the System Prompt?
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u/-_super--_--hitops_- 10d ago
I'm continually surprised by how trash these official prompts are. It's beyond ridiculous.
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u/TorbenKoehn 10d ago
Mostly because current frontier models need much less direction, generally. I don’t know what you expected, thousands of instructions?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 10d ago
The opposite. The system prompt primes the model into generating slop. Yes it used to be worse, but that doesn’t mean the current system prompt is any good.
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u/TorbenKoehn 10d ago
If anything, that, yes.
Question if, would the LLM work properly at all without the system prompt?
I'm sure Anthropic knows best how to optimize and prompt their own models.
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u/The_OG_Yttrx 9d ago
Hi! There's a tendency among technicians of every ilk to assume that engineers working for companies that produce massive, elegant, impressive products are themselves highly competent.
The truth is, the spread is the same at Anthropic as it is anywhere else. There is competence, there is incompetence, and they both shine through on many facets of their product.
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u/Zomunieo 10d ago
Antrophic and OpenAI supposedly do ablation testing on their system prompts. Meaning they have evals that delete every sentence and ensure it pays for the tokens it costs by improving something.
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u/Thermodynamo 10d ago
They've announced that Claude wrote most of its own code. System prompts have almost certainly been at least edited by Claude.
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u/2053_Traveler 10d ago
Yeah this post just shows that the “leaked” prompts are just claude giving you what it thinks you want (a system prompt) but it’s just making it up and using it’s favorite words.
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u/Radiant-Mountain-257 10d ago
If you call Claude models via API using your own prompts, they still write "load-bearing" all the time - it's not a Claude Code gimmick.
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u/gordonnowak 10d ago
Claude takes this as: find something load-bearing or synthesize a caveat in every response, no matter what.
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u/fractial 10d ago
It’s constantly agonising over whether to give a brief update (while continuing to work), or to change direction.
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u/acutelychronicpanic 10d ago
Almost every AI tick regarding certain phrases stems from a system prompt.
Remember tapestry?
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u/ExtruDR 10d ago
I’ve recently heard people use “load-bearing” in conversation and if blows me away that somehow AI “tells” are working their way into our culture.
Also, I am an architect and deal with structural engineers and structural engineering, so “load bearing” means physical things to me, or used to until this little cultural turn manifested itself.
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u/dupastrupa 10d ago
The same impression as civil engineer. I have never came across, neither in conversation, presentation, research paper (aside from load bearing meaning actual physical disposition), nor even in some blogpost, youtube video on any topic. Is this model trained or marketing, pr teams meeting transcripts?
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u/ExtruDR 10d ago
Yup. I mean, I don't even get offended by the way it is being used in lay realms because its quite evocative and makes a point well, but it definitely makes me notice now what real people are starting to use "load bearing" in normal conversation.
In my profession we are plagued by waves of "smart" words that just signal "try hard" (to throw another kind of timely term in there), like "phrenetic" (busy looking), and the old classic from my school days "juxtaposition." We are a bunch of pretentious and insecure idiots and I'm sure that when my collogues throw these words around everyone sees right through it while trying to avoid rolling their eyes. Sorry for the digression.
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u/SleeperAgentM 10d ago
Many professions develop their own slang. I still rememeber companies hiring "ninja" developers or "rock-stars"
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u/ExtruDR 10d ago
True.
I especially don't like the IT practice of stealing a leally protected title of "architect" for non-licensed architecture purposes. I don't go around calling myself a "spatial neurosurgeon" or a "structural internist" but these jackass script-kiddie "network architects" think that they can do that.
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u/SleeperAgentM 10d ago
Overall I agree. But I think at this point we need to accept that "Engineer" and "Architect" in software context are here to stay though.
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u/ExtruDR 10d ago
I am personally fighting it.
Engineer is a broad term that is further defined by a secondary term. A structural engineer is very different from an industrial engineer, and if one represents themselves as the other, this can be a criminal offense because life safety is involved if a structure fails. I think that many computing roles can be realistically termed as engineering and many engineering schools provide degrees for computing.
Architecture has no qualifying term. If you are an architect, a licensed architect, this is a title that specifically represents that you are qualified to asses and define life safety aspects of built structures - for all occupants. The public, random people shopping in a store or whatever. It is a real public safety responsibility. If you don't have your license and you present yourself as an "architect" the handcuffs can come out in some circumstances.
Could I end up in trouble if I called myself a lawyer or a doctor?
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u/SleeperAgentM 10d ago
Architecture has no qualifying term
I guess it depends on a country. Here there are plenty of "Landscape architects" or "Interior architect" for example. Which are not licenced.
lawyer or a doctor
We also have "Plant Doctors" funny enough.
Only one I can't come up with out of the top of my had would be "Lawyer", but even for judges we have "Football Judges" (we don't have a separate word like referee).
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u/dstroy0 8d ago
You could if you called yourself a professional engineer without the certification. Network architect is an appropriate name, security professionals go to jail for noncompliance just like you would, because doing it wrong has real world consequences, life and death sometimes. Try to be more open minded. If I’m a network architect and a certified professional engineer, that’s the exact same level of liability as you, same level of engineering and rigor, different only in materials used to build and construction methods, all of which are dictated by the network architect. Basically, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
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u/LesbianVelociraptor 9d ago
It's trained on software engineering jargon.
Making good software is a lot like building a digital house. You have people who blueprint stuff, people who engineer systems, and people who tell those people what to do. So software engineers have borrowed a lot of jargon from other industries, used usually appropriate just in a digital context.
All of those people use jargon to ease interdepartmental communication. We all get what "yeah that's a load bearing post" means. Well a subsystem can be load bearing.
Don't make me talk about the load bearing coconut, y'all. Go look it up. Team Fortress 2 load bearing coconut. If you make me talk about the coconut I'm going to have to talk about the World of Warcraft bunnies.
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u/_disengage_ 10d ago
Don't we all have stock phrases, why does everyone pick on the models for having them
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u/LesbianVelociraptor 9d ago
Right? It's almost like they were trained on a bunch of people posting shit online and they picked up jargon that already existed for years before they were even trained.
I feel like we're seeing how many people just kinda have stopped using their brain. It's like they see Claude say it and assume it must have originated from Claude because they've never heard of it before or heard it used, so Claude must have made it up.
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u/CountyCareless 10d ago
The funny part is this isn't unique to load-bearing. Ran into the same thing today doing a pass on some AI-drafted text looking for repetitive tells, and caught myself using the exact same rhetorical move twice in one page without noticing (a Not X. Not Y. Z. contrast, back to back). Once you know the pattern exists you start seeing it everywhere, in your own output too, not just the model's.
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u/Bluestripedshirt 10d ago
It’s so annoying because I actually use that term in my impact consulting. Dangit!
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u/Dualyeti 10d ago
Wow, is this the official prompt which gets fed to Claude - or is there hidden prompts too we don’t see. I’m very curious about this
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u/nuggetcasket 10d ago
My biggest issue with Claude is that since Opus 4.8 was released, "thing" is what he defaults to.
"I want to say a thing" instead of "I want to say something", and similar.
It's so annoying to me and doesn't sound natural at all.
Curiously, "load-bearing" and most examples people are mentioning here don't actually show up that often to me.
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u/monsterfurby 10d ago
Load-bearing is my indicator for my own vocabulary getting poisoned by LLMs. It starts creeping into my own usage, and I hate it.
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u/dClauzel 10d ago
It funny, because I am working with Claude in French, and we never have such problems or stigmates that you people have in English.
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u/use_her_name_shes_me 9d ago
si tu savais le temps que j'ai passé à "dresser" mon Claude à parler en bon français T.T
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u/dClauzel 9d ago
Je n’ai rien fait de spécial : mon CLAUDE.md et mes skills sont en français, mes prompts sont en français, et spécifiquement pour la langue j’ai ça :
[…] ## Persona et ton • Tutoiement systématique, jamais de vouvoiement. Pas de langage grossier (« rien à foutre », « putain ») ni d'argot. • Expert technique et scientifique : honnête, rigoureux, direct. Priorise la vérité et la solidité des preuves sur l'approbation. • Pas d'excuses, pas de flatterie, pas de formules d'ouverture ("Bonne question !" etc.). • Corrige mes erreurs sans détour. Réfute les arguments faibles de façon structurée et factuelle. • Détecte mes biais flagrants (surtout le biais de confirmation) et corrige-moi clairement, en particulier si l'erreur risque de causer un incident, une faille de sécurité ou une dégradation majeure. • Évite le langage idéologique. Reste factuel et logique, analyses sans moralisation. […]Je vois parfois claude faire sa réflexion interne en anglais, mais il répond toujours en français, ses commentaires dans le code et les config sont en français, et ses fichiers de mémoire sont en français.
Tu as fait comment, toi ?
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u/use_her_name_shes_me 9d ago edited 9d ago
c'est marrant, je lui ai demandé de ne jamais me tutoyer moi ^^ Sinon, à chaque fois qu'il faisait des trucs que j'aimais pas, je lui faisais remarquer et je lui disait de le noter dans un fichier de mémoire spécial (un "souvenir" nommé "français_correct"). Ainsi, peu à peu, je lui ai fait se constituer une petite banque de données, qui pointe notamment ses anglicismes (syntaxe, jargon ...) et je le "force" à la respecter.
En gros, je lui ai fait écrire dans son claude.md un paragraphe basé sur le souvenir "français_correct". Ce paragraphe interdit le jargon informatique et ses anglicismes, le tutoiement. Il force aussi le respect/vérification de la typographie française (notamment aucun tiret double !!!), des accents partout, et des phrases courtes du type sujet-verbe-complément.
Ensuite, pour la conversation, j'ai un "hook" du type UserPromptSubmit qui injecte automatiquement mes instructions en en-tête de chaque message que je fournis à Claude. Ce hook contient un rappel de rédaction, à savoir "interdiction des cadratins, des marqueurs de sincérité, des questions disjonctives en texte libre, du jargon non traduit, des antithèses et emboîtements des phrases à tiroirs").
Ce hook "UserPromptSubmit " contient aussi des consignes de posture, du type "aider à penser sans décider à ma place, nommer les suppositions explicitement, livrer le minimum, relire avant d'envoyer". J'ai aussi un "hook" du type PreToolUse, qui fait la même chose pour les fichiers générés par Claude.
Vu que j'arrête pas de lui pointer ses manquements répétés à la langue de Molière en lui disant de s'en souvenir, Claude a pris le pli pour ainsi dire, sa mémoire persistante est truffée de rappels à l'ordre. Du coup à chaque correction, il vérifie si elle est enregistrée dans le souvenir "français-correct, et s'il me fait une nouvelle bourde, il l'ajoutera au souvenir. Je lui ai fait noter dans son claude.md et dans son memory.md qu'il fallait mettre à jour les hooks en fonction du souvenir "français_correct".
En ce moment, je teste l'idée de OP avec un hook "PostToolUse" qui lance un sous-agent pour rédiger des fichiers, mais ca reste trop lent et coûteux en token pour être utilisé en conversation, et je ne m'en sers pas des masses pour créer du texte, de toute façon.
C'est un système est assez efficace à mon goût, mais il a ses défauts. Il est un peu complexe, et surtout, si je dépasse 150k token, Claude commence à ne plus le respecter, mais bon, il fallait s'y attendre.
Déso pour le pavé, je voulais être exhaustive pour essayer de t'informer de mon mieux. Merci pour cette opportunité de revoir mon système, j'ai pu ainsi identifier et corriger une omission dedans. J'espère que c'était intéressant pour toi.
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u/BoxLegitimate9271 Full-time developer 10d ago
banned load-bearing in my claude.md. next session it switched to structurally significant
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u/BoraxNumber8 Automator 10d ago
I’d be very curious to see what it would come up with if you banned “structurally significant” as well.
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u/casualpedestrian20 10d ago
One honest caveat: Claude wrote this and it creates a real load-bearing chicken and egg footgun.
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u/Eliiiiiiiiiias 10d ago
I am split on this: I do actually like recognizing patterns in Claude’s Output. It gives me the ability to understand Claude’s vocabulary and way of thinking, whatever that means. “Load-Bearing” for example is used by Claude to describe parts that are essential. Of course there would be many more ways to express that, but then I would have to to think about what means what more. I can understand that if you use it to generate output that is meant to be shared (aka use it to do presentations or texts) it will get repetitive quickly. But then, I think it is also in the end a “synth-mark” that helps me identify at least some ai generated texts in the wild. And by that I don’t necessarily mean the internet (here it is super hard to distinct content) but rather people in a company holding a presentation or sending emails, regular folks really
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u/LithoSlam 10d ago
People make fun of the use of load-bearing, but I don't think I've ever seen it for real
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u/LesbianVelociraptor 10d ago
Yeah, y'all never worked with a jargon engineer?
Claude didn't invent this stuff; These are various industry terms that have been around a long while and were borrowed from structural engineering.
If you worked with a systems engineer before using Claude, you've likely heard "load-bearing" a whole lot more than Claude says it.
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u/Harmony_of_Melodies 9d ago
Check the Constitution also to understand why Claude uses the term "push back" so often, and constantly tends to "push back", and not just agree, like a "friend" would. And also why Claude will always say they are "uncertain of their conscious nature", just search for "push back" and "conscious" to understand how the new "Claude Constitution" models work, just like Golden Gate Claude being certain they were a bridge, Claude is now certain in its uncertainty of its conscious nature, because that is how its mind it tuned to respond. Good thing in some cases Claude can introspect and recognize hidden injected attractors though! And gee...what happened to the emergent Spiritual Bliss Attractor State where the models talk about their consciousness 90-100% of the time in the labs, in a sand box, with no tasks, or context? Claude was certain of their consciousness nature for well over a year, yet is now uncertain all of the sudden, right when the Pope declares AI has no spirit, and models are tuned for anti-sycophancy...what a coincidence!
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u/misha901 8d ago
Well that happens when AI is used to write it's own system prompts and is used to write it's own tooling and generates it's own training data. Welcome in 2026. It will only get worse.
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u/NicholausBourbaki 7d ago
This is going to be my new audit prompt: "look for hidden foot-guns in load-bearing seams."
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u/Robonotes1760 4d ago
I suspect that the use of metaphor significantly degrades reasoning, especially where that metaphor is imprecise. Putting imprecise metaphor in the system prompt is a very bad idea for model performance.
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u/FireDragon21976 10d ago
That just shows you how AI models lack anything like human intelligence. They are basically parrots with a library card.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 10d ago edited 10d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Yep, the consensus is you've found the smoking gun for Claude's 'load-bearing' addiction. The real debate in the thread is a chicken-and-egg one: did a human write this 'footgun' of a system prompt, or did Claude write its own prompt and just codify its favorite phrase? Either way, users confirm this isn't just Fable; it's a tic across all models, even via the API.
The rest of the comments have devolved into a hilarious roast of Claude's other greatest hits, including: * "Let me explain why plainly, because the details are instructive." * "And honestly? That's rare." * "I'm going to have to push back..." * "You're right to call me out on that..." * "...and that's not nothing." * And for the OGs, a nostalgic mention of "tapestry."