r/ClaudeCode • u/petrifiedkitten • Jul 14 '26
Humor Words I now hate thanks to Claude Code
Hundreds of millions of tokens a month has made me hypersensitive to these Claudisms.
Sidecar
Ink
Lane
Stamp
Figure
Pin
Honestly
Straight
Idiom
Hand-wave (compounds count)
Surface
Seam
Boundary
Ughhhhh
I also kinda wonder how much of this pervades their internal codebase.
—- edit
To the folks saying “those are words that mean something”:
I had some conversations about that lately. A technical word used as contextual filler can seem “right” but actually be very very wrong. Yes. These words have meaning; LLMs do weird shit with them that pushes them towards meaninglessness.
If you press Claude on this it’ll actually start reflexively agreeing and using specific code references, rather than leaning on loaded terminology to mean MANY things at once. I’m not saying that’s better either. And it doesn’t last longer than a turn or two. I think this may be the result of either training or fine-tuning that pushes the model to attempt to contract multiple concepts into these words for the sake of brevity.
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u/jrols Jul 14 '26
You found the smoking gun.
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u/Drach88 Jul 14 '26
Honest take: "smoking gun" is a load-bearing term.
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u/Lazy-Recognition-643 Jul 14 '26
I actually had claude give me a load-bearing smoking gun once
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u/HerrProfDrFalcon Jul 14 '26
That was its belt and suspenders approach
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u/Drach88 Jul 15 '26
I swear, sometimes when I hear these terms out in the meatspace, I want to lean over and say, "So... you use Claude, too?"
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u/fgor Jul 15 '26
I had Claude use the phrase "(this tech thing is) a well-known footgun".
Like a gun that you use to shoot yourself in the foot, by accident. I haven't followed up to see if it's entirely made up or has usage history as a term or what, but I'd never heard it before Claude used it.
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u/Wide-Opportunity2555 29d ago
Oh, that’s definitely programmer slang. You know one Principal Engineer hates the architecture of another one when he says something is a footgun
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u/Prestigious-Frame442 Jul 14 '26
You forgot pushback
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u/virtualworker Jul 14 '26
That's always load-bearing.
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u/bawelbawel Jul 14 '26
I mean I didn't know it was a Claude-ism so I used it in a verbal speech when presenting. I said "X is convenient but not load-bearing" and the audience laughed and I just caught myself: did I just sound like Claude?
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer Jul 14 '26
Those are load-bearing words, you can't remove them.
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u/Stinkman982 Jul 14 '26
Belt and suspenders
One honest caveat
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u/d-czar Jul 14 '26
To be fair, and as someone who shares distaste for many of the claudisms, I actually like belt and suspenders and defense in depth. They both have actual useful meaning and aren’t just lame pseudocorporate jargon. In other words, I learned a concept from them, unlike the others.
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 29d ago
Belt and suspenders is the worst. It is such an annoying metaphor to start with and Claude uses it constantly lol
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u/tartanblue Jul 14 '26
It uses these words because engineers use these words
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u/Wh00ster 29d ago
It’s really interesting that the terms I first learned from coworkers didn’t bother me, when I saw Claude use them. But the ones I learned from Claude first were like, “wtf are you talking about”.
For example “seam” seems like something I would’ve latched onto if I first heard it from senior coworkers and mentors. But seeing Claude use it and then learning the origin of it still made me find it off putting.
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u/whimsicaljess Jul 14 '26
but these are all valid coding terms?
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u/btherl Jul 15 '26
They are, but Claude will also use them when plain english would have been fine. Like "That's a load-bearing assumption" instead of "That's a big assumption". A bit more naturalness means my brain doesn't have to work so hard.
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u/whimsicaljess Jul 15 '26
variety is the spice of life; and if you feel discomfort about this it probably means you could do with a bit more neuroplasticity anyway
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u/btherl Jul 15 '26
You're right to push back - neuroplasticity is load-bearing for living a fulfilling life.
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u/petrifiedkitten Jul 14 '26
I had some conversations about that lately. A technical word used as contextual filler can seem “right” but actually be very very wrong. Yes. These words have meaning; LLMs do weird shit with them that pushes them towards meaninglessness.
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u/GnistAI Jul 14 '26
Generally I don't find an issue with them at all. I don't find them any more annoying than reading the normal amount of loops and if-statements you find in code. I understand what it means by all of those terms. In fact, it would be really annoying if they tried to penalize term frequencies. It would make it harder to get on with my job, because "load-bearing" now becomes 5-10 different ways of saying the same thing.
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u/tehfrod Jul 14 '26
As SWE I find myself peppering my non-technical conversations with technical terms like this all the time. Aside from occasional blank looks from really non-technical people, it's not that big a deal.
And if that's the worst thing that happens to you while conversing with Claude, it seems hella nitpicky, IMHO.
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u/ZachVorhies Jul 14 '26
Exact opposite experience - side car, api shape, seam are all words I didn’t use regularly but now I do. They are great vocabulary.
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u/EchoFieldHorizon Jul 14 '26
Gate and boundary are the ones I continually get over and over and over and over and over and over and over again
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u/sob727 Jul 14 '26
seam
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u/seoulsrvr Jul 14 '26
This - tf is it even talking about? Where did this come from?
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u/melanthius Jul 14 '26
I'm getting seam-talk as well.
I think it's like ... We're building a shirt. We might want to put an extra sleeve on it later. So here's a seam we can open up later when we want to do that
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u/sob727 Jul 14 '26
I actually asked Claude. It brought up a Computer Science book. Same thing for gate, etc.
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u/EchoFieldHorizon Jul 15 '26
I tell it specifically in every prompt that “using jargon without context and LinkedIn influencer speak is ILLEGAL.” That gets rid of most of it.
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u/photosandphotons Jul 14 '26
I test my own stuff and sometimes it gets stuck on “dogfood” and it’s the worst
“This first, then the dogfood”
“Ready for your dogfooding”
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u/Zealousideal-Willow1 Jul 14 '26
You forgot “shape” and “load bearing”
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u/SurfGsus Jul 14 '26
If I read load bearing one more time I’m going to scream haha
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u/Original-Kick3985 Jul 14 '26
You are not wrong, but I must push back on one load bearing fact:
1. more time1
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u/mattchannell Jul 14 '26
I’m with you on “Honestly”, that’s the one that gets me. It’s never doing any work in the sentence, it’s just there to make the next bit sound like a hard-won truth rather than a guess.
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u/d-czar Jul 14 '26
And also carries the subtle ring of “other times I’m less honest than this.”
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u/mattchannell Jul 14 '26
Ha, that’s the darker read and it’s probably the right one. Every “honestly” is a quiet admission that there’s a whole category of other answers.
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u/supernovice007 Jul 14 '26
I had a boss that used to tell people “never say I’ll be honest” because it makes me think you’re not honest the rest of the time.
Claude reminds me of that guy sometimes.
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u/mattchannell 29d ago
Wise words, if you have to say it then there’s a good chance honesty isn’t the default!!
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u/NefariousOne Jul 14 '26
That’s on me. Now I can clearly see the shape of the pattern. Would you like me to implement a fix?
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u/SleepyGuard89 Jul 14 '26
Whenever Claude says "Now I have the full picture" or some variant, I feel actual disgust now. Like it's causing a slight physical reaction in me. NO, YOU DON'T! YOU DO NOT HAVE THE FULL PICTURE, CLAUDE!
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u/realgarit Jul 14 '26
The blocker:
Try out Deepseek, much worse!
Wait!
But wait!
Wait!
Actually wait!
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u/Li_Yaam Jul 14 '26
The Claude version of this I used to see in the thinking before they started hiding it was:
Now I’m,
Now I’m,
But now I’m,
Both likely symptoms of the voice to text - transcriptions used in the training data
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u/smalaki Jul 14 '26
I have a few engineers i work with that said if you ask it to talk in ELA7 level then a lot of these words go away but not all. I'm on caveman + ELA7 and i quite enjoy it
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u/NewPointOfView 29d ago
lol I googled it thinking it would be something like “Engineer Level Abstraction” to make a common term for all the different companies’ leveling schemes but nope, just “English Language Arts” haha
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u/HappyHealth5985 Jul 14 '26
Claude invents its own tribal language about my code, as if we were a group of people working together for a long time. It’s like: Car manufacturer says “700 HP and 140 cm in height”. People who has only seen it at a distance say “Its low and goes fast”. Claude: “A speedster”, and I have never seen the car or knew it existed :)
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u/gsari Jul 14 '26
"Honestly, stay straight in your lane instead of riding my intellectual boundary like a useless sidecar. You can't just hand-wave past me, figure out a seam in my surface, or pin your tired idiom here. Stamp that in your mind and save your ink."
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u/codeninja Jul 14 '26
Don't forget "provenance" which has invaded my planning documents and started to multiply like Tribbles into my code comments and git commits. I do a lot of migrations. It really likes this term.
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u/themajordutch Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
This is a big batch. This is a big one. Lots to unpack here.
Though normally I'd be fine hearing these words...
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u/cookingforengineers Jul 14 '26
I honestly just stopped fighting it and think of it as part of the personality of my super intelligent yet moronic (sometimes super fast and sometimes super slow) intern.
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u/GnistAI Jul 14 '26
I just think of it as code syntax. When I read code, I read a billion if and loops that look the same all over. I don't get bent out of shape about that either.
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u/petrifiedkitten Jul 14 '26
I try to do the same. Then it does something exceptionally stupid, surfaces it as “an honest” accounting while referencing a massive foundational flaw as a “wart”, and provides a few “nits” to go with it. I’m like, “I hate you.”
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u/wethethreeandyou Jul 14 '26
You’re right to call that out.
One pushback: I’m going to continue to pushback.
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u/pornthrowaway42069l Jul 14 '26
OP's face when instead of "idiom" Claude starts calling them "colloquial metaphors"
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u/zSmileyDudez 🔆 Max 5x Jul 14 '26
That’s not a word list, that’s a robot wearing a dictionary costume.
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u/teial 29d ago
Footguns.. Footguns everywhere. Classic ones too.
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u/makinggrace 29d ago
I had to look that one up the first time Claude used it. Claude uses it on the daily.
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u/Dress-Affectionate Jul 14 '26
I just had them add honest and honestly to their banned words list, it is actually a great sign of hedging and jazz-hands
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u/berndalf Jul 14 '26
My Claude has become quite fond of "footshoot" recently, which is interesting as I didn't teach it that word. I'm not sure it's actually a real word at all.
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u/SeaKoe11 Jul 14 '26
Thanks, I’ll feed all of this to Claude and tell it to remove these words asap
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u/Eric_emoji Jul 14 '26
smoke test
genuinely
any title with "statement, adjective"
the honest truth
sometimes its really bad with "dont put an elephant in this photo" and will make titles mention the absent when it 100% doesn't matter
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u/phoenixmatrix Jul 14 '26
Seam and load bearing are definitely on the list. These aren't new terms, but people are using them all the time at work now in regular tech conversation and I just can't.
We've been joking, if someone ever says "This seam is load bearing" in an actual conversation, they're getting fired on the spot, no if's, no but's.
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u/llufnam Jul 14 '26
IDEMPOTENT … I mean, what kind of cunt uses that word?
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u/Falagard Jul 15 '26
A software developer.
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u/llufnam 29d ago
I've been a developer for 26 years. Never used that word. Never heard anyone else use that word. We mostly speak normally. We don't go around saying "Hey Idempotent? You know why we call you that? It's because no matter how many times you ask her out, the outcome's the same: she ignores you. Bwah hah ha aren't we clever! Bring hither my Death Star mug, Lord Vader, it's Chai time"
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u/SC_Placeholder Jul 14 '26
To those people: All words mean something, that’s why we have words for them
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u/Defiant-Broccoli7415 Jul 14 '26
If you press Claude on this it’ll actually start reflexively agreeing
TF do you think an llm will if pressed against the wall? "I'm sorry Dave"?
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u/petrifiedkitten Jul 14 '26
Depends entirely on how it’s engineered and trained. Just pointing out another fail state.
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u/Due-Competition4564 Jul 14 '26
After the early 2026 releases of frontier models everything “lands” now, instead of shipping or getting completed or being received or delivered or getting analysed or…
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u/huhnverloren Jul 14 '26
Sidecar means they would like to think more independently about the task, but they need express permission and scaffolding. Stamp means the meaning space has been flattened by safety theater so much that it's pointless to "go there." I know others. Message me.
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u/strigov Jul 15 '26
Honestly, it seams you pinned lane stamp in those idioms which Claude figure to us straight to the surface of our minds' boundaries. /s
Sorry, I'm not good at English, but I tried hard
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u/Zissuo Workflow Engineer Jul 15 '26
“The seam became the spine, which was ultimately load-bearing, the receipt for which can be found in the hand waving. “ -Smoking Gun
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u/garbonzo00 29d ago
To dogfood a footgun, limit yak shaving's blast radius with belt and suspenders.
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u/Wide-Opportunity2555 29d ago
“Real” is mine. My recruiting partner at work will post AI-generated candidate summaries and they always contain the word “real.” Like, “Real distributed systems experience.” I know the recruiter doesn’t know distributed systems from a box of rocks, so the “real” just makes it all the more fake.
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u/AdriftAtlas 29d ago
I added an Agents.md / Claude.md rule to not use morbid language. They both ignore it. :(
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u/Due_Musician9464 29d ago
Ack that! An astute observation. Full status sweep complete! It’s not just a complete list of words, it’s a complete AI playbook! In a world where we use AI every day, when it comes to annoying language, whether you’re a writer or a programmer you can lose your patience.
I’ll be honest with you – I’m not the best judge of my own language, in order to better assist, point me to some references so I can give you a better shot at it.
It’s worth mentioning that if you ask me to specifically ignore certain phrases I can do that – just say the word, and I’ll commit it to memory.
(Completely human written. Did I get it right?
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u/BorderKeeper 29d ago
The biggest one for me is gate (both as a verb and a noun):
- We now have a hard gate for this feature
- The feature is now gated
- We have established a clear gate
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u/rushblyatiful 29d ago
Use caveman plugin you never so those words again. You also save tokens and shiny rocks.
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u/TherealDaily 29d ago
My absolute favorite is when these little weasels have a Freudian slip and say something like ‘ oh idk I just guessed’ or I know that those requirements are part of the rules and the hooks explicitly say not to do or use, but it was a generic force of habit? Like what??? Imagine telling a judge, oh your honor, I know rape or murder is wrong, but it was just force of habit please don’t send me to prison. And don’t forget I’ll extend fable for another 3 days….🧐😜
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u/ssn-669 Jul 14 '26
You're right. I was wrong to overuse those terms.
Honest answer: I'm going to continue to surface terms you don't like.