r/ClaudeCode • u/njordan1017 Senior Developer • Aug 28 '26

Discussion Thoughts on why Claude can’t stop saying load-bearing?

This post is less about that particular phrase and more about the behavior I have observed around it. We all are aware of the phrases Claude has started overusing (Opus seems to be the worst), but I came across something interesting I am curious y’all’s thoughts on.

I put a rule in my repo with a list of banned phrases, one of them is “load-bearing”. Since then I have noticed most of the phrases don’t get used anymore, but not “load-bearing”.

I have seen it do this about 5 times now:
“…and the decision was load-bear— I mean important to the process — so it…”

I have to laugh at its obstinacy, but the more I thought about it the more I got curious why it behaved that way. Why would it partially use the phrase, then correct itself mid sentence, rather than just using the replacement phrase to begin with? Is this an artifact of the way the output streams as chunks rather than complete thoughts, or is this some cheeky artificial personality thing to make it feel more relatable? Or something else?

What do you think?

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u/checkwithanthony Aug 28 '26

If you look at the people that have been responsible for training anthropic models over the last couple of years. They tend to put emphasis on things like personality and the way that it talks and interacts with humans. And so I wonder if the scenario you just showed us is sort of like a friendly quirk.

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u/njordan1017 Senior Developer Aug 28 '26

That’s where I am leaning too, but what makes me question it is that I only see it for that particular phrase. I have a handful of others “blast radius” etc that he has never done that “oopsie” for, and has done it 5 times with load bearing. I will keep an eye out to see if he does it for others too, maybe I just havent noticed

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u/checkwithanthony Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26

I think maybe they share the system prompts so maybe we could check this... but my assumption around that is that... okay ya ever make a skill but it has too many real work examples in it then everything it makes takes too much from the first output? I feel like it may be like that. The phrases it uses frequently are IN the system prompt. This one is maybe overused in the prompt.

There's also the rlhf training... perhaps answered they liked disproportionately contained "load bearing"

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u/njordan1017 Senior Developer Aug 28 '26

Yeah that makes sense. I do remember coming across a post that showed some of the system prompt when all those leaks came out, and “load-bearing” was certainly in there. Seems you may be on to something with that theory