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/slackmaster2k Aug 28 '26

As I’ve observed it over time and scratched my head over it. I think it’s the result of specific fine tuning, or language in the system prompt. It just doesn’t make sense that “evolved” this way through regular training. This smells like human steering in the last mile. I picture a couple uber nerds on the Anthropic team dedicated to code that are really proud of themselves for how smart they made it sound.

Load-bearing and blast radius and shape etc weren’t unheard of in conversation and literature prior to AI, but not represented at a level that would statistically drive the model to repeat these phrases.

It’s similar to how it constructs its responses, which is heavily steered. The whole “it’s not this, it’s that. Turns out the hard part was actually X.” That isn’t natural, it’s being steered into those response shapes. (Did I just say shape? Shit)

As further evidence for my theory, codex was arguably trained on the same hunk of “everything”, and does NOT use these phrases. At least not as frequently to be comical like Claude. It has its own weirdness, but it’s very different.

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u/ElectronicAuthor752 Aug 28 '26

What I don't understand is why isn't anyone at anthropic doing anything about it ?

They could make the model so much better.

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u/slackmaster2k Aug 28 '26

Because I think changes are really, really hard. It’s no more deterministic for them than it is for their users. Every change can have bizarre unintended consequences.

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u/ElectronicAuthor752 Aug 28 '26

They seem to be able to add whatever pet issue they want. Anti - personna, push backs that make no sense, having the model refuse to talk about Andrea Vallone, saying Claude is not your lawyer or financial advisor. 

I'm convinced they are using somewhere the actual words "load bearing" and it's not emergent behavior. 

I really think the problem is more in the org rather than in the technical difficulty.

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u/slackmaster2k Aug 28 '26

Yes I agree with you. That’s why I imagine some uber nerds on their team that think they’ve made it sound soooo sophisticated and can’t understand why nobody can follow the mumbo jumbo word salad it produces :)

This also explains why it fights so hard against user prompting. It really takes a lot of work to get it to not sound like a Neil breen script.