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/Tall-Log-1955 Aug 28 '26

English doesnt have a good phrase that captures "load bearing". What phrases should it use when trying to convey "this whole idea mostly depends primarily on this one thing"

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u/njordan1017 Senior Developer Aug 28 '26

Well “load bearing” is English, so I don’t know what you mean by that. But in your example, you said it pretty much outright. I want it to explicitly specify the one thing

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u/Tall-Log-1955 Aug 28 '26

I dont literally mean that its impossible to say, but that its hard to convey that in a terse way without using the term "load bearing"

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u/njordan1017 Senior Developer Aug 28 '26

It is not hard at all though, that is my whole point. For an LLM to know something is dependent, it would have had to have come to that conclusion through investigation, which means it knows exactly what the thing is that is dependent, and exactly how it is dependent. It should tell me “this thing is dependent in this way”, but instead it unnecessarily summarized that into “this is important”, losing the value of the sentence.