I was pleasantly surprised when I attempted to scroll down and realized everything the author wanted to present fit on-screen. It's almost ironic that this site is able to make such an obvious, compelling presentation without being overly verbose or complicated (something which LLMs have a hard time doing). I wouldn't read TOO deeply into what is being presented, but the author has done a good job to not inject their own bias into the presentation which works well.
I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs. Something I've noticed in my own writing is that I now present lists of examples in a consistent way: "... such as <example 1>, <example 2>, etc., ...". I started to notice I was using this pattern quite a bit somewhat recently, but I took a quick look at some of my social media posts and realized it's been occurring for a while. I had realized that I grown accustomed to this kind of language because, especially early on, LLMs would focus too much on the specific examples I'd provide when, really, I was just trying to give them a sense of what I was looking for. I just picked up that providing two examples then adding the "etc." worked to get the LLM to not focus so much on the specific examples and to understand that they need to consider more than what I explicitly presented. Of course, now I write like that in my social media comments, in Slack with my colleagues, etc. :>
I'd be interested to see if anyone can identify trends like this, since I think the human-language component of the adoption of LLMs is probably being somewhat neglected despite probably being surely dramatically affected.
Author here :)
Thank you for the compliment! I did spend a lot of time designing a nice experience on both desktop and mobile. Even the scrollbar to select words was non trivial as I wanted the words to be of different size, yet avoid flickering when scrolling!
I know HN prefers we focus on the content and not the design but I have join in to say that word scrolling experience was brilliant.
I was focused on the data initially scrolling through until I suddenly realised, wow, this is really nice!
You did a fantastic job; very to-the-point with effective visualisations. Kudos!
One very minor note: if your scroll device reports pixel-perfect deltas rather than discrete scroll-wheel ticks (e.g. logitech mx master, laptop touchpad, etc), the behaviour in the word search box is a bit weird. Arrow keys work fine though.
Thank you!
I did test it with my mac touchpad without issue. Maybe the problem is that I wanted to make discrete scroll-wheel ticks work. I just tried a fix by normalising deltaMode to pixels.
If you could just paste this in your console, I would have a better idea:
FWIW I got a bunch of "(-)10.00 native" in the console, "PAGE" never showed up no matter what I tried. Firefox, also a Logitech mouse, no trackpad though.
On a compatible Logitech device, browsing through the word search box benefits a lot from enabling hyperscroll.
G502 user here! I also put a draggable scrollbar for the less lucky :)
Congratulations! I was going to comment on the scroll field in particular when I saw this. I didn't even realize you had to hand-craft the component, but it's such a nice UI idea in general, the way the scrolling works and how the content above changes.
Thanks! The real and probably unnecessary pain was having the words in different sizes.
Mobile experience is great! Thanks for thinking of us!
I just wanted to pop in and say that I found the site delightful. It’s aesthetic, concise, and everything works so quickly and responsively.
In the enterprise, we are already adopting them. “Seam”, I term I’d never heard used before, is now not only our defacto way to describe the boundary between systems/workflows/components, it is encoded into our organizational roles and responsibilities descriptions.
I am the proud owner of several seams, and am considering giving them person-names. The empty space between my inventory APIs and their clients might be “Karen”.
I can’t say that Claude invented this; the same type of terminology cycling happens every few quarters based on what leadership is reading/being told by Gartner.
"seam" dates back to refactoring & software engineering literature that pre-date LLM use by 20 years -- see Working Effectively With Legacy Code for one example (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/working-effectively-wit...). Its a great book, still use techniques from it everyday.
"load-bearing" I have never heard used for programming before Opus, and its incredibly annoying and over-used.
+1, useful read!
Seam is used liberally throughout because it captures the idea well (i.e. a place where you can cleave ball of mud code apart to begin refactoring efforts in an isolated way) and that takes many different forms throughout the book whether that be via methods and classes, source files as a single unit, linker seams, on and on.
load-bearing was/is used frequently on the ops side of things, I assume the LLMs picked up from physical engineering texts or sysadmin type blogs.
"Load-bearing" is an apt metaphor in the https://xkcd.com/2347/ sense.
Or in the admin handover sense https://lastplacecomics.com/car-jacking/
I take it in a get-ye-flask mode.
http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Ye_Flask
I remember "cleavage" and "cleaves" from that vocabulary. Always made my adolescent brain chuckle.
"seam" is a cop-out term for when someone (usually AI) lacks the imagination to come up with something more descriptive. It's like saying "middle thing". Just name it by what it does, and if you can't, remove it because it's not doing anything.
"load-bearing" on the other hand is just a weird way to say "required" or "prerequisite" without drawing any attention to the fact that one cannot articulate what something is a prerequisite for, probably because that fact has since been lost from context.
"Seam" has been a thing since before the AI craze. Wasn't it the NSA director who once said something like "we make our living at the seams"?
Not the same thing.
I believe the term "seam" came from Michael Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code": “a seam is a place where you can alter behavior in your program without editing in that place”.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LegacySeam.html
Claude is using it a bit liberally, but not totally incorrectly.
I've associated it with the concept of "carving nature at the seams", except that I just realized that in the standard phrasing it's actually "at the joints", not "seams".
Saying "the language of LLMs", while technically correct, is not exactly precise. It should really be the language of "AI agents", or "chatbots". OG LLMs would just mimic the style of its context based off of (pre)training from text on the Internet.
The kind of quirks you see came from crowd-sourced human-in-the-loop fine-tuning, with not very good work conditions or level of qualification (so resulting in "what non-writers thought good writing looked like", before people had developed the flair to detect these patterns) as well as feedback loops during agentic reinforcement learning and RLVR.
I've found myself rewriting my own words to avoid Claudisms (because they can be cringe and I don't want people to think I'm copy/pasting Claude output at them).
> I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs, or at least certain language quirks that come from interacting with LLMs.
Or we'll do the opposite and even deliberately use some words that an LLM would never use to identify whose content is worth reading?
>I suspect, as we continue forward, humans will slowly start to adopt the language of LLMs
I'm already seeing it. A coworker said something like "<person> added the color to the ticket here" meaning that someone added details to a ticket.
I've started seeing Opus 5 talk about "hermetic testing" when it just means "unit testing", so I hope that doesn't catch on...
One of my coworkers uses “load-bearing” ironically constantly now, it’s very funny
The idiom "added color to" as an expression of adding detail or nuance to something goes back much further than the AI era. I've certainly used it at various times in my career spanning 4 decades now.
All of these phrases existed. Claude didn’t come up with them. The question is whether people are using them a lot more now due to Claude’s influence.
I think it would be fine if more people used "add color to". I think it's a great turn of phrase.
"Load bearing", not so much. Ick.
I’ve been using that idiom since 2010.