20 years ago idlewords wrote[1] "Despite - or perhaps because of - sucks" and coined the term "linguistic kudzu" for annoying idioms spreading and spreading. I suggest it as a good term for LLM-isms despite, or perhaps because of, the way it doesn't quite fit.
> "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>"
The meaning is often different in these constructs. Consider: “Claude answers no questions” vs “Claude doesn’t answer questions”. The first could be a bot or a politician avoiding the substance, the second could be a broken UI or a politician cancelling the QA of a press conference.
Interesting use of Claude’s construct! Your phrasing might also suggest that it resolves something else, which is left ambiguous, whereas your other construct would be less likely to suggest that idea (unless you explicitly appended a contrastive clause for emphasis).
The bots are subtle. From your example in your GP comment (and in part depending on the surrounding context) I would expect that an empty list would be less likely the subject of: “the list contains no string”, than in “the list doesn’t contain strings”.
I might be over interpreting the intentionality of Claude in using this construct, however, these models were pretrained by reading so much more than any human, they learn to handle language differently than most humans.
I suspect you read more into it than there is. The original post is about overuse of certain words and speech patterns, which already is an argument against intentionality. I wouldn't recommend treating it like scripture or a text from your crush.
Oh, the use of “load-bearing” is a pretty clean bug in the system context of Claude code. It can be fixed trivially. The overuse of particular language constructs, including the one you suggested, is a more interesting problem; it is fixable, but might involve considerably more effort.
Yes! This is probably the one thing I want to think about but it requires detecting thise constructs. I think spacy was able to annotate each word with a function, so it should be able to validate known constructs but I need some model to perform unbiased discovery.
The "X, not Y" is well known, but another thing that bothers me is "It <verb>s no <noun>" instead of "It doesn't <verb> <noun>".
For example: "the list contains no string" or "it changes no behavior" or "it holds no directory".