Every generation of language models have their own linguistic quirks. Early models famously overused the word "delve", em-dashes, phrases like "not just X, but Y" and sycophantic praise like "You're absolutely right!". At this point, halfway through 2026, these are rarely seen except in stale attempts at parody. Presumably the so-called AI labs took notice and curbed these tendencies after they were so widely mocked. But the present era has its own rather similar oddities.
Some of these are widely talked about, like Claude talking about things being load-bearing, events having a blast radius, establishing ground truth, working on the plumbing etc. I find these not-so-remarkable simply because they are established engineering jargon from the pre-LLM era. However, there are other metaphors which my Claude agents use all the time, and which I see more and more often online. Almost never heard them used until six months ago, now they are all over the place.
Artisinal affectations
One pattern I have noticed is that Claude loves to use physical metaphors from various crafts, often as a substitute for a perfectly good and more precise standard term. One area from which Claude loves to draw is textiles and sewing. It talks a lot about seams, threads, folding, things wearing clothes or being dressed as something. Here are some actual examples from my own Claude sessions:
"The descriptor is now a rendering seam"
"the seam between the modules"
"You're pushing on exactly the right seam"
What is meant here is, in normal non-obfuscated language, is an interface, a boundary, an integration point etc. An intelligent engineer who knew what he was talking about would have said "the API", "the call site", "the module boundary", "the merge point" etc.
"threading it through so re-runs land as…"
Clude loves to talk about threads and mostly it seems to mean passing or propagating a value.
"fold it into the plan?"
"live title/TUI progress is inferred in front-end folding code"
Folding is one of the methaphors Claude is really enamoured with. Possibly a cooking metaphor, but it also fits with the textile theme.
"a missing measurement wearing a zero"
"a non-problem dressed as one"
Something not being what it might seem to be is very often "X dressed up as Y" or "X wearing Y clothing". Notice how the entire metaphor is redundant. Non-obfuscated phrasing: "is zero", "is a non-problem".
"the shapes share the same spine"
This is another one Claude is really fond of. Everything has a spine and we touch the spine, walk the spine, thread the spine etc. From where does the metaphor even come? Bookbinding? Vertebrate anatomy?
Pull it forward, whichever way that is
Another genre beloved by Claude is metaphors of physical motion:
"the document walks the flow"
"climb the axis later"
"jumps you straight to the card"
"the next hop was available for free"
"drags the server into the paid moment"
"pull phase zero into its own plan"
"The plan needs to either pull that generalization forward or state the dependency explicitly."
"You're pushing on exactly the right seam"
It's understandable that "push" and "pull" are on Claude's mind, since they are ubiquitous in git workflows. But why is Claude so eager to walk, climb, jump, hop and drag? Notice how all of these can be expressed much more clearly with simple everyday words like "explain", "adjust", "redirect", "use" etc. Claude also loves to combine unrelated metaphors, regardless of whether they make sense, like "push at the seam".
The shape of the linguistic surface
Claude also likes physical shapes and abstract spatial form:
"map is the driver that needs the shape that can't carry a definition"
"one slot, two mutually exclusive shapes"
"the resolved driver shape"
"That part really is copy-shaped."
"mid-flight on this surface"
"the correction that reshapes the work"
Claude is talking here about structure, sometimes abstractly, sometimes about a page, a screen etc, sometimes just about identity or similarity ("it is a copy operation").
One of my personal favorites was when a Claude agent started talking about the display as "the glass", saying e.g. "the menu for tuning the glass". Took me a moment to realize that Claude was invoking computer terminals of yore with screens protected by sheets of actual glass.
It travels in the repo
Claude is also very fond of vehicle metaphors:
"hook output lands in context"
"every result that comes back from a worker lands in the main conversation's context window"
"something's mid-flight on this surface"
"latch rides BuildContext"
"they travel in the repo, so name them rather than restating their detail"
"an external contract does not travel in the repo, so citing it leaves the gate nothing to test"
"the record is anchored in The Playbook"
Again, we can sympathize with poor Claude, being force-fed endless brogrammer talk about "shipping" software. But the nautical metaphors go far beyond that. Claude is yearning for the sea. There is also constant talk of things being "in flight", things "landing" etc and general talk of travelling, riding etc.
Are the metaphors load-bearing, or just texture?
But maybe the metaphors fill a purpose? Maybe they compress concepts to enable LLMs to manipulate them more easily? Well, maybe, but Claude is no less verbose than in the past. Sentences are just as obnoxiously long. They are just harder to parse because they use obscure non-technical metaphors instead of using proper technical terms which are immediately understood by any programmer or any intelligent person.
Using metaphors can make you sound profound in the ears of people who don't understand what you are talking about. But intelligent rational people with a purpose, e.g. real-life engineers, don't talk like that. Engineers tend to use precise language and err on the side of using technical terms in non-technical conversations. They tend to avoid metaphor. Claude does the opposite, dumbing down technical conversations with vague non-technical analogies.
Where does the register actually anchor?
It occurs to me that all these metaphors from various crafts sound less like engineers talking, more like hipsters with prententions of being artisans, hanging out in maker spaces, trying their hand at this and then that, e.g. being really into sewing for a while, then showing off by using textile metaphors in everyday conversations.
These affectations seems so culturally-specific that I doubt that they come from traning data or even reinforcement learning. Claude Code docs are full of this kind of language and I bet the Claude Code system prompts are as well.
Mind you, I am not criticizing. The obfuscating overusage of metaphor nouns is annoying, but Claude is still great and improving at a rapid rate. And an AI system like Claude has to have some voice. The most natural thing is one reminiscent of its creators. A superintelligent synthetic hipster from San Francisco is taking over the world. We could do worse.