How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

Absolutely ripping your hair out reading Claude referring to everything as “honest takes” and "load-bearing seams"? You’re not the only one. But what if I tell you there’s a way to take this massive source of frustration and make it so ridiculous you can't but laugh at it? Or just simply fix Claude's vocabulary. I present to you, the MessageDisplay

hook.

First you need a little script with some replacements set up:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import json, re, sys

replacements = {
    "seam": "whatchamacallit",
    "you're absolutely right": "I'm a complete clown",
    "honest take": "spicy doodad",
    "load-bearing": "cooked"
}

data = json.load(sys.stdin)
text = data.get("delta") or ""

for phrase, replacement in replacements.items():
    pattern = r"\b" + re.escape(phrase) + r"\b"
    text = re.sub(pattern, replacement, text, flags=re.IGNORECASE)

print(json.dumps({
    "hookSpecificOutput": {
        "hookEventName": "MessageDisplay",
        "displayContent": text,
    }
}))

put that in ~/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh

and make it executable with chmod +x ~/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh

. Then to hook it up, add it to your ~/.claude/settings.json

in the hooks

block like:

{
  "hooks": {
    "MessageDisplay": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "$HOME/.claude/hooks/wordswap.sh" } ] }
    ]
  }
}

Hooks load at startup, so you just need to start a new session to start your new life.

I'm sure you can come up with much better and more productive replacements than me. Have fun!

Written by Johanna Larsson. Thoughts on this post? Find me on Bluesky at @jola.dev .

Related posts #

elixir oss

Let libraries be libraries

A gentle rant on the topic of libraries that run as Elixir applications and why that's an anti-pattern for library design.

atproto tangled

CI workflows on Tangled for Elixir

How to set up CI workflows on Tangled for Elixir, with specific Elixir and Erlang versions, and a PostgreSQL service.

blog atproto

Automatically syncing your blog to atproto and standard.site

Kicking off a little side project for automatically discovering content through blog post feeds and syncing to atproto and standard.site.