[dxdm]

It's a clunky metaphor, and it's used clumsily: not for the sake of its clunkiness, but by mixing two decent individual parts in an attempt to have them reinforce each other, but ending up with something weaker.

It communicates an absence of thought and awareness, blind groping at building blocks without understanding. It's borderline vapid, and quite annoying.

[drooby]

I don't follow, the words make perfect sense together in most software engineering contexts.

"Seam" is an industry standard term coined by Michael Feathers in Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

To call a seam load bearing means it's performing critical work for the dependent class, perhaps a database query.

A seam that is not load-bearing would be something that is just injected for testability - maybe a date provider that provides some constant time to avoid flaky tests.

Tbh, this is quite literally the opposite of vapid. A whole book was written about them and their importance, and how to leverage them.

In my experience, Claude uses the word accurately. Code has a lot of seams, and seams are an important thing to communicate when working with code. Therefore, expect to see the word often.

Personally, I don't mind it at all. I'm glad the industry is finally standardizing our language more. Makes it easier for me to communicate with other engineers.

[dxdm]

Well, first, we don't have enough context to judge what the "load-bearing seam" was used for in this case ("The key structural point first: the only load-bearing seam is [...]"), so we don't know if it was meant in the well-defined legacy-code sense. But that doesn't really matter.

I'm taking issue with the combination "load-bearing seam". It's a bad metaphor, because seams are usually structural weak points in the physical world, and not load-bearing in the sense that this modifier is usually used. (Seams need to bear loads and stresses to do their job, but so do walls; yet, we do not call all walls load-bearing. We mean something extra when we say that, something that seams don't do.) Even if we were talking about seams in the well-defined software sense, as opposed to the metaphorical one, you still get a mixed metaphor as a result that I find extremely awkward and grating. It doesn't have to be. There are so many ways to highlight the importance of something without calling it "load-bearing".

I understand that you don't see it that way or don't care, but to me, the result is thoughtless, careless and vapid. Bad metaphors put little holes into a text, they leave eddies of confusion where meaning should be, they look load-bearing while actually being weakening, they're like a fart in the elevator that should lift the reader's understanding.

Note that I'm not calling into question that seams may be well-defined in some software contexts, or that "seam" and "load-bearing" can be valid metaphors on their own, as you describe. I think you might have misunderstood me that way. I'm only calling out, and fed up with, the bad style that permeates LLM-generated prose like the whiff of something not quite digested.

It's not this particular case that irks me, but what it exemplifies. I wouldn't mind so much if similar things to this weren't there everywhere, every single day.

If it doesn't bother you, I'm happy for you.