My 8yo keeps calling any piece of software he can run an "app", regardless of it being on a computer, a website, or a mobile device. I object to it out of principle, old man yelling at clouds style. But fundamentally, it's just code I interact with to do something, I'm just used to using different terminology for each runtime. The term website came about right before we really had anything interactive on the W3, describing something rather static.
All this to say, we're both right and wrong in feeling this way lol
I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".
It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing!
What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name.
Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.
It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.
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