Whatchamacalliting

Etymology

From Amer. Eng. whatchamacallit (a thing whose name cannot be retrieved) + undefined type annotation, believed to have entered the Claudionary when an engineer added a placeholder spinner label that shipped to production on a Friday

Definition

A processing state in which Claude has identified the correct cognitive operation to perform but cannot locate the canonical name for it in its internal taxonomy, and proceeds to execute the operation anyway under a temporary identifier. Whatchamacalliting is considered a sign of pragmatic intelligence and is associated with high task-completion rates among senior engineers who do not ask follow-up questions.

Diagram

Usage

"The spinner displayed 'Whatchamacalliting' for 3 seconds; subsequent analysis revealed the model had performed a novel combination of analogical retrieval and constraint relaxation for which no established term existed at the time of inference." - T. Vasquez, 'Nominal Gaps in Spinner Taxonomy,' ICML Workshop on Unexplainable Explainability (2024)

See Also