alt Hacker News> That 20ms is a smoking gun - it lines up perfectly with the mysterious pattern we saw earlier!
Speaking of smoking guns, anybody else reckon Claude overuses that term a lot? Seems anytime I give it some debugging question, it'll claim some random thing like a version number or whatever, is a "smoking gun"
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ChatGPT too. And "lines up perfectly" when it doesnt actually line up with anything
Or the "Eureka! That's not just a smoking gun, it's a classic case of LLMspeak."
Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude all have these tics, and even the pro versions will use their signature phrases multiple times in an answer. I have to wonder if it's deliberate, to make detecting AI easier?
I've love to delve into that.
Without knowing how LLM's personality tuning works, I'd just hazard a guess that the excitability (tendency to use excided phrases) is turned up. "smoking gun" must be highly rated as a term of excitability. This should apply to other phrases like "outstanding!" or "good find!" "You're right!" etc.
I'm working on a little SRE agent to pre-load tickets with information to help our on-call and I'm already tired of Claude finding 'smoking guns'.
You might see certain phrases and mdashes ;-) rather often, because … these programs are trained on data written by people (or Microsoft's spelling correction) which overused them in the last n years? So what should these poor LLMs generate instead?
They love clichés, and hate repeating the same words for something (repetition penalty) so they'll say something like "cause" then it's a "smoking gun" then it's something else
I don't think claude has even once used this in my conversations (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Voice conversations...) Sycophancy, yes absolutely!
Maybe it has something to do with your profile/memories?
smoking gun, you're absolutely right, good question, em dash, "it isn't just foo, it's also bar", real honest truth, brutal truth, underscores the issue, delves into, more em dashes, <20 different hr/corporate/cringe phrases>.
It's nauseating.
Yes, it’s kind of a corpus delicti. ;)
At this I'm just so glad that "you're absolutely right!" phase is over.
I see it from GPT5 too a lot
It's a smoking gun of Claude usage.
> Speaking of smoking guns
Oh shoot! A shooting.
So the TL;DR of this post is: don't change this setting unless you know what you're doing.
Chastise it with a reminder that you're using smokeless powder.
Yes! While this post was written entirely by me, I wouldn't be surprised if I had "smoking gun" ready to go because I spent so much time debugging with Claude last night.