alt Hacker News- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon)
- “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon)
- “The thing to internalize:”
- “The smoking gun:”
(really, sentences that start with “The <tag suggesting the next clause is the key point>:” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific)
- “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture)
- “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action)
- “smoke test” (esp. when “sanity check” is more apropos)
- Lists of three clauses/adjectives where the third is really just a combination of the first two
- Referring to the “shape” of things figuratively
- Social media posts that end with “Curious if anyone…”
- Stories or anecdotes using. “Oh. Oh.” (where the second “oh” is italicized)
Edit: Yes, some of those last ones are terms that we often use as devs...but I would argue about the actual frequency of their use. Plus, these tells live on in prose generated by the latest models.
Replies
> I would argue about the actual frequency of their use
Assuming you mean load bearing & blast radius, I'd see those used and use them myself very frequently pre LLM, mostly in online discussions though so its telling where they got their training data. Load bearing itself is/was a pretty normal phrase in the ops world in daily discussion.
Smoke test though, I can't say I've ever see irl usage.
I had GPT research Claude 4.7isms: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a18e3b4-1308-832a-9263-bed823de3f...
Also, here’s a link to well-documented patterns by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
The funniest one I've seen with regularity is belt-and-suspenders/belt-and-braces, when I've never seen anyone ever use that term. I had to tell AI to stop using it, it was just annoying.
for me the most annoying one is “escape hatch”.
Everything is an escape hatch, try catch is an escape hatch, a cli flag is an escape hatch. It makes no sense, and quickly ended up in my “banned words and phrases” md file
These seem mostly like Claudeisms. I feel each model (and even generation) has their own set of these isms.
I routinely use "load bearing" in conversations and writing, both seriously and ironically (like a "load bearing just" or "load bearing paint").. maybe I should stop.
I wonder, could we use these catch phrases to track down what data was used dor training? They must have occurred in abundance in some training corpus. Perhaps some specific company's email culture?
Codex seems to love threading things through things. I don't usually know what it means, but it sounds clever.
The ones that annoy me the most, which are very widespread, are the clickbaity one-weird-trick style ones:
"what really Xes" "is genuinely X" "that actually Xes" "is/makes/does/etc a real X"
The real/genuine/actual cluster of words are wildly overused.
I hear "Substrate" a LOT.
- Ending something with "happy to ..." (usually "happy to help")
- And a variant of the above is omitting the subject, "happy to" instead of "I am happy to"
- Codex refers to "the spine" of something
- Claude often says some decision is "locked" (i.e. decided on)
- The [utterly mundane thing] was decisive.
This stuff reminds me of the classic writing style guide Plain Words by Gowers which advises against all of the above nonsense. I absolutely hate the magazine writing style that LLMs seem to love to regurgitate. It's even worse when it's used not for entertainment but for actually conveying information.
These LLM idioms are constantly being consumed every day and are bound to make it into the next, if not current, generation's vernacular. It's going to be unbearable.