alt Hacker NewsI’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that is happening when the robot writes stuff like “3 campuses, one app” example, I’m glad the author was able to identify it as chat context leaking through.
The other version of it is the robot over-indexing on some part of the prompt and leaving comments places. An example is I ask it to prefer integration tests using TestContainers, it starts adding comments to every new test saying “Real services, no mocks” or something.
And yes, I have a line in my *.MD saying not to do that.
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I think lots of AI tells these days are leaks from the ai/writer connection into text for the reader. It partly feels like the inevitable result of RLHF with the wrong human's feedback ("I did it! Pick me!") and partly feels like thinking tokens leaking into the main text.
"Here's the argument, in plain terms", "It's not just X, it's Y", "It's worth stating precisely", "The sharper distinction here"... They're things that gesture toward the relationship between the text and the prompt, making it clear where it matched the author's expectations and where it deviated.
Not that humans are immune from coding/writing for their boss instead of their user/reader!
I just used Opus 5.5 for something other than coding, and after about a dozen chat messages (some of which were genuinely amazing), it got LLM brainrot, and started suggesting dumb, irrelevant stuff, ignoring previously established facts, and talking in PR doublespeak.
The thing is, that kind of screen has existed long before vibe coding was a thing. Discord, for example, has had it for years. And the purpose is to reassure the use that the app is still doing something (since users have cottoned on that spinners are meaningless).
Some of the other examples there are equally error prone. The glass example, is something pioneered by Apple too. And was added to CSS before vibe coding. It’s also an effect I mirrored years ago in a UI I built in SDL.
The coloured box example struck me as good UX too. The stuff that needed more urgent attention had a more reddish tone. That makes complete sense. And having those fields a different colour makes it easier for users to pick out specific elements quickly (like how icons are used too).
The problem with AI slop is that it’s trained on good code as well as bad. This is like the arguments against the Oxford comma and em dash all over again.
LLMs love https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpec... . You tell them not to do a thing, they make a point of saying they didn't do the thing.