A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

- “(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.

The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse.

> Contrastive negation is a rhetorical structure that denies a specific idea in the first half of a sentence and asserts an alternative in the second half.

> It typically follows an "It’s not X, it’s Y" or "not just X, but Y" formula.

Wikipedia also has a great resource which covers many of the common LLM patterns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

  No ___, no ____. Just _____

Will be interesting if that holds in other areas when chasing super intelligence.

My favourite one today from today:

“The tax isn't the problem. The mindset is.”

I haven’t tried it with Slack messages because I’m a little scared to read what it says, haha. But the same concept surely applies.

There are a few people at work who are aggressively using Claude to write Slack messages. It’s easy for me to tell because one day they’re writing barely coherent English in multiple messages, and the next they’re sending perfectly coherent prose in a single message.

Thought for sure we'd get a critique of Inter overuse. JetBrains Mono is a lovely font, though.

    <somebody> just <did something>. 
    
    And it changes everything.

In coding, I've noticed a few tropes as well: everything is a "contract" or an "artifact" (clearly trained on like three decades of Java lol), everything is constantly "backwards-compatible" or "versioned" (even if working on a brand new greenfield project), and a few others.

> "belt and suspenders"

Instead of this:

  def add_three_ints(x: int, y: int, z: int) -> int:  
      return x + y + z

  def add_three_ints(  
      x: int,  
      y: int,  
      x: int,  
  ):  
      return x + y + z

I can also see how it is not necessarily the case, since all models seem plagued by having unique cliche patterns. We all seem to experience the writing smells from the same models. I see 'cleanly' a lot less from GPT 5.5 vs <5.4

Why would you do that in the first place? If you are just starting writing about math, I assume your goal would be to get better at it, and using LLMs is not how you get better at writing.

also, how come jetbrain mono has become one of these tells is insane to me!

For those curious https://github.com/ryanthedev/oberskills/blob/main/commands/...

Last month it was quiet things being said out loud.

When you use the tools all the time it’s fun to watch these things pop up a week or so later as normies copy and paste the slop out on LinkedIn and their newsletters.

Did Anthropic and/or OpenAI deliberately train their models to produce websites with a specific design language, or did these stylistic preferences emerge naturally as some kind of LLM-selected optimum?

/endredditmode

I actually love folks documenting this. I'm all for LLMs producing rough drafts. But rough drafts are, as a rule, slop.

It is strange to read as the topic A has often not been introduced and introducing it by saying what it is not makes very little sense to a new reader.