No ___, no ____. Just _____

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

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.

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?

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.

My favourite one today from today:

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