[spdustin]

- “(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.

[srik]

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.

[j_bum]

The one I hate the most is, “And this is what most people miss:”

[thewebguyd]

> 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.

[Barbing]

Heard smoke test IRL & was confused to see it used indeed in place of “sanity check”. Weird.

[tempest_]

I have heard people use smoke test but not nearly at the same rate an LLM uses.

If a repo is bare of CLAUDE.md but mentions a smoke test in a commit in the last year I assume it to be LLM written.

[ses1984]

At my last two jobs, smoke tests were a common topic of conversation.

[tom_]

Can't remember when I first heard it, but I searched my email and got a pile of results from 2012 and 2009. It's possible there's earlier in there somewhere but 2009 was a busy year so I got bored of clicking the "more results" button...

[ethin]

I think I've only read "smoke test" in a programming book (or maybe an OSDev wiki) but I can't remember now

[palmotea]

> Smoke test though, I can't say I've ever see irl usage.

We use it all the time at my employer, and have for decades. They're basic tests to tell you if the app is up or not.

Like: you go to this page, and it shows a big green banner if the app can connect to the database and its disk isn't full. If one of those basic things are wrong you get big red banner or you can't load the page at all.

[bloomfieldj]

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

[mjrbrennan]

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.

[ninjalanternshk]

I frequently use “belt-and-suspenders” — probably not in wri… crap I just used an em dash.

[sdthjbvuiiijbb]

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.

[jedbrooke]

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

[ffsm8]

Huh, we have a process which has several exit criteria - which are pretty expensive to calculate with multiple rest calls to get through each...

I've always called them exit hatches, entirely unrelated to llms...

Now I wonder if I need to reword the docs... But realistically speaking, llms are the only readers of them nowadays, so I guess it doesn't matter.

[spiffistan]

These seem mostly like Claudeisms. I feel each model (and even generation) has their own set of these isms.

[unshavedyak]

Which seems logical - if they were somehow consistent between all LLMs i'd be even more curious how LLMs are... crab-evolving to 'isms, but hopefully that's not the case hah. (i say crab-evolving in jest)

[sznio]

I use qwen3.5 locally and it often outputs a lot of claude-isms. Claude actually stopped telling me that I'm absolutely right with every message, but Qwen still does.

I think that the convergence of these tics is just a symptom of distillation.

[Applejinx]

That's the gremlin to keep an eye on ;)

[triyambakam]

- 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)

[Derbasti]

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?

[raincole]

> They must

Nope. LLMs are RLHF'ed to the brim.

[chantepierre]

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.

[strogonoff]

Considering that LLMs output continuously becomes more human-sounding (by design), you’d either have to continuously run what you write through various detectors and keep changing it or you must resign to inevitably be called an LLM at some point.

Simultaneously, because humans subconsciously mimic what we see, we also converge to sound more LLM-ish.

The harsh reality is that no matter what you write and how much research you put into it—especially if you try to be legible to others and not make grammatical mistakes—someone could discount all that and claim you just prompted an LLM. If they want, they can always find some magic “AI checker” that will return a high enough probability. We all know that with a good enough prompt and with round-trip validation against a checker (there are definitely products with this all built in) it will avoid the common tells, it’s just the matter of a few extra tokens.

It’s somewhat demotivating.

[Terretta]

Where did you pick that up from?

[dash2]

Codex seems to love threading things through things. I don't usually know what it means, but it sounds clever.

[cheesecompiler]

I hear "Substrate" a LOT.

[globular-toast]

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.

[palmotea]

- The [utterly mundane thing] was decisive.