[BearOso]

Backticks ` ` are used to trigger code-style formatting in markdown. Since all the coding AIs are trained almost entirely on github, you see it everywhere in their output. They'll use it even in places where it's supposed to be just plain text, and almost always in git log messages, which by spec have no formatting.

[jitl]

i write markdown-ish text in any text box including using backticks for command names like `cat`, or use * for *emphasis* just like i did on IRC in the 2000s. these conventions in human plain text conversation predate markdown and AI by decades. that was the point of markdown: formalizing those kinds of conventions enough to turn them into deterministic rich styling.

HN itself renders * as emphasis, but not ` for "code"; this doesn't mean HN is a broken markdown machine or that i'm a bot. many hn comments use plain text conventions for links, see examples that use footnote style markdown-like links[0], I was [doing markdown links here back in 2017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14763397) even though they've never been parsed by HN.

This kind of semantic formalism in text goes way back, its not so different from something like Chicago style citations first published in 1906 [1].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258996

[1]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/dam/jcr:bba47b07-61ba-4...