Has been doing this for years, even before LLMs were a thing. No, not in college assignments; by the time emoji appeared, I had long since walked out of my PhD program and went to the industry.

I put such emojis at the beginning of big headings, because my eyes detect compact shapes and colors faster than entire words and sentences. This helps me (and hopefully others) locate the right section easier.

In Slack, I put large emojis at the beginning of messages that need to stand out. These are few, and emojis work well in this capacity.

(Disclaimer: I may contain a large language model of some kind, but very definitely I cannot be reduced to it in any area of my activity.)

FWIW it is really confusing to me and others. What is this emoji supposed to mean? Heck if I know.

But the telltale signs are far more than just that. The whole document is exactly the kind of README produced by Claude.

I had assumed they were referring to stuff like "Type-safe operations with compile-time guarantees". What a weird detail to add to a readme. And the whole section is like that. I wonder if that's part of a prompt leaking through.