- “(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.

▲

jedbrooke 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

▲

srik an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

thewebguyd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	tempest_ 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

triyambakam 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

- 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)