Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.

Yes what's with that in LLM output?

It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that.

But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why?

Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes?

> Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them.

Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly).

It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this:

    //  -------------------------
    // ------------------------
    // ----- Input Handling ----
    //  ------------------------
    //  |--------------+-------+------|
    //  | Potentiometer |  Min | Max | 
    //  |--------------+-------+------|
   

    ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...);