Because I would've completely avoided the article if I knew that I would be served slop. I was interested in the content, but I was immediately thrown off by the writing style, which closely resembles what I've been getting from Opus 4.8 lately in my dev work. Filler language and useless metaphors everywhere.

> Booleans look tidy until somebody adds a third case and exhaustiveness silently doesn’t kick in. Strings narrow honestly.

Like, nobody truly writes like that. It wouldn't get past any competent editor.

Strings narrow honestly? What does that even mean? This kind of 3-word precision is useless and they appear everywhere in the article. We get the point with in the first sentence, no need to add more.

> Strings narrow honestly.

This is a great example of the latest "LLM tell" I'm seeing in prose.

It's so terse with its "power-verb" that I have to read it multiple times. It's a clever compaction of English, not something I want to read outside of a headline or motto.

Here's another example from a Claude convo I had open: "Alerts flag mirrors". It's agreeing with my proposal that the alert system should be expanded to consider duplicates, and it came up with a cutesy phrase for it that ends up reading like three unrelated words.

Makes me appreciate how helper words help make the structure of a sentence more obvious.

More examples: "Errors surface drift", "Tests anchor scope", "Guards screen input". That's probably what it is: when the verb is also the form of a noun (flag, surface) or adjective (narrow).

Slogans mask meaning.

I just flag like I would terrible writing by a human and move on.

It’s frankly depressing when (2018) oldies-but-goodies get reposted here for the Nth time. The clarity of thought and obvious effort that went into communicating that thought was expected for top-voted posts at the time. Now those posts appear exceptional in this era’s standard of “the LLM just cleaned up my notes” slop.