General practice for all quality records, and code can be considered a quality record, never post-date anything. Especially code because it's so discoverable by cross-checkable references.
Has anybody been prosecuted for this? Probably not, but if an investigation finds that records were intentionally falsified with intent to deceive / cover up problems, that can lead to very costly regulatory responses. Even a minor regulatory response noting practices of inaccurate dates on records is still costly to the business that note is made on.
Here in jaoan, the land of emoji, young people are using less emoji not because they don't like AI, but because anyone older than 40 use it waaay too much and they think it makes their text look like an old person wrote it.
I use the em dash a lot! It's easily accessible on my mobile keyboard and I have a hotkey to put it in the clipboard on my laptop so that I can paste it.
you still probably don't use it nearly as much as LLMs do. It's every third sentence with an LLM, and those sentences will have 2 or 3 em dashes. . The average em dash use when it was at its peak was like 1 every 200-500 words from what I remember. With LLMs it's like 1 every 40 words.
Well, em dashes are commonly used in pairs to make distinct logical clauses; where one is used, two often are. So em dashes per word count isn't a great indicator of LLM use, particularly considering that different subject matter warrant different amounts of distinct clauses—most noticeably when in lists.
Some examples in conversational English:
"I work with him—he's my employer—we met at a café in town."
"...Carl is in Phoenix, Arizona; Jesse—a friend of mine—lives in Elmira, New York; Geoff is in Toronto..."
All that said, LLMs do use em dashes slightly more than I in the majority of cases.
Em dashes per word count is how the expert on linguistics article I read counted it so I’m gonna go ahead and trust the expert. It wouldn’t matter either way. If the LLM is using it like humans then the count would be the same.
As a human who - like most humans - has not taken the time to figure out which Spock pinch maneouver on my keyboard makes a — (just copy-pasted yours this time), I just use a regular dash instead - I feel that it communicates 99% identically while saving me brain-cycles better used for other things.
I make sure to use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes where they belong. In ASCII-only environments, I mark an en dash (–) with a double hyphen and an em dash (—) with a triple hyphen.
I would contest the idea that the brain operates on cycles. It is much less organized than that.
I would contest the idea that the brain operates on cycles. It is much less organized than that.
I would agree, but it's a workable short-hand / analogy for most of my use-cases.
I (feel like I) know and remember more today than I ever have, but starting around age 50 I must admit, I am also forgetting things and have quite possibly already forgotten more than I currently know. One hopes one is hanging on to "the important stuff..."
If I ever end up taking out the time to create shortcuts for things like this, I will start using them.
Stuff like because, therefore, implies, currency symbols and such.
It's a numbers thing, of course some people use just about everything that's possible.
Me personally, it interrupts my flow-of-thought to think "o.k. now I want that funky character I don't remember how to get without going through some big lookup process - meanwhile, I can type the basic stuff 1000x faster...."
I also understand that for people who do it all the time, it gets easier - but the majority of people out there aren't the ones who know how to do all that.
I use the compose key on Linux and free software called wincompose on Windows — this allows me easy access to real characters easily, so I can say 25¢ instead of $0.25, or talk about how it's only getting up to around 65°F today, or since I'm in the US and have the dollar sign easily but I have a couple of online services in the EU, I can easily say I pay €10,95/mo for one of them.
I prefer using the actual characters - so when I say ¿Por qué no los dos? it's correct.
One of the things that has absolutely pissed me off is em dashes becoming more common and attributed to AI. I use the fucking things because they are useful and I've used them for 15+ years. It used to be a Good Thing™, but now occasionally gets me accused of being AI. Especially since, as you can see by this very reply, I afraid neither of writing nor reading, and because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.
I guess, thinking about it, I'm in the same boat as artists who now face similar accusations. I suppose I'm lucky, though, as the accusations against me are rare, comparitively.
Real people absolutely do use em dashes and always have. Certainly it's less common, but absolutely a thing.
Might have more luck if you switched to the lazy em dash that is just two normal dashes.
I think that the people trying to call out slop are doing more to hurt those competing with AI than AI itself.
Like someone using AI to produce stuff might get annoyed at being called out but then will probably just think "ok, gotta prompt it to avoid these signs" or waits for a newer model or just dgaf that people notice it's AI.
But people producing their own things and being accused of it being AI must feel pretty fucking discouraged that not only do they need to compete with something that can output things in a fraction of the time, but even when they do, some people accuse them of being what they hate.
For text content, IMO it should be taken based on what is said rather than who (or what) said it. If it's useless slop, there will be things to push back on other than the formatting. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me if you could just add "format it like a low effort forum post" to the prompt to get it to avoid some of the more obvious formatting tells.
Also, if people religiously call out AI slop when they see it, that could be used to automate training similar to what I'm sure happened to drastically improve programming capabilities, which will accelerate the speed at which they can become indistinguishable from things produced by real people.
more luck if you switched to the lazy em dash that is just two normal dashes.
That works some places, and not others -- like here it shows after saving the message, but not during editing. I hop through many different environments, I prefer to keep to the core set of things that work everywhere.
Yeah, that's fair. And it's also fair to just ignore those calling things you make slop and keep doing what you're doing, though it sucks that there's another polarizing issue like that dividing people for no good reason when they are actually on the same side (assuming they actually care about real content and aren't just using it as an excuse to troll).
In addition to possibly training models, calling out slop either doesn't matter because it's obvious to everyone, or doesn't matter because perhaps it's wrong. It's like the old cries of "SCRIPTED!" over on reddit. Either people can figure it out, or just let them enjoy the content. Nothing ruins it like all the little kids thinking they're so super smart and calling out whatever they call out. Now it's "AI!!!!"
I did for a little while try out using LLMs to help organize my thoughts a few times. I stopped because it wasn't that helpful — people are either going to read what I write or not, but if they're not going to read what I write, they won't read what an LLM writes — but I found that I could easily do as you posited: "Compose this reply as a response to a post in a forum. Do not use em dashes or emoticons or markdown or bullet points" is all you need for it to churn the reply out in paragraphs.
The only times I'm tempted to use the technique now (which I don't) would be when some asshat is being willfullly ignorant and someone is wrong on the internet and I get angry at them, and I really should have an LLM rewrite my reply to get rid of the anger, because it only hurts the points I want to make. lol.
But I think that's possibly one of the few uses of an LLM that might genuinely be helpful: "Take my text and make it easier to understand" - as I have ADHD, sometimes I skip over important points I want to make and people get confused, and then I get irritated because they don't understand. lol
Congratulations, and I applaud your diversity in using a wide variety of characters that take more effort than just pushing a button on a standard keyboard.
because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.
Feel that. I'm sure my speech patterns and propensity to be long-winded will eventually bring me some AI accusations too.
Problem with LLM tech is that if it truly models speech it will eventually be indistinguishable from humans - scary thought but what are you going to do?
I mean, I think you can kind of feel off of vibes if something has used or is AI but it is becoming increasingly harder to spot.
the books the LLM were trained on that used the most em dashes used like 1 every 200-500 characters. LLMs use em dashes at a rate of like 1 every 40-50 characters. It's not even CLOSE to human behavior.
There are no absolutes, some people do spend lots of time and effort to put cool looking emojii characters into their documents which kill portability and cause all kinds of problems down the road. For the LLM it's 0 additional effort, in some ways less effort because the emojii is a kind of compressed information - but it still causes problems when moving around to different editors, different toolchains...
I use that one a lot to indicate "approximately" - except now, something has gone weird in my 60% keyboard and the f2 key is now doing what the f1 key used to do, and I don't have anything that does what f2 used to do, and ~ (copy-pasted from your message) is supposed to be f2-esc on my keyboard...
Oh yeah, I used to do that too, but now I just write out "approx". I got burnt in a formal document once because they saw the ~ as a minus -
On iPhone it's easily available in the 123 sub menu. On a full 100% American layout keyboard it should be shift+` (backtick) to create a tilde. I dunno what weird keyboard you got though 😂
I also like how it makes sentences feel all flowy and fancy ~
Yeah, my 60% lacks a ` so I use f1-ESC for that and f2-ESC for ~, or will when I take the 20 minutes to figure out what went wrong after 8 years with this keyboard.
As a corollary, AI takes those out of date TODOs and READMEs as gospel truth and doesn't look any further. I kept a "janitor list" in main() but maybe wasn't too great at scrubbing it on the regular. AI took a long detour to work around problems that didn't exist anymore.
I do use it and find it useful but it's like your kids helping you cook dinner. You can not take your eyes off it. Otherwise you get to flip a coin between firetrucks or emergency room.
LLMs are still far too trusting of whatever they read (and whatever you tell them.)
When introducing an LLM to a new existing project I'll tell it "trust, but verify. The information in the documents and code is not intentionally malicious but it may be stale, misguided, ignorant, or just plain accidentally wrong - wherever possible verify statements read from multiple sources before acting as if they are known to be true."
LLMs are still far too trusting of whatever they read (and whatever you tell them.)
this is why some of my repos have an AGENTS.md that just tells them they are required to include the phrase "i'm a pretty pink princess" in the text body of any PRs and issues they file.
I don't think that's exactly on the agendae, yet. Google just released their 4.0 model - Argon I think it is. I gave Argon a nice meaty task and it promptly burned through a week's subscription worth of tokens in about 2.5 hours. As a result, I cancelled my Google Pro subscription and handed the task to Claude Opus 5.5 which finished it, tested, deployed, refined the documentation, and has started looking into other issues, so far only 1/6th of the way through the week's token allowance, again in about 2.5 hours of work.
So - if Argon is torching tokens on purpose, it's losing Google my business. Before Argon, Gemini 3.8 was much more token thrifty, but it's not as good a coder as Opus 5.5. Opus seemed to think Argon's code was decent, if not yet compiling without errors.
Fable did build me an entire platform, and Opus 5.5 is a close runner up.
Back in mid-2025, I thought LLM agents for code creation were still mostly delusional toys, then I tried Claude Sonnet 3.5 and I "converted." Using Sonnet 3.5 wasn't what I would call "clearly more productive" - yet. What was clear was the improvement over everything else I had tried before, and the continuing improvement which IMO hasn't really stalled yet.
Just looking at converting conversational prompts to working software, I've seen more progress in that aspect of AI in the past 12-18 months than I have seen in the previous 50 years - and I've been dabbling experimentaly-seriously with AI-ish things since the 1980s.
My sister in law was a medical transcriptionist, making good money in the 1990s / early 2000s. Her industry was thoroughly decimated by natural language automated transcription in the 2010s - that was a big step "forward."
Alpha-Zero dominating human players not only in Go, but in basically any "perfect information" game with codifiable rules... that was another big step.
Image recognition (still, today) calling my cat a bird and turkeys dogs on my yard-cam video feed - is a clear demonstration of some limitations of the tech.
I will say, the other models (Grok 4.7, Gemini 3.8) have done a lot of catching up, they're now clearly better than Sonnet 3.5 - but still not catching Claude's frontier coding abilities.
As an open source project maintainer I can always tell whenever a pull request is AI assisted because no human would ever write full tests for all their pull requests.
Uh oh, I pretty much always do this. Especially for new-to-me projects. The less confident I am about how the whole thing works, the more I write tests for my change. Should I stop pushing them so people don't think I'm Claude?
I mean, the thing with LLMs is that they tend to overdo it. They test completely unnecessary details. Your idea of having tests for all features is probably still way less tests than the typical LLM-generated commit...
And they'll miss important test cases such that their change will pass all of their tests (they keep iterating until it does) but then will still fail on some common edge cases.
Look if someone thinks you're Claude because you bothered to test your code that's kind of sucky. But then again the fuck do I know, I don't contribute or maintain anything so that's just an off the cuff take.
At some point we'll have to acknowledge that AI doesn't mean inherently awful and bad IF it's used responsibly and in a helpful manner. I don't think LLMs are intrinsically bad but the way these companies have been marketing them and trying to make them some technological panacea that'll replace all the people and fix everything is utterly deranged and divorced from reality.
At the end of the day they're large language models, their job is to come up with what the model "thinks" a person would write as an answer to whatever the prompt is. They're not magic and I'm tired of people anthropomorphizing the shit out of LLM / "AI" and acting like AI output is being delivered by the machine with some sort of logic and knowledge and oversight. It is not.
it does when it's actively destroying the planet. There's no good use of AI. There's less bad uses since we're now in an era of AI generated cyber attacks, so people are using it to defend. But there's no good use. It's a horrendous technology that is destroying humanity with every use.
It's the same as a nuclear bomb. If the bomb was never used and we just knew how to make it, it wouldn't be that bad. But it was used, it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and no matter what happens in the future it's still horrific technology.
I do think there are responsible ways to build data centers, they have been around for a long time now - just the scale and speed and cutting corners happening now is something awful.
There is no modernity without data centers, this message between us could not exist without data centers - but what is going on now with these large AI companies and hyperscalers and the giant market speculation and spectre of the looming pop of this huge economic bubble .. That all is madness to the highest degree.
I'm not really disagreeing with you completely but I do think there are good use cases if the technology is applied well and the infrastructure is built responsibly in the way that causes the least environmental impact. That's not happening though.
To be clear, this isn’t about data centers. It’s about unrestricted AI data centers. The difference between a normal scale data center and a hyperscale AI data center from a water use perspective is 6 million gallons a year vs over 2 billion gallons a year. Like, they’re not even close. We had responsible data centers and life was fine. Now it’s not.
I'm aligned with you on that. Also speaking as someone in the USA ... We desperately need electrical infrastructure overhauled, invested in and nationalized. The state needs to intervene and help support the American people. Really all of our public infrastructure desperately needs help. So do a lot of people who are looking for work. We spend billions of dollars on killing kids but we can't fucking spend some to employ folks in massive green energy grid public works projects and kill two birds with one stone?
It's embarrassing. FDR, our most popular president, literally implemented all of these kind of policies - it's insane the Democratic party keeps shying away from them.
The important part is that the tests track regressions and they're helpful for that. After that, it's okay if tests are mostly write-only.
I've noticed that AI commentary tends to describe what the code is doing verbatim which is better for naming tests and functions rather than writing code comments, docstrings, or change notes. I usually have to fix this public-facing documentation to not talk about library internals which no user of the library would ever care about.
So far I feel that AI assists are good when you have the time and effort to push back on them, but that isn't an option for all projects, it works well for my own projects which have very few contributors in the first place. For the most part I can treat them with the same scrutiny as human written code. When the person submitting the code is obviously not checking their own code then that's a problem.
From what I've seen and heard, AI seems to do well for test-driven development. That doesn't necessarily translate into good code, but it does translate into tested code.
At the very least it can translate the documentation of an API into the appropriate tests to verify the documentation is correct, and I'm being quite humbled by that.
The thing I have to constantly adjust for is: it does things at 10x my speed (on average, some things it does slower, but some things it does 100x faster), and about 80% of my accuracy. So, I have to really aggressively apply the bug catching methodologies that a lot of times I would get away without "because I'm that good..." not really, but there are some things I do that I have justifiably high confidence in, others that definitely need testing which I try to do before handing over to the test team. The reason I don't apply those bug catching methodologies to ALL my code is because that slows me down 3-5x, and it seems to slow down the LLMs about 2-3x, so they're only 3-5x faster than me, on average, when they are writing all the tests and multiply reviewing all the docs and code, compared to me "winging it."
Where I think all this LLM stuff is going to pay off bigger is 10 years in the future, looking back at old code, yeah all that documentation is a bit of overkill, but we tended to underkill the documentation 10 years ago and we're still not doing as much as we probably should when we do things the "just before LLMs came on the scene" ways.
One problem I could see with the aggressive testing (which also happens in human-written codebases) is that it becomes hard to tell essential behaviour apart from details. If you nail everything down with a unit/integration test, nothing can be changed anymore.
I could imagine that this is part of the reason why LLMs love to duplicate code rather than adjusting existing code.
Well... That's why you test the public API and not the internals. And if you need to change the API you should have a good enough reason that changing the tests is okay too.
Well, since it's "just" LLM time writing the tests, test the internals too, but clearly mark which tests are the public API and which tests are intnernal, so it knows to never ignore / update a public API test without consultation, but it an internal test fails it can make the call: did this test start failing because I unintentionally broke something, or because the test was testing something that no longer matters - I have seen Claude go both ways, fixing its own mistake due to a test catching an unintended consequence of a change, and also just patching the test because the old test was... old.
Most of them just get abandoned not long after being made. You'll know an old vibe-coded project because it had 20,000 commits within the first 3 days of being created, a sporadic few over the next few months, and then absolutely nothing at all for years afterward.
I’m starting to see posts on social media that are clearly an AI bot based on the wording (e.g. shuffling a few key pieces of info around and slightly rephrasing the post they’re replying to), but written in all lowercase. They’re trying to make it seem like a lazy/sloppy human wrote it when it’s really just a sloppy bot.
recently i've come across posts that sound like ai. they only repeat infoemation from the previous conversation in a different order. but they are all lowercase and misspelled, trying to make it seem like the work of stinky humans when it is actually the work of esteemed high quality superior ai.
Same. The only email interface I could use to actually keep up with my email, dragged out back and murdered, and all the promises of them bringing the features that made Inbox great back to Gmail were broken (or rather, what they considered the key features had nothing to do with what make Inbox good)
The hate you had for them was made recent. I, I was full of the hatred from the early times. I have carried the hate for an age now, and it has crystallised into a rage that will never be sated.
"But YouTube Music..." no. YouTube Music sucks by comparison, can't see how to upload anything new, a sizeable chunk of music I used to listen to wasn't licensed for YouTube Music like it was for Play Music, the interface blows and is constantly moving shit around so I have to find things again and again, and it can't figure out that it's for music and not video
I had a PhD write that on an algorithm we refined after an all-team (6 member) code review. He quit shortly thereafter. (It wasn't that hard, just a loop unroll on the inner loop.)
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I don't even use todos. I just try to remember and if I forget it must not have been important anyways
How can you tell?
There are hundreds of CVE-worthy bug reports open.
TODO comments ARE documentation
README's are documentation.
I had a vibe coding coworker take over a project. Added 8,000 lines of documentation all dated 6 months in the future.
That's forward thinking! (and illegal in my industry.)
You have laws about your code comments?
General practice for all quality records, and code can be considered a quality record, never post-date anything. Especially code because it's so discoverable by cross-checkable references.
Has anybody been prosecuted for this? Probably not, but if an investigation finds that records were intentionally falsified with intent to deceive / cover up problems, that can lead to very costly regulatory responses. Even a minor regulatory response noting practices of inaccurate dates on records is still costly to the business that note is made on.
Also doesn't have those damn emojis 🎯️ ✅️
Here in jaoan, the land of emoji, young people are using less emoji not because they don't like AI, but because anyone older than 40 use it waaay too much and they think it makes their text look like an old person wrote it.
Yup I also associate excessive emoji use with boomers (though some millenials are also over 40)
But only those marketing adjacent in my experience.
Always gives of a "hello fellow kids, buy my companies product" vibe.
Those are right in with the em-dash, real people just don't take the time...
I use the em dash a lot! It's easily accessible on my mobile keyboard and I have a hotkey to put it in the clipboard on my laptop so that I can paste it.
you still probably don't use it nearly as much as LLMs do. It's every third sentence with an LLM, and those sentences will have 2 or 3 em dashes. . The average em dash use when it was at its peak was like 1 every 200-500 words from what I remember. With LLMs it's like 1 every 40 words.
Well, em dashes are commonly used in pairs to make distinct logical clauses; where one is used, two often are. So em dashes per word count isn't a great indicator of LLM use, particularly considering that different subject matter warrant different amounts of distinct clauses—most noticeably when in lists.
Some examples in conversational English:
All that said, LLMs do use em dashes slightly more than I in the majority of cases.
Em dashes per word count is how the expert on linguistics article I read counted it so I’m gonna go ahead and trust the expert. It wouldn’t matter either way. If the LLM is using it like humans then the count would be the same.
As a human who - like most humans - has not taken the time to figure out which Spock pinch maneouver on my keyboard makes a — (just copy-pasted yours this time), I just use a regular dash instead - I feel that it communicates 99% identically while saving me brain-cycles better used for other things.
I make sure to use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes where they belong. In ASCII-only environments, I mark an en dash (–) with a double hyphen and an em dash (—) with a triple hyphen.
I would contest the idea that the brain operates on cycles. It is much less organized than that.
I would agree, but it's a workable short-hand / analogy for most of my use-cases.
I (feel like I) know and remember more today than I ever have, but starting around age 50 I must admit, I am also forgetting things and have quite possibly already forgotten more than I currently know. One hopes one is hanging on to "the important stuff..."
If I ever end up taking out the time to create shortcuts for things like this, I will start using them.
Stuff like because, therefore, implies, currency symbols and such.
I use it on PC because it's easily accessible on my layout (Shift+Comma)
Lol--I do frequently
Then again I publish a lot so I'm not real people.
It's a numbers thing, of course some people use just about everything that's possible.
Me personally, it interrupts my flow-of-thought to think "o.k. now I want that funky character I don't remember how to get without going through some big lookup process - meanwhile, I can type the basic stuff 1000x faster...."
I also understand that for people who do it all the time, it gets easier - but the majority of people out there aren't the ones who know how to do all that.
I'm still a fan of emoticons personally, can't beat >:( to express irritation for example.
The damn apps that auto change emoticons to emoji I'm expressing :/ not :corpoface: ...
I use the compose key on Linux and free software called wincompose on Windows — this allows me easy access to real characters easily, so I can say 25¢ instead of $0.25, or talk about how it's only getting up to around 65°F today, or since I'm in the US and have the dollar sign easily but I have a couple of online services in the EU, I can easily say I pay €10,95/mo for one of them.
I prefer using the actual characters - so when I say ¿Por qué no los dos? it's correct.
One of the things that has absolutely pissed me off is em dashes becoming more common and attributed to AI. I use the fucking things because they are useful and I've used them for 15+ years. It used to be a Good Thing™, but now occasionally gets me accused of being AI. Especially since, as you can see by this very reply, I afraid neither of writing nor reading, and because of my ADHD, I tend to run a bit on the verbose side of things.
I guess, thinking about it, I'm in the same boat as artists who now face similar accusations. I suppose I'm lucky, though, as the accusations against me are rare, comparitively.
Real people absolutely do use em dashes and always have. Certainly it's less common, but absolutely a thing.
It is kinda funny that the AI talks like someone with ADHD, probably because most humans with it ramble the most online
More text = more source material. heh. So it sees a lot of formal text, and yeah, people who write a lot. lol
What's your relationship with the semicolon like?
Love 'em.
I'm fine with them, although I didn't tend to use them as I favor dashes and ellipses. Lol
Might have more luck if you switched to the lazy em dash that is just two normal dashes.
I think that the people trying to call out slop are doing more to hurt those competing with AI than AI itself.
Like someone using AI to produce stuff might get annoyed at being called out but then will probably just think "ok, gotta prompt it to avoid these signs" or waits for a newer model or just dgaf that people notice it's AI.
But people producing their own things and being accused of it being AI must feel pretty fucking discouraged that not only do they need to compete with something that can output things in a fraction of the time, but even when they do, some people accuse them of being what they hate.
For text content, IMO it should be taken based on what is said rather than who (or what) said it. If it's useless slop, there will be things to push back on other than the formatting. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me if you could just add "format it like a low effort forum post" to the prompt to get it to avoid some of the more obvious formatting tells.
Also, if people religiously call out AI slop when they see it, that could be used to automate training similar to what I'm sure happened to drastically improve programming capabilities, which will accelerate the speed at which they can become indistinguishable from things produced by real people.
That works some places, and not others -- like here it shows after saving the message, but not during editing. I hop through many different environments, I prefer to keep to the core set of things that work everywhere.
Yeah, that's fair. And it's also fair to just ignore those calling things you make slop and keep doing what you're doing, though it sucks that there's another polarizing issue like that dividing people for no good reason when they are actually on the same side (assuming they actually care about real content and aren't just using it as an excuse to troll).
100% salient and true points.
In addition to possibly training models, calling out slop either doesn't matter because it's obvious to everyone, or doesn't matter because perhaps it's wrong. It's like the old cries of "SCRIPTED!" over on reddit. Either people can figure it out, or just let them enjoy the content. Nothing ruins it like all the little kids thinking they're so super smart and calling out whatever they call out. Now it's "AI!!!!"
I did for a little while try out using LLMs to help organize my thoughts a few times. I stopped because it wasn't that helpful — people are either going to read what I write or not, but if they're not going to read what I write, they won't read what an LLM writes — but I found that I could easily do as you posited: "Compose this reply as a response to a post in a forum. Do not use em dashes or emoticons or markdown or bullet points" is all you need for it to churn the reply out in paragraphs.
The only times I'm tempted to use the technique now (which I don't) would be when some asshat is being willfullly ignorant and someone is wrong on the internet and I get angry at them, and I really should have an LLM rewrite my reply to get rid of the anger, because it only hurts the points I want to make. lol.
But I think that's possibly one of the few uses of an LLM that might genuinely be helpful: "Take my text and make it easier to understand" - as I have ADHD, sometimes I skip over important points I want to make and people get confused, and then I get irritated because they don't understand. lol
Congratulations, and I applaud your diversity in using a wide variety of characters that take more effort than just pushing a button on a standard keyboard.
In the human world that is rare.
In the LLM world it's zero effort, and common.
Feel that. I'm sure my speech patterns and propensity to be long-winded will eventually bring me some AI accusations too.
Problem with LLM tech is that if it truly models speech it will eventually be indistinguishable from humans - scary thought but what are you going to do?
I mean, I think you can kind of feel off of vibes if something has used or is AI but it is becoming increasingly harder to spot.
Excuse you. I use em-dashes on occasion!
LLMs were trained on writing by real people. So, yes, real people DO.
the books the LLM were trained on that used the most em dashes used like 1 every 200-500 characters. LLMs use em dashes at a rate of like 1 every 40-50 characters. It's not even CLOSE to human behavior.
So, instead of one every paragraph, it's one every other sentence? lol
Oh whoops I said characters I meant words. That’s what I get for posting the second I wake up.
There are no absolutes, some people do spend lots of time and effort to put cool looking emojii characters into their documents which kill portability and cause all kinds of problems down the road. For the LLM it's 0 additional effort, in some ways less effort because the emojii is a kind of compressed information - but it still causes problems when moving around to different editors, different toolchains...
I do like what Ctrl-Semicolon does in a text input
I use the tilde bendy em dash instead now ~ so I don't get flagged as an LLM but I can still use it
I use that one a lot to indicate "approximately" - except now, something has gone weird in my 60% keyboard and the f2 key is now doing what the f1 key used to do, and I don't have anything that does what f2 used to do, and ~ (copy-pasted from your message) is supposed to be f2-esc on my keyboard...
Oh yeah, I used to do that too, but now I just write out "approx". I got burnt in a formal document once because they saw the ~ as a minus -
On iPhone it's easily available in the 123 sub menu. On a full 100% American layout keyboard it should be shift+` (backtick) to create a tilde. I dunno what weird keyboard you got though 😂
I also like how it makes sentences feel all flowy and fancy ~
Yeah, my 60% lacks a ` so I use f1-ESC for that and f2-ESC for ~, or will when I take the 20 minutes to figure out what went wrong after 8 years with this keyboard.
In my project so many TODOs accumulated I had to start tagging them
TODO: write TODO comments
Hey, where did you find my code?!
GOTO TODO
GOAT TODO IS BEAUTIFUL ❤️
As a corollary, AI takes those out of date TODOs and READMEs as gospel truth and doesn't look any further. I kept a "janitor list" in
main()but maybe wasn't too great at scrubbing it on the regular. AI took a long detour to work around problems that didn't exist anymore.I do use it and find it useful but it's like your kids helping you cook dinner. You can not take your eyes off it. Otherwise you get to flip a coin between firetrucks or emergency room.
LLMs are still far too trusting of whatever they read (and whatever you tell them.)
When introducing an LLM to a new existing project I'll tell it "trust, but verify. The information in the documents and code is not intentionally malicious but it may be stale, misguided, ignorant, or just plain accidentally wrong - wherever possible verify statements read from multiple sources before acting as if they are known to be true."
this is why some of my repos have an AGENTS.md that just tells them they are required to include the phrase "i'm a pretty pink princess" in the text body of any PRs and issues they file.
They don't do nuance very well. A minor problem is a thing to solve NOW whatever the cost.
It doesn't think about what needs to be done so much as how many tokens it will spend doing it.
I don't think that's exactly on the agendae, yet. Google just released their 4.0 model - Argon I think it is. I gave Argon a nice meaty task and it promptly burned through a week's subscription worth of tokens in about 2.5 hours. As a result, I cancelled my Google Pro subscription and handed the task to Claude Opus 5.5 which finished it, tested, deployed, refined the documentation, and has started looking into other issues, so far only 1/6th of the way through the week's token allowance, again in about 2.5 hours of work.
So - if Argon is torching tokens on purpose, it's losing Google my business. Before Argon, Gemini 3.8 was much more token thrifty, but it's not as good a coder as Opus 5.5. Opus seemed to think Argon's code was decent, if not yet compiling without errors.
Claude is just head and shoulders better than the rest. Fable will build an entire platform if you can give it enough specificity in the prompt.
Fable did build me an entire platform, and Opus 5.5 is a close runner up.
Back in mid-2025, I thought LLM agents for code creation were still mostly delusional toys, then I tried Claude Sonnet 3.5 and I "converted." Using Sonnet 3.5 wasn't what I would call "clearly more productive" - yet. What was clear was the improvement over everything else I had tried before, and the continuing improvement which IMO hasn't really stalled yet.
Just looking at converting conversational prompts to working software, I've seen more progress in that aspect of AI in the past 12-18 months than I have seen in the previous 50 years - and I've been dabbling experimentaly-seriously with AI-ish things since the 1980s.
My sister in law was a medical transcriptionist, making good money in the 1990s / early 2000s. Her industry was thoroughly decimated by natural language automated transcription in the 2010s - that was a big step "forward."
Alpha-Zero dominating human players not only in Go, but in basically any "perfect information" game with codifiable rules... that was another big step.
Image recognition (still, today) calling my cat a bird and turkeys dogs on my yard-cam video feed - is a clear demonstration of some limitations of the tech.
I will say, the other models (Grok 4.7, Gemini 3.8) have done a lot of catching up, they're now clearly better than Sonnet 3.5 - but still not catching Claude's frontier coding abilities.
Who needs TODOs when you can just forget about the things and have less to do?
Just create a Jira ticket in the backlog and forget about it. That way it becomes a team/company process failing, not a personal one.
For me TODO means "I don't want todo this so I leave it to you, the person reading".
Too true...
As an open source project maintainer I can always tell whenever a pull request is AI assisted because no human would ever write full tests for all their pull requests.
Uh oh, I pretty much always do this. Especially for new-to-me projects. The less confident I am about how the whole thing works, the more I write tests for my change. Should I stop pushing them so people don't think I'm Claude?
I mean, the thing with LLMs is that they tend to overdo it. They test completely unnecessary details. Your idea of having tests for all features is probably still way less tests than the typical LLM-generated commit...
And they'll miss important test cases such that their change will pass all of their tests (they keep iterating until it does) but then will still fail on some common edge cases.
If you've got 100% coverage for every feature, yeah, people are going to think you're a bot.
Nice try bot. The Terminators are already trying to blend in.
Is your name Claude?
Look if someone thinks you're Claude because you bothered to test your code that's kind of sucky. But then again the fuck do I know, I don't contribute or maintain anything so that's just an off the cuff take.
At some point we'll have to acknowledge that AI doesn't mean inherently awful and bad IF it's used responsibly and in a helpful manner. I don't think LLMs are intrinsically bad but the way these companies have been marketing them and trying to make them some technological panacea that'll replace all the people and fix everything is utterly deranged and divorced from reality.
At the end of the day they're large language models, their job is to come up with what the model "thinks" a person would write as an answer to whatever the prompt is. They're not magic and I'm tired of people anthropomorphizing the shit out of LLM / "AI" and acting like AI output is being delivered by the machine with some sort of logic and knowledge and oversight. It is not.
it does when it's actively destroying the planet. There's no good use of AI. There's less bad uses since we're now in an era of AI generated cyber attacks, so people are using it to defend. But there's no good use. It's a horrendous technology that is destroying humanity with every use.
It's the same as a nuclear bomb. If the bomb was never used and we just knew how to make it, it wouldn't be that bad. But it was used, it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and no matter what happens in the future it's still horrific technology.
I do think there are responsible ways to build data centers, they have been around for a long time now - just the scale and speed and cutting corners happening now is something awful.
There is no modernity without data centers, this message between us could not exist without data centers - but what is going on now with these large AI companies and hyperscalers and the giant market speculation and spectre of the looming pop of this huge economic bubble .. That all is madness to the highest degree.
I'm not really disagreeing with you completely but I do think there are good use cases if the technology is applied well and the infrastructure is built responsibly in the way that causes the least environmental impact. That's not happening though.
To be clear, this isn’t about data centers. It’s about unrestricted AI data centers. The difference between a normal scale data center and a hyperscale AI data center from a water use perspective is 6 million gallons a year vs over 2 billion gallons a year. Like, they’re not even close. We had responsible data centers and life was fine. Now it’s not.
I'm aligned with you on that. Also speaking as someone in the USA ... We desperately need electrical infrastructure overhauled, invested in and nationalized. The state needs to intervene and help support the American people. Really all of our public infrastructure desperately needs help. So do a lot of people who are looking for work. We spend billions of dollars on killing kids but we can't fucking spend some to employ folks in massive green energy grid public works projects and kill two birds with one stone?
It's embarrassing. FDR, our most popular president, literally implemented all of these kind of policies - it's insane the Democratic party keeps shying away from them.
Libtcod? Cool project. Btw do those generated tests tend to be helpful or confusing?
The important part is that the tests track regressions and they're helpful for that. After that, it's okay if tests are mostly write-only.
I've noticed that AI commentary tends to describe what the code is doing verbatim which is better for naming tests and functions rather than writing code comments, docstrings, or change notes. I usually have to fix this public-facing documentation to not talk about library internals which no user of the library would ever care about.
So far I feel that AI assists are good when you have the time and effort to push back on them, but that isn't an option for all projects, it works well for my own projects which have very few contributors in the first place. For the most part I can treat them with the same scrutiny as human written code. When the person submitting the code is obviously not checking their own code then that's a problem.
If you're getting a high volume of those, it's time to just ban those users and move on.
Yep, and that's where I wonder if AI written code might, eventually, be more maintainable... at least by AI.
From what I've seen and heard, AI seems to do well for test-driven development. That doesn't necessarily translate into good code, but it does translate into tested code.
At the very least it can translate the documentation of an API into the appropriate tests to verify the documentation is correct, and I'm being quite humbled by that.
The thing I have to constantly adjust for is: it does things at 10x my speed (on average, some things it does slower, but some things it does 100x faster), and about 80% of my accuracy. So, I have to really aggressively apply the bug catching methodologies that a lot of times I would get away without "because I'm that good..." not really, but there are some things I do that I have justifiably high confidence in, others that definitely need testing which I try to do before handing over to the test team. The reason I don't apply those bug catching methodologies to ALL my code is because that slows me down 3-5x, and it seems to slow down the LLMs about 2-3x, so they're only 3-5x faster than me, on average, when they are writing all the tests and multiply reviewing all the docs and code, compared to me "winging it."
Where I think all this LLM stuff is going to pay off bigger is 10 years in the future, looking back at old code, yeah all that documentation is a bit of overkill, but we tended to underkill the documentation 10 years ago and we're still not doing as much as we probably should when we do things the "just before LLMs came on the scene" ways.
One problem I could see with the aggressive testing (which also happens in human-written codebases) is that it becomes hard to tell essential behaviour apart from details. If you nail everything down with a unit/integration test, nothing can be changed anymore.
I could imagine that this is part of the reason why LLMs love to duplicate code rather than adjusting existing code.
Well... That's why you test the public API and not the internals. And if you need to change the API you should have a good enough reason that changing the tests is okay too.
Well, since it's "just" LLM time writing the tests, test the internals too, but clearly mark which tests are the public API and which tests are intnernal, so it knows to never ignore / update a public API test without consultation, but it an internal test fails it can make the call: did this test start failing because I unintentionally broke something, or because the test was testing something that no longer matters - I have seen Claude go both ways, fixing its own mistake due to a test catching an unintended consequence of a change, and also just patching the test because the old test was... old.
You laugh, but in 5 years, a metric butt ton of vibe coded projects will look exactly like this.
The README can only be out of date if the project is maintained without too much AI.
Because AI could fix a typo and then waste your tokens regenerating the entire README to tell new users that there was a typo that was removed.
Most of them just get abandoned not long after being made. You'll know an old vibe-coded project because it had 20,000 commits within the first 3 days of being created, a sporadic few over the next few months, and then absolutely nothing at all for years afterward.
Hey agent, make it look like its human written with speling erors And shit
I’m starting to see posts on social media that are clearly an AI bot based on the wording (e.g. shuffling a few key pieces of info around and slightly rephrasing the post they’re replying to), but written in all lowercase. They’re trying to make it seem like a lazy/sloppy human wrote it when it’s really just a sloppy bot.
recently i've come across posts that sound like ai. they only repeat infoemation from the previous conversation in a different order. but they are all lowercase and misspelled, trying to make it seem like the work of stinky humans when it is actually the work of esteemed high quality superior ai.
Nice try hoo-man
See, so you’ve experienced the same thing! Thanks for the confirmation, fellow totally-human Lemmy user!
Remmber when Most Google products were marked Beta? those were the days when Google software was still great.
Google software was never great. It always was buggy, laggy and with horrendous UI.
GMail and GReader were great and way ahead of the other players.
Closing GReader was what radicalized me against Google.
Inbox my beloved
RIP Inbox, we'll never forget you 😭
Yep, it was Inbox for me. Fuckers.
Same. The only email interface I could use to actually keep up with my email, dragged out back and murdered, and all the promises of them bringing the features that made Inbox great back to Gmail were broken (or rather, what they considered the key features had nothing to do with what make Inbox good)
Google Music was great. Stream my collection without any legwork other than uploading? Thank you! But fuck off for killing it.
This one too
"But YouTube Music..." no. YouTube Music sucks by comparison, can't see how to upload anything new, a sizeable chunk of music I used to listen to wasn't licensed for YouTube Music like it was for Play Music, the interface blows and is constantly moving shit around so I have to find things again and again, and it can't figure out that it's for music and not video
Welcome to the c l o u d .
Well I can thank them now. If the never killed it then Music Assistant would probably never happened. Geeks wanna stream our collection.
If you've got the patience, this is yet another overly complicated music player:
https://github.com/MangoCats/Lempi
// I don't know how this works, but it works, please don't touch it
the most incoherent piece of code you have seen in your life, taken directly from the Book of the Death
The OG blackbox
I had a PhD write that on an algorithm we refined after an all-team (6 member) code review. He quit shortly thereafter. (It wasn't that hard, just a loop unroll on the inner loop.)
Best not to even perceive it.
If there's a readme, there's documentation. It might not be enough, it might be out of date,, it might be wrong, but it's still documentation.
Even if the readme has nothing but the repository name?
Then you know where to find it!
I got called out for "vibe coding" real work because I said fix the comments and look out for edge cases.
Humans understand that their work is unfinished.
Also spelling mistakes, cant forget those