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Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

No mention of Claude/ChatGPT's favourite new word genuine and friends? They also like using real and honest when giving advice. Far as I can tell this is a new-ish change.

> Honestly? We should address X first. It's a genuine issue and we've found a real bug here.

Honorable mention: "no <thing you told me not to do>". I guess this helps reassure adherence to the prompt? I see that one all the time in vibe coded PRs.

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There are some subreddits where this trope is completely out of control. For better or worse I follow the NBA subreddit and in the comment sections the number of people who throw in honestly as a qualifier is like way more than you would assume from natural conversation.

I really don’t understand what’s wrong with people using LLMs for these types of mundane conversations. There’s nothing to gain and it destroys value of online discourse.

I don't think anyone is using LLMs for those conversations. A lot of those replies are bots. There's a market for reddit accounts that have a solid human-looking reply/post history, to be used for astroturf marketing, so some organizations set up bots to grow such accounts. There probably are also just people who overuse "Honestly? [statement]" sentences. I've spoken to such people in person before LLMs.

I’ve noticed the honestly thing for sure.

But I feel like I’ve noticed an uptick in people using the adverb “genuinely” in what I genuinely believe to not be AI generated comments, articles, etc. Maybe it’s just me, I got similar vibes about the word efficacy a few years ago, before the ascent of GenAI (but after the pandemic — again, maybe just me).

Similarly, "X that actually works"

...and half of the time still doesn't do what you want.

And the "final version" statement. Irrelevant as obviously it has no idea how many iterations you'll go through

I found a new one in claude recently with "Fair enough, ..."

My favorite:

"And honestly? That's rare"

> no <thing you told me not to do>

I see this so often. Sometimes it’s just “no react hooks”, other times it gets literal and extra unnatural, like: “here’s <your thing>, no unnecessary long text explanation”. Perhaps we’re past AGI and this is passive aggressiveness ;)

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