Now people think I'm just parroting what Claude said. It sucks. I want my catch phrases back, I guess this is how em dash users felt
When someone uses the presence of em-dash as the only signal for AI-generated then they are simply lazy.
They're only a LinkedIn-ism when used to create an unduly dramatic juxtaposition for an otherwise mundane idea. But now they set off people's AI radar when used for any reason at all.
You ask it to do something, then tell it to do something in a different way, then it assumes it needs to do the refactor in a backward compatible way, or creates migrations for it etc.
1) use the edit in-place functionality; or
2) ask it to rewrite to remove something
It'll write the prompt as if the agent (codex) knew about the conversation and add "don't do X" etc. At first that bothered but I realized it doesn't really change the output so I stopped caring.
Still, no experience is unique I guess.
It contains (Among other things) stuff like "this is a single user personal project, I'm the only user, this will never be open to the public internet" etc.
It kinda-sorta tones down the proclivity to worry about backwards compatibility and slight edge cases where if someone has edited some template and the new code doesn't support it.
I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by making it more concise. It came back after 20 minutes of work, did a line count and was aghast that the line count had somehow increased...
Even then it is conservative. For the love of God, compact the comments.
Comments become a huge maintenance burden, especially in the age of AI. They just grow and grow, and then mislead the AI later on.
That is a dramatic shortcoming, but I fix it with permalinks to other files. https://replicated.live/blog/link
I also love how it'll build local plans with phases, tasks, or decisions, then reference those numbers in those same useless comments.
I wish they trained the bots to be a notch more relaxed and less hysterical. Less is more.
But maybe that's just a consequence of the RL training being essentially AI torture to make them do what we want.
When I'm writing technical documentation, it keeps the explanations in. Same when writing non-technical documentation. When I was having it attempt to generate a Pathfinder 1e class for a Sword Dancer, it was leaving in notes about why it removes things I told it to remove/rework.
And it isn't just Claude. I've seen the same with GPT models, with Grok, with Deepseek. Each AI isn't quite the same with how it approaches this, but in every case they seem to have a strong bias to retaining information, even bad information that we want gone, so it is like they have a, dare I say, subconscious bias to retain the information. Putting a note in a comment or explaining why to not do something or something was undone is a good way to retain information while still achieving the goal (well, if you ignore the part about the human intention for the information to be gone).
This then weakens the AI in the future, as I find AI struggles with the more incorrect information. Sure, a comment saying "not X because Y" is less 'context damage' than a comment saying "X" (assuming X is wrong), but it is still a slight shift to X being present in context in some way. One off, AI's seem to perfectly handle this without issue. But after hundreds or thousands of cases build up? The attention mechanism seems unable to keep up and incorrect information flows it. This effectively creates a sort of vibe coding maximum size unless there is a human janitor cleaning up the bad information on the context stays nice and clean.
But this is all simply a feeling I get as I use AI to do different things and isn't at all backed up by any formal study.