> 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.