The one phrase that irks me as overly dramatic and both GPT and Claude use it a lot is "__ is the real smoking gun!"
I'm a non-native English speaker, so maybe it's a really common idiom to use when debugging?
The one phrase that irks me as overly dramatic and both GPT and Claude use it a lot is "__ is the real smoking gun!"
I'm a non-native English speaker, so maybe it's a really common idiom to use when debugging?
It probably was found in a bunch of meaningful code commit messages
I’m a British English speaker and find the use of cliched American idioms really quite disgusting. Don’t want to think about about ballparks, home runs, smoking guns, going all in, touchdowns or hitting it out the park.
Ironically (or not) I've seen smoking gun attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story. (It was smoking pistol in that story). Even if that's rubbish, I think that one is common across the English speaking world. The baseball/American football stuff is a bit different. In the commonwealth we might say "Hit for six" instead of hitting it out of the park. There are a bunch of other ones related to sports more common in England like snookered, own-goal, red card, etc.
That observation about Sherlock Holmes certainly puts the smackdown on me and gets you to home plate.
It actually probably wouldn’t be too expensive or difficult to finetune those sayings out of default behavior if it were made accessible to you, you could even automate most of the relabeling by having the model come up with a list of idioms and appropriate replacement terms so it calls eg cookies biscuits or removes references to baseball. Absolute bollocks they don’t offer that as a simple option anymore
Should send over a geezer to give them a slap.
In my user instructions I always have a point to "always use British English" which seems to reduce Americanisms. I am yet to see Claude give me a "back of the net!" though, sadly.
Crikey, you are correct!
My colleagues were joking about smoking guns yesterday after noticing that Claude was obsessed with it.
I like how your co-workers enjoy the language. I had a similar group of colleagues once who did similar pre LLM but with words in popular culture, very playful.
In the future these tells will be more identifiable. We will be easier to point back at text and code written in 2026 and more confidently say "this was written by an LLM". It takes time for patterns to form and takes time for it to be noticeable. "Smoking gun was so early 2026 claude".I find thinking of the future looking at now to be refreshing perspective on our usage.
> I'm a non-native English speaker, so maybe it's a really common idiom to use when debugging?
No. But it is something goblins say a lot.
Especially sleuth goblins...