I really think it’s a native language blindness a lot of people here have, but I’ve been reading technical “programming English” for 20+ years and LLM speak is exactly like tech blog speak from 20 years ago. As a non-native speaker with a flair for language acquisition I see this a mile away.
LLMs just copied human production, people have been writing this prose style forever and it has been ingested as training data.
Like I just went to your blog Simon and I can go to the earliest entries and read a style that LLMs would mimic today. The seeds of the mimicry are there, maybe not all in one article but as an aggregate.
And I mean this as no disrespect whatsoever, it’s just language and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. They copied you, not the other way around.
Why are you so confident of that, if you’re a non-native English speaker? I’m a native English speaker, and I have also written and read many technical blog posts for over a decade, and I see Claudish all over the place.
If what you said were true, then I would have never have seen Claudish, and that’s obviously not true.
If you genuinely haven’t seen Claudish in English on the Internet in the last year, then I would suggest that’s because your English is not as native as you think it is. Or maybe you just don’t use Claude that much. (I use Claude all the time, because it is useful, but that also makes its tics very apparent when I encounter them on a blog. And yes it immediately makes me suspicious of sloppy thought.)
Actually one prominent and sorta sad example is that I’m basically certain Professor Joe Hellerstein has been using Claude to write blog posts since April 2025. The timing is pretty suspicious on its own.
Yeah, that prose is gross.
score 1 · canonical
I really think it’s a native language blindness a lot of people here have, but I’ve been reading technical “programming English” for 20+ years and LLM speak is exactly like tech blog speak from 20 years ago. As a non-native speaker with a flair for language acquisition I see this a mile away.
LLMs just copied human production, people have been writing this prose style forever and it has been ingested as training data.
Like I just went to your blog Simon and I can go to the earliest entries and read a style that LLMs would mimic today. The seeds of the mimicry are there, maybe not all in one article but as an aggregate.
And I mean this as no disrespect whatsoever, it’s just language and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it. They copied you, not the other way around.
score 1 · canonical
Why are you so confident of that, if you’re a non-native English speaker? I’m a native English speaker, and I have also written and read many technical blog posts for over a decade, and I see Claudish all over the place.
If what you said were true, then I would have never have seen Claudish, and that’s obviously not true.
If you genuinely haven’t seen Claudish in English on the Internet in the last year, then I would suggest that’s because your English is not as native as you think it is. Or maybe you just don’t use Claude that much. (I use Claude all the time, because it is useful, but that also makes its tics very apparent when I encounter them on a blog. And yes it immediately makes me suspicious of sloppy thought.)
Actually one prominent and sorta sad example is that I’m basically certain Professor Joe Hellerstein has been using Claude to write blog posts since April 2025. The timing is pretty suspicious on its own.
https://jhellerstein.github.io/blog/
e.g. https://jhellerstein.github.io/blog/cost-of-committing/ - so many Claudish tics here
I was reading his papers on distributed systems (CALM, Bloom, etc.) over 10 years ago. That was technical prose.
I don’t know if he had a blog prior to 2025, but I bet if he did, you can compare the prose and see that it’s now done with Claude.
score 1 · canonical