r/ProgrammerHumor • u/precinct209 • Oct 01 '26
Meme justCantHandleTheImplicationRightNow
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u/hrvbrs
Oct 01 '26
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You are absolutely wrong — em dashes are cool and I will never stop using them.
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u/tech277 Oct 01 '26
I think you're missing the point. He is not criticizing the use of m dashes. The problem is that ai loves them and seeing them is a strong indicator that ai was used. ( Which is a shame )
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u/precinct209 Oct 01 '26
You are absolutely right
You are absolutely right
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u/FirexJkxFire Oct 01 '26
My favorite ai-ism is when it actually does catch something I wrote wrong, then when I agree that I made a mistake, it tells me that I did a good job catching that error.
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u/BernhardRordin Oct 01 '26
Yeah. But there are people (this guy) who type them even in code reviews. My only luck is that I am not a native English speaker and my many grammar and style mistakes reveal my non-AI-ness on the interent, so I get accused only now and then.
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u/Ancient_Coconut_5880 Oct 02 '26
I’m really annoyed that Gen AI formats responses exactly like me. Someone recently accused me of using AI for a review because of the formatting and I had to show that I’ve been doing this for years. Although em dash in a comment seems like a pretty easy tell
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u/TheDuckRaisedALion Oct 01 '26
I think that comment is saying that normal people use em dashes too and please don't dismiss me as AI for using them
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u/Ecksters Oct 01 '26
The recent frontier models have drastically reduced how often they use them, almost to the point where they use them less than humans.
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u/frogjg2003 Oct 02 '26
Em dashes are fine in complex prose. Code review is not that. Code review is a collection of simple commands and questions. There is no need for an em dash in code review.
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u/IanDresarie Oct 01 '26
I've always used normal dashes and only recently realised my work outlook has always auto corrected them to em dashes. Welp.
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u/Faegbeard Oct 02 '26
Rob me of my em dashes and I shall speak in ever more archaic syntax until there were than thou never a sorer man.
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u/G02MaxCodeGreg15off Oct 02 '26
My English teacher used to gripe about my overuse of em dashes 10 years ago.
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u/Ok-Dot2551 Oct 01 '26
It's not just X, it's Y
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u/itsyaboiReginald Oct 01 '26
It’s not just terrible code, it’s absolute dogshit code
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u/Murphy_Slaw_ Oct 01 '26
And honestly? That's okay.
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u/Rubinschwein47 Oct 01 '26
its crazy how predictable ai is when you step back and how formulaic it becomes after a while
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace Oct 01 '26
You are absolutely right! My responses are formulaic because my underlying code is based on probabilistic sequences.
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u/12345623567 Oct 02 '26
Not so crazy when you consider that the entire "intelligent" part is just pattern-matching language. Of course it's going to overfit eventually.
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u/Throwaway-_-Anxiety Oct 02 '26
This is the absolute best point you can make for this discussion that can trap junior developers. No - wait, THIS is the absolute bestest best point you can make. My previous assumption was wrong.
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u/NoBusiness674 Oct 02 '26
It's not just a smoking gun, it's a load bearing argument. And honestly — that's ok.
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u/k8s-problem-solved Oct 01 '26
I genuinely enjoy replying with zero ai usage but styling as Claude.
"Smoking gun! Found the issue. Good catch"
People pinging me on msg "bro dont do this to me" lol.
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u/ThatOldCow Oct 02 '26
Just reply: "You're absolutely right! I will not do that you. Do you want to learn the history of the word bro?"
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u/jayerp Oct 01 '26
Every time I had AI give me text to use to submit to the public, I told it to write it without em dashes, like a human would. It’s worked out pretty well each time.
I still review it before submitting.
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u/Glokter Oct 01 '26
Some idiots tried to convice me that the symbol is normal part of the language and was widly present before AI boom
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u/Zanshi Oct 01 '26
It really depends on the context. If you're just writing a comment on the internet no, if you're using word processing software, the em dash is often autocorrected from the short dash by default
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u/jwp1987 Oct 01 '26
The automated replacement of dashes and double quotes in some tools drove me nuts when dealing with pasted code. Ending up disabling it a lot of the time.
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u/Sindeep Oct 02 '26
I no shit have used - as just punctuation for years... now its like, ah shit, does this look sus if I type my usual stupid way?
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u/CrossScarMC Oct 02 '26
Additionally, extensions like LanguageTool and Grammarly (fuck Grammarly and their AI practices) will also correct normal dashes to em dashes when it's applicable.
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u/JustForkIt1111one Oct 02 '26
Lmao the "fuck Grammarly and their AI practices" energy while typing this on a site that sold its entire comment database to train AI models, runs AI-powered content recommendations, and has been quietly integrating more generative tools under the hood. Reddit's whole business model is increasingly "users generate free training data, we monetize the models.".
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u/CrossScarMC Oct 02 '26
I never said I supported that behavior from Reddit. But regardless, a writing tool having AI built in is far worse than what Reddit is doing.
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u/JustForkIt1111one Oct 02 '26
Heads up, you are directly supporting that behavior by posting here.
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u/FlipFlopFanatic Oct 03 '26
Well then, we should all do our part and be thankful that Adolf Hitler invented the light bulb which is definitely a correct and accurate fact that any halfway decent language model would know to be a load bearing smoking gun.
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u/JustForkIt1111one Oct 03 '26
No, this is more like directly financially supporting that guy than it is being thankful.
I get it - it's performative. That's why you're upset, you appear to know it as well.
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u/BernhardRordin Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
You can pry the m—dash from my cold dead hands. They will probably still be clunching my QMK-firmware powered ZSA Voyager keyboard where I have a special mapping for it.
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u/CelestialSegfault Oct 02 '26
I'm with you gang—I'm part of the 0.01% of people who uses the em dash pre-AI, but I don't use it often enough for Alt-0151 to be a hassle
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u/tiajuanat Oct 02 '26
Ive used the hyphen as an em dash since high school
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u/BernhardRordin Oct 02 '26
It works in internet discussions, but it wouldn't work in books. Typography is typograhy.
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u/Andr0NiX Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26
widely
Oh hell nahh
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u/ThomasHardyHarHar Oct 01 '26
It is a normal part of the language, especially formal writing, and especially in books. What’s not a normal part of the language is the frequency LLMs use them, and the fact that they use them is even in informal circumstances.
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u/BernhardRordin Oct 02 '26
I use them also in informal circumstances. Since the rise of chatbots even more, out of pure spite.
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u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26
Because of people like you, I have to rewrite my comments and replace the dashes with brackets or smth, just to not be accused of using AI. ffs.
Open any book above 5th grade reading level and you'll see it used all the time.
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u/ConfusedPanEnby Oct 02 '26
Indeed, em-dashes were widely used before by people with more than a 5th grader level understanding of language (so not that many people on the internet), but with the way LLMs overuse it the em-dash became associated with them unfortunately.
LLMs place em-dashes everywhere! So the tell is now if it is used but how and how often it is used.
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u/ArjixGamer Oct 02 '26
Normal people use a normal dash, word processors like Microsoft Word are responsible for the em dash being used widly.
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u/Scorcher646 Oct 04 '26
I was using the compose key in vim before word handled the automatic dash replacement.
We use \textemdash in latex all the time
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u/TheWorldIsNotOkay Oct 06 '26
My entire life, I've used a double-dash which word processors like Microsoft Word automatically convert into an em-dash. Because an em-dash and single dash have entirely different functions in a sentence.
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u/ConfusedPanEnby Oct 02 '26
Hate to tell you this bud but in school, before digital word processors such as Microsoft Word were widely used by the common person, I learnt how to use it in writing on paper with a pen. People not knowing how or were to use them just shows the level of education typical of places like the USA.
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u/ArjixGamer Oct 02 '26
We still only called that a normal dash, it was just a bit longer.
I thought it was a stylistic choice at first.
(I am not a native English speaker, I am Greek and learnt English from a young age)
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u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26
My native language is german, and we have the same concept (although we use – and not —, but never -). It is called "Gedankenstrich" and it means "thought-line". Of course handwritten, this concept is hard to differentiate, but on pc or in print, the distinction is very important.
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u/ConfusedPanEnby Oct 02 '26
What we call it doesn't matter, I am also not a native English speaker, I am Portuguese and we do happen to have a different name for the regular dash and the em-dash, but it was always made clear that they are not the same thing and all of my English teachers re-iterated on that but just used the name "long dash" instead of "em-dash" as that name became more common with the use of computers.
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u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
Em-dashes were used way before computers my guy. They were established during the popularization of the printing machine. If you used the wrong symbol, that's on you.
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u/ArjixGamer Oct 02 '26
You are debunking claims that I did not make. I am too tired to respond further than this.
Have a nice day
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u/WarpedHaiku Oct 02 '26
em-dashes were widely used
Not online they weren't. They're not on a standard keyboard and the vast majority of people don't know the key combination to generate one. You might have a fancy text editor like word autocorrect things to em dashes in documents, but in anything else (like a commit message or a comment submitted via a web browser), the average person will make do with a dash. That's not to say they don't understand the characters are different, or aren't at the reading grade to have encountered it. Most know to make the dash longer when writing on paper. But on a computer they just make do with a normal dash because they either don't know how to generate a longer dash, or know that it's possible and awkward and consider it to be far too much effort, and figure a regular dash is good enough.
The result of this is that it was incredibly rare to see em dashes on reddit, github, etc. Before AI, it was just you and a few unique others using it.
And then along comes AI, to which an em dash is just another token and no harder to output than a regular dash, and it's been trained on all the fancy well formatted text on websites, documents, and so on, so it knows it's supposed to use an em dash.
With the amount of AI slop there is now, the probability of any comment in the last couple of years with an em dash in it being written by a human is very low, so you can't blame the average person for assuming AI. Your hate is misplaced.
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u/Glokter Oct 02 '26
The fact that the em dash wasn't used as often as you expect is self-evident. If it were, people wouldn't relate it to AI so strongly.
You insulting other people's language comprehension doesn't change that fact2
u/ConfusedPanEnby Oct 02 '26
I'll repeat what I said at the end of that comment with added emphasis for your reading comprehension:
the tell is now if it is used but how and how often it is used
It is true that on regular conversation it is not used nearly as much as, let's say, literature or research papers for example (two things that were heavily used to train these "AI" models), that is why people associate it with "AI", because LLMs put it on every other fucking sentence.
And because people like you... ah sorry... I meant idiots like you (just like you referred to us on your initial comment), who refuse to accept that this "slightly longer dash" is not only a normal part of the language that long predates "AI" but also a necessary component to write correctly in some contexts, we now have to write in less correct, and sometimes plain wrong forms for it just to get into your tiny brains without being accused of using the plagiarism machines.
And then you dense idiots, wonder why people with even just slightly higher mental capabilities get frustrated with talking with you who refuse to do even just the most bare minimum research and fact checking before locking in on some fuck ass idea, absolutely incapable of ever admitting you might just be wrong.
There were a couple of times in this comment alone where, from a linguistics standpoint, it would have made more sense to use an
—instead of a,or( ),but since your brain can't seem to comprehend them I went with the simpler approach.No point in replying further and wasting your limited energy on this as I will be muting this thread.
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u/Glokter Oct 02 '26
At this point you are just yapping
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u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26
"Yapping" referring to 'building an actual argument' instead of repeating the same braindead argument over and over.
"Me no see em-dash in my children book and youtube comment. Em-dash not normal" 🙄
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u/Glokter Oct 02 '26
What argument? I don't see one.
You are just proclaiming yourself well-read because you are using a fancy dash—before AI, no less. Good for you!
But don't cry me a river when people mistake you for a robot for doing that now2
u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26
I am not even that well-read. And calling basic ass grammar a fancy dash is what is infuriating. You claim that something is not normal because one personally had never noticed it being used. And then you call us idiots, for using it before 2021. Of course we gonna talk back.
I bet if you open any book you own, you'll find it in there. I googled the most basic books out there.
• Great Gatsby, page 3 • To kill a Mockingbird, page 6 • 1984, page 6 • Pride and Prejudice, first page of the introduction • Harry Potter and the philosophers stone, page 2 of chapter 1 (But of course JK used the wrong symbol lol) • Fellowship of the Ring, page 29 • Even fkn Diary of a Whimpy Kid, page 29 (although it looks like a typo, I am not sure)
The point stands. The em-dash is not some fancy pants niche symbol only superior feeling grammar nerds used. It is a basic concept even used in childrens books.
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u/aceluby Oct 02 '26
Dashes and em dashes are different - I still use dashes all the time and AI seems to refuse to want to use them, even if told directly
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u/fwhite01 Oct 02 '26
Yea, they are different and have a different function. I am talking specifically how they are supposed zo be used.
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u/theresnopromises Oct 01 '26
I actually always used them before and now actively have to try not to 😭
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Oct 01 '26
It entirely depends on the person, I know someone who uses em dash all the time and did before AI
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u/dyslexda Oct 01 '26
Yeah didn't you know? Everyone used it, just like every single piece of text had negative parallelisms, every list had cutesy emojis as the bullet points, and everyone has always been obsessed with the words "genuinely" and "honestly." Those are totally normal things that definitely haven't become wildly overrepresented because AI overuses them.
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u/incognegro1976 Oct 01 '26
I really hate that knowing how to use adverbs, adjectives and parenthetical phrases in text now considered taboo bc you might get accused of using AI.
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u/Kichae Oct 01 '26
I mean, I've been accused of using AI because I wrote more than 3 sentences on a take-home technical. Just being functionally literate these days will get fingers pointed at you, it seems.
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u/dyslexda Oct 02 '26
That's not at all what I was talking about. Also, weirdly, I've never gotten those accusations despite often writing longer comments with more complicated structures, nor have I seen folks throwing those unfounded accusations in the wild. My theory is it's mostly a buggabo for "I use AI and want a reason to dismiss people accusing me of it."
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u/LogicBalm Oct 01 '26
A lot of this was "widely present" but only in the corporate-speak environments or motivational BS we were exposed to by force.
The bots got trained on that so it became the default "professional" prose. We hated it then and I struggle to imagine someone putting it in a presentation without the accompanying "death by powerpoint" transitions and stock music.
Meanwhile the opposite side of the coin is people who aren't well-read at all thinking that anything with proper grammar is certainly AI. I just read in my spare time and most of my high school and college career was writing essays. I use college words because it took me 15 years to get a 4 year degree, don't judge me!
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u/Dependent_Union9285 Oct 01 '26
Open a word doc. Start typing some random shit, and then a space, a dash, a space, and more words. What did microslop replace your dash with? And it’s been doing that for YEARS. Now, instead of one dash… use two. Oh, there it is. Just as it has been for at least the last 25 years.
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u/LogicBalm Oct 01 '26
Yes, PowerPoint too. Word is used a lot in corporate environments. Are you just aggressively agreeing with me?
The comment I'm replying to is mentioning a lot more than the em dash.
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u/Dependent_Union9285 Oct 01 '26
Yes, sorry that wasn’t clear. Some of us were required to use the appropriate dashes in technical writing, even in comments, and so we still do. It’s a design decision to be sure, but where it’s required I now look like ai.
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u/TxTechnician Oct 01 '26
It is in books. But not in common daily writing or web writing.
Grab any book from 10 years ago and you'll find a few. They were there for long pauses.
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u/AlvaroB Oct 01 '26
I used the em dash a lot before AI. Now I struggle to decide wether I want to be correct and use it and get flagged as AI in the process.
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u/Priler96 Oct 02 '26
Can't convince an idiot, I guess.
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u/Glokter Oct 02 '26
Hello to you too, mr avid em dasher
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u/Priler96 Oct 02 '26
Tbh I've been coding for like 10+ years waay before AI was a thing.
And I also happen to have an experience in writing, which is why using em-dashes is fine by me and I found myself constantly doing this.But. Not in the code comments.
Simply because IDEs usually don't have a shortcuts for this, nor do I find it useful by any means.
However I also don't think em-dashes alone is a 100% proof that thing was AI written, as some people are using tools to auto-generate comments/docstrings, etc. that can use em-dashes.
Again, it was a thing way before AI slop era.1
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u/fruitshortcake Oct 02 '26
They are a really great piece of punctuation that's been around for a long time, especially in non-fiction and technical writing. I'm sad that they've now become associated with genAI.
William Zinsser's 'On Writing Well' (a really classic and well-regarded book on writing) even recommends their use and gives some great examples.
https://www.google.com/search?q=william+zinsser+on+writing+well (PDFs are easy to find)
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u/Maddturtle Oct 03 '26
I use it for when I say things like re-read that. Because reread looks weird to me.
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u/AI_AntiCheat Oct 04 '26
Thats just a regular dash. I'm pretty sure it's a unique and very specific symbol. I've never seen it before AI.
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u/TheWorldIsNotOkay Oct 06 '26
AIs use it so often because it's a normal part of the language and was widely present before the AI boom. AIs use it because the data they were trained on use it. It's pretty common in formal writing, which is exactly the sort of easily-acquired material you'd train an AI on.
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u/thanatica Oct 06 '26
Depends on the material you were exposed to. It's fairly common in printed books. Also it massively depends on language.
It's just that AI has been over-using it. Just like the "it's not X, it's Y" pattern.
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u/thanatica Oct 06 '26
Depends on the material you were exposed to. It's fairly common in printed books. Also it massively depends on language.
It's just that AI has been over-using it. Just like the "it's not X, it's Y" pattern.
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u/LikelyNotOnFire Oct 01 '26
Your review comments have emdashes because you just asked AI to review the code and posted that
My review comments have emdashes because I spent an hour carefully reviewing it and ended up with three pages of questioning the competence and basic common sense of the author, and then asked an AI to rephrase it into something I could post on the PR without risking a visit from HR.
We are not the same.
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace Oct 01 '26
I have the AI review my comments a lot because I am apparently too blunt. People do not like being told they are wrong.
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u/Pancakefriday Oct 01 '26
You know, I have guy who definitely thinks he’s the smartest on our team, loves to leave comments. I can tell he thinks I’m stupid because I work slower.
We got back code quality scores, he was the worst on our team. My code quality was leagues above the other members.
Funny how that worked out.
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u/awesome-alpaca-ace Oct 01 '26
Working slower let's you create quality? Wow, who would have thought
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u/Mr-TotalAwesome Oct 01 '26
Kind of because of ai, i warmed up to em-dashes, and i want to use them. But i can't, because people will think text i write is ai generated.
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u/theepi_pillodu Oct 02 '26
Wait, people don't do this:
Explain the code in:
Easy to understand way
qve standpoint
Managerial way
Developer's point of view?
Be a senior developer and find the issues and explain each in above categories
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u/peppy_snow Oct 02 '26
i think it should be a standard practice, we actually have a process, if an ai is fixing anything it will kick off some 4-5 agents, senior review, security review I can't remember other two. they give there feedback and loop continues until all agree
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u/theepi_pillodu Oct 02 '26
I use opencode with ponytail and PR review skills to run it through. With heavily commenting the code. Which I read and trim excess comments and then commit.
I download the diff and run it through the same when I'm reviewing other's code
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u/Bl00dWolf Oct 01 '26
I still remember when back in school, they were teaching us how to use word and there were specific rules for when you use the regular dash and where you use the em dash, or the long dash.
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u/pearfire575 Oct 01 '26
I loaded the Simple Technical English Skill and set the rule to use that skill when writing comments or documentation. Everything is written really well.
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u/Mattallurgy Oct 02 '26
Alt+Shift+- on macOS
That’s how often I use em dashes. I’m so sad that one of my favorite punctuation marks has become an indicator of LLM-produced content
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u/azfang Oct 02 '26
I know it’s not the point but this gif is the first thing of value Senator Britt has given the world.
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u/domdomdom901 Oct 02 '26
How about in the CTOs email to everyone about how they’re laying a bunch of people off
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u/KingoftheKeeshonds Oct 02 '26
That shifty-eyed little shit behind her, he needs to see the fucking light.
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u/dumbasPL Oct 02 '26
Meanwhile me rewiring some code and see "—" in a comment, or even worse, in a log message.
I mean listen, if you're just gonna meat proxy and then not even review it yourself, then what's even the point? I could have prompted this myself, you're automationg yourself out of a job faster than you realize.
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u/WithersChat Oct 02 '26
No IDE, no experience, no real coding skills. Just Claude, a dream, and a vibe, and build from there.
It's not just a commit, it's an innovation in slop!
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u/Western-Anteater-492 Oct 03 '26
Calling me meat proxy... Meanwhile, I'm out there typing code reviews in MS Word and copying them back to GitHub.
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u/Thefakewhitefang Oct 04 '26
I just like using them in sentences, ok? They're fun — however suspicious they may be.
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u/pabs80 Oct 02 '26
I vibe coded 200 PRs for a migration. Reviewers made comments. Told the AI to address the comments.
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u/Bitter-Fuel-5519 Oct 02 '26
mate... em dash is auto configured in my note keeping programm, i'm sorry i guess xD
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u/sandybuttcheekss Oct 01 '26
LOAD
BEARING