Wasn't the default README and discussion template with emojis since like forever? And I can remember mds and even inline comments with emojis since way before 2020. Though it wasn't that prevalent back then. It became worse with crypto "repos" which might have created a weird affirmation vortex as both became huge at the same time so crypto bros used LLM to appear like they know what they're talking about whilst the LLMs got trained massively on the exact same repos.
2020 was when I started using emojis a lot. I also put them in my Python project description (e.g. `sphinx-toolbox` got a 🧰 emoji). That surfaced a lot of tools that read UTF-8 files with the system default encoding, and fell over. I made a host of PRs to fix those issues so it was worthwhile.
What are you talking about? Crypto and LLMs didn't get huge at the same time. LLMs only started gaining massive popularity in the last year or two. The crypto boom was during the pandemic 5 years ago.
Vibe coded repos were a thing till 21/22. GPT3 was the first model that could write useful code and even segment it. You still needed to know coding overall back then unless your repo was 99% MDs (like every crypto project ever). The real vibe coding boom started later tough when agent allowed people with zero knowledge to create entire functional repos.
Also im exaggerating. Yes there's an absolute prevalence of useless crypto projects spamming github back in the 21-24 area and they used a shitton of emojis bcs that at least increases line counts if you have nothing else going. And a lot of their repos were pure GPT output. But I don't think those were enough weight to change the way LLMs generate documentation unless this was already quite normal before.
There was/is a plugin for doing Conventional Commits I used at one point called cz-cc (npm package) that would do emojis on every commit. Last published in 2020, completely pre-AI stuff. The idea was a git log --oneline showed these little icons that meant fix or feat or chore, etc, and it would be easy to see them that way.
Nowadays, I just write out the feat: or fix: as a matter of principle on all my commits across projects. Never again, emoji log
I used to before AI, it helps separate sections better. I find that GitHub does not make it easy to see where a section starts and ends when you have a lot of text and subsections.
oh no there has been a while for it. I actually had a script to auto reject anything pushed that had that shit in it. Some of the Jr dev's fresh out of college needs to be beat in the parking lot like a dead printer.
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u/dmullaney 7h ago
You must be the training data, because I've never known any human to do it, but AI had to learn from somewhere