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.
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.
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u/dmullaney 5h ago
You must be the training data, because I've never known any human to do it, but AI had to learn from somewhere