LLMs Are Obsessed With the Word 'Spine'—And It Shows in GitHub Pull Requests
The LLMs Yearn for the Spines
Hillel Wayne noticed AI-generated TLA+ specs kept using 'spine.' Digging into GitHub pull request titles, he found a 20x jump in 'spine' PRs in 2026 versus all of 2025—far outpacing overall PR growth. Other LLM-favored words include 'gate' (1 in 26 PRs), 'lane,' 'truth,' and 'seam.' He shares a tool to spot these lexical fingerprints.
If "spine" wasn't an LLisM, we would expect only a 1.5xish increase from 2025, not a 20x increase.