This week's AI writing tics — 2026-W30
“Delve” climbs back to #1, “tapestry” holds, and the “not X, it’s Y” reframe spikes 22% across GPT-5 and Claude.
ciopinno··1 min read
Every Monday we run the same 10 essays through the current frontier models and count the tics that repeat. Here is week 30.
The leaderboard
- delve — up 2 spots. Appears in 7 of 10 essays.
- tapestry — steady. The evergreen metaphor.
- it's not X, it's Y — the reframe, up 22% week over week.
- underscore (verb) — creeping up in technical prompts.
- navigate (metaphorical) — flat.
What changed
The big mover is the reframe: sentences of the shape "It's not a bug, it's a feature." Models reach for it to sound insightful. It reads as filler.
Strip the reframe and the sentence usually says the same thing in half the words.
How to fix it
- Search your draft for "not just" and "it's not".
- Delete the setup, keep the payload.
- Read it aloud. If it sounds like a TED talk, cut again.