LLMs are good at inline code formatting

Throughout my career, I’ve had various side roles related to technical writing: in addition to doing the writing itself, I’ve built various writing and documentation tools and written a handful of style guides and how-tos. One thing that I don’t think I ever quite got right was imparting the correct usage of inline code (also called monospace/fixed-width/verbatim text). I’ve seen all kinds of abuses of it, from people using it for general UI labels and product names, or sometimes just for emphasis. An invented example:

In Microsoft Word, navigate to File > Options > Save. Choose an appropriate filename and make sure you always save to the shared drive.

In the worst cases, it’s used in place of a blockquote, often (hideously) for multiple lines of text.

Hi, I'm having some technical difficulities. Before, you told me that to send you my report in Microsoft Word, I had to go to File > Options > Save, and make sure I always save to the shared drive. I couldn't find the shared drive, please assist.

When reviewing others’ work, I’d often see bizarre new applications of this formatting. What’s worse is that the writer would usually have a fairly logical rationale for using it, and their rationale would even be concordant with the style guide I wrote, prompting me to update it. “Use inline code for verbatim text” definitely did not cut it. But as many caveats as I specified and as many examples as I gave, both positive and negative, I would still see obviously incorrect uses of the formatting.

What I ultimately wanted that section of style guide to do was transfer my intuition about the appropriate uses for inline code formatting – developed through many years of reading blogs – to other minds. I don’t think I ever quite succeeded.

Luckily, LLMs then came along and read all of the blogs on the Internet, allowing them to develop this intuition pretty much perfectly. In service of producing output that appears correct and polished, the chatbots can be overzealous with textual flourishes – I think the overreliance on dashes is precisely because a dash is technically correct in so many more places than other punctuation marks – but I’ve never seen one misuse inline code like a human would. While much about the continuing proliferation of AI writing in inappropriate spaces is unpleasant, I’m glad I don’t have to fix inline code formatting anymore.