A programmer noticed an odd lexical trend: the word "spine" kept appearing in LLM-generated specifications and public code changes. To test whether this was an LLM-driven phenomenon, GitHub pull request titles were searched as a proxy for code output. The search shows a roughly 20x increase in PR titles containing "spine" in the first nine months of 2026 versus all of 2025, far outpacing overall PR growth (which rose only ~1.5x). Monthly data shows steady growth early in 2026 followed by sharp jumps in April-June; model-release timing (GPT-5.5 in April, Opus 4.8 in May) does not neatly explain the pattern, and many flagged PRs are coauthored by Claude and Cursor, so no single model is pinned down.
The same method reveals other LLM-preferred tokens: "gate" appears in hundreds of thousands of PRs this year (about 1 in 300 PR titles, 1 in 26 if counting bodies), "lane" shows ~30x growth, "truth" ~15x, "proof(s)" ~8x, and "seam" ~20x. Some spikes are artifacts (e.g., "ladder" driven by automated boto3 upgrade messages). A reproducible analysis tool and gist are published for further inspection, and broader GitHub metrics suggest tens of millions more LLM-authored PRs year over year, indicating widespread, measurable lexical influence of LLMs on code-related text.
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