It's polite to give parsers (human or otherwise) hints that they're about to encounter text which is now intended for a different kind of parser.

I recently forgot to surround my code in ``` and Gemini refused to help with it (I think I tripped a safety guardrail, it thought I was targeting it with an injection attack). Amusingly, the two ways to work around it were to fence off my code with backticks or to just respond to:

> I can't help you with that

With

> Why not?

After which it was then willing to help with the unquoted code. Presumably it then perceived it as some kind of philosophical puzzle rather than an attack.

It's disappointing to see people here use language like "perceived" for an LLM.

As a panpsychist I have no special esteem for an LLM's perceptive powers. I also anticipate that the planet perceives us as nuisance.

Fair question, it does look a bit jarring when not rendered. I write a lot of markdown and it's a very strong force of habit to use backticks to sort of highlight a technical term and turn it into a noun. Similar to writing endash as a double hyphen.

When I read what I write, my eyes glance through backticks and maybe come back if I need to parse the inner term in more detail.

Markdown habit.

Tell me you don't Markdown, without telling me you don't Markdown.

It's a developer thing, using backticks means the enclosed text is emphasised when rendered from Markdown.

Backticks mark fixed width inline code, not emphasis.

I know what they do, it doesn't change the fact that we use them for emphasis.

Chuckled when I saw the reasonable correct informative and perfectly polite answer…is the one in gray. Cheers.

Backticks long predate markdown.

How dare someone not be a developer!