A developer sits down to write about something they built. What comes out reads like a product page.
We have built a powerful new solution that streamlines the workflow and delivers a seamless experience.
They know it is bad. They cannot always see why, because every individual word is defensible.
The cause is abstraction, not vocabulary
The problem is not "powerful" or "seamless" specifically. It is that every noun has been replaced with a category.
"A powerful new solution" is a category. "A scheduled function that scans your commits" is a thing. "Streamlines the workflow" is a category. "Turns four commits into one post" is a thing.
Marketing language is what abstraction sounds like. The vocabulary follows the abstraction, not the other way around, which is why swapping "powerful" for "robust" does not help.
Why people abstract
Three reasons, all understandable.
They assume specifics are boring. The actual detail feels mundane because they lived it. The reader has not, and finds it interesting precisely because it is real.
They are writing for everyone. Trying to reach a broad audience pushes toward generality. But general content reaches nobody, because there is no hook for anyone in particular.
They are copying what they have seen. Product pages are written that way, so writing about a product feels like it should be written that way.
The fix
Replace every category with the specific thing.
| Category | Thing |
|---|---|
| a modern tech stack | Firestore, a scheduled function, one model call |
| improved performance | dropped from 4 seconds to 400ms |
| enhanced the user experience | moved it from three clicks deep to the front page |
| batch processing capabilities | five images to one zip |
| enterprise-ready security | per repository access, tokens that expire hourly |
Go through a draft and find every noun phrase that describes a category rather than a thing. Replace it. The post gets better immediately, and the marketing tone disappears without you addressing the tone at all.
The test that catches it
Could another person have posted this about their own project?
If yes, it is too abstract. "We shipped a powerful new feature" is true of thousands of people this week. "The export now writes a temp file first because the streaming version corrupted large exports" is true of you.
That test is more useful than any list of banned words, because it catches the cause rather than the symptom.
Where the banned words still help
We do keep a list. Noomachy DevTracker refuses to generate posts containing revolutionary, game-changing, seamless, cutting-edge, transformative, leverage, unlock, empower, next-level and a few dozen more, and it re-checks the output afterwards rather than trusting the instruction.
But that list is a backstop, not the mechanism. A post can avoid every banned word and still be entirely abstract. The words are a symptom that is easy to detect automatically, which makes them worth checking, not the disease.
The disease is that nothing in the post could only have been written by the person who did the work.