The term appears in the GitHub description of Cathryn Lavery's Diagram Design, a Claude Code/Codex/Pi skill built explicitly to stop producing it: "no Figma, no generic rounded boxes, no Mermaid-slop." It names a second-order problem distinct from earlier AI-diagram criticism of decorative, hard-to-edit raster images — Mermaid is text-based and solves that failure mode, but reflexive use of it without judgment about what a diagram should actually depict produces a different kind of low-information output.