It's a staccato speaking style with articles/embellishment removed, but written in text. I like the effect, personally, and use it sometimes when speaking and rarely when writing.
Often people respond with Office reference: "Why use many word when few word do trick". Amusing. Novel reference. Haven't heard before.
You have lots of small sentences, and some of them lack the words to make it a complete one.
For example, instead of starting a sentence with "Smart guy, ...", most people would write something like "He's a smart guy". Or instead of "An interesting conversation", people would write "We had many interesting conversations" or something along those lines.
Not a second language. But spent the last decade largely speaking a second (or third) language and/or with ESL speakers. Perhaps that's starting to rub-off! Oh dear.. Not sleeping right for the past few days may also be a factor. GPT-3 paranoia may also be a thing.
I think my problem is that many of your sentence fragments are not complete sentences. You keep dropping the Subject and/or Verb of the sentence.
In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I".
In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom.
You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what.
Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness."
Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much.
Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
I mostly work and socialise with people who have English as a second language. I have noticed myself simplifying sentences a fair bit too, reducing idiom use, and so on. But perhaps not to the same extreme :)
No, I am not a computer.