It seems to me that it's misleading to call that a hint. Rather, certain code paths create hard-to-predict branches, and others create predictable branches. A h

It seems to me that it's misleading to call that a hint. Rather, certain code paths create hard-to-predict branches, and others create predictable branches. A hint would be some kind of metadata that says "you'll want to predict this branch this way based on your algorithm, but please don't!"