Writing our own skill to take the AI sound out of copy

In plain English

Copy written by AI has habits readers spot quickly: “it’s not just X, it’s Y”, everything in threes, words like “pivotal”, and a punchy last line that repeats the point. We looked for a ready-made skill that teaches an AI agent to edit those habits out. The best one is good, but it clashes with our house style in several places, so we are writing a short one of our own that borrows its ideas and credits it.

Context

A skill is a short instruction sheet an AI agent loads when a job calls for it (decision 0005). Our uk-house-style skill already covers British spelling, dates, plain words and the ban on em-dashes, but not the wider habits that make copy sound machine-written. Issue #2 asked for a skill that covers them without fighting our house style.

Skills published by other people are instructions written by strangers, and some include programs the agent is told to run. So every candidate was read as plain text before it was judged, and nothing was installed or run. We also rewrote one deliberately bad paragraph by following each skill’s instructions by hand, to see how each one pulls. The full comparison, with the before and after, is in the research note “Skills that take the AI sound out of copy” in the journal’s private research folder.

Options

Anthropic publishes no skill for this, so all three candidates come from the community. All three use the MIT licence, which lets us copy and change them as long as we keep the author’s credit.

1. humanizer, by Siqi Chen (https://github.com/blader/humanizer). One instruction file, no programs, and the most widely used of the three. It lists 26 habits, strongest first, with an example of each, and it guards against hidden instructions in the text it edits. But it bans the en-dash that our house style uses for asides and ranges, it is written in American English, its examples include real em-dashes (which would fail our automatic check), and several examples are copied from a Wikipedia page whose licence asks for different terms. Its newest version also tells the agent to add details “you know to be true”, a risk for a journal that has to be accurate. It changes often, with 28 releases this year.
2. avoid-ai-writing, by Conor Bronsdon (https://github.com/conorbronsdon/avoid-ai-writing). The most careful about facts: it never lets the agent invent a detail or an experience. But it tells the agent to run its own programs on every rewrite, which breaks our rule for outside code, its full package is 676 files, too big to check properly, and it allows some em-dashes.
3. stop-slop, by Hardik Pandya (https://github.com/hardikpandya/stop-slop). Small and easy to read, with no programs. But its rules are blunt (“kill all adverbs”, never use the passive), one of its own examples has an em-dash, and in our test its rewrite added claims the original never made.
4. Write our own. A short skill using the habits humanizer and Wikipedia identify, plus avoid-ai-writing’s rule never to invent a fact, written in our own spelling, punctuation and examples.

Decision

Option 4. No candidate can be used as it stands, because each would fail our em-dash check the moment it was copied in. Adapting humanizer would mean rewriting most of its rules and examples, and then redoing that work for every new release. Writing our own is a few hours’ work and gives us something we control.

The new skill will copy no text from the others and will credit humanizer, avoid-ai-writing and Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing” page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing) for the ideas. Because these habits are the same in every Method7 project, it lives in method7/house-rules next to uk-house-style and is copied into Roofus at a fixed version, in the same way.

Consequences

• Writing the skill becomes a new issue. Nothing is installed by this decision.
• We keep it up to date ourselves. When we want new habits added, someone reads humanizer’s change log and the Wikipedia page and adds what is useful, when it suits us rather than on someone else’s release schedule.
• Agents writing copy will have two skills to follow. The new one has to say that uk-house-style wins on spelling and punctuation.
• Simon accepted this on 12 November 2026, with the skill living in method7/house-rules.