name

ai-tells-validator

description

Detects and rewrites "AI-sounding" text. Invoke when you are about to ship cold-outbound email, marketing copy, LinkedIn DMs, blog drafts, or any prose where a reader would lose trust if it read as ChatGPT default. Pulls the freshest version of the Wikipedia "Signs of AI writing" catalog before every run. Supports two ops — `validate` (find tells) and `rewrite` (call Claude to clean a draft until the validator passes).

ai-tells-validator

A flagging + rewriting skill grounded in the live Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing. The skill prefetches the article on every invocation so banned-word lists stay current as the community catches new tells, then enforces them with hard, deterministic regex.

When to use

Invoke this skill before sending or publishing any of:

Cold outbound emails (any touch in a sequence).
LinkedIn DMs / connection notes.
Marketing-page copy, landing-page hero text.
Founder posts, customer-facing announcements.
Auto-generated blog drafts.

Do not use for:

Internal code comments or commit messages (different bar; signs-of-AI doesn't translate).
Conversational chat with the user.
Long-form technical documentation (the rule-of-three pattern is genuinely useful in docs).

How to invoke

Validate (find tells):

node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/validate.mjs < draft.txt
# or
echo "your text" | node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/validate.mjs

Exit code is 0 when the text is clean and 1 when any tell fires. JSON output goes to stdout:

{
  "ok": false,
  "tells": [
    { "tag": "banned_word:delve", "quote": "…we delve into…", "category": "word" },
    { "tag": "punctuation:em_dash_overuse", "quote": "3 em-dashes", "category": "punctuation" }
  ],
  "word_count": 84,
  "source_freshness": "fetched 2026-05-17T15:12:00Z (3 min ago)"
}

Rewrite (clean a draft until it passes):

node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/rewrite.mjs < draft.txt

Calls claude -p with the freshest banned list in the system prompt and retries up to 3 times if the output still contains tells. The cleaned text goes to stdout; full report (attempts, tells eliminated, final findings) goes to stderr.

Flags (both CLIs)

--fresh — force refetch of the Wikipedia source (default: refetch if cache > 1h old).
--cache-ok — use the cached copy unconditionally (skip network).
--source <url> — override the source page (default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing).
--max-em-dashes <n> — relax the em-dash cap (default: 0, no em-dashes allowed).
--allow-lowercase — disable the proper-capitalization check (default: required).
--allow <tag,tag> — suppress specific tell tags (e.g. --allow banned_word:landscape if your domain is geography).

What it catches

Pulled live from the Wikipedia article + hardcoded augmentations:

Words: delve, tapestry, intricate, landscape, meticulous, pivotal, robust, showcase, testament, underscore, plus the modern SaaS-pitch vocabulary (leverage, streamline, transformative, unlock, empower, seamless, synergy, ...).
Phrases: I hope this email finds you well, circling back, just checking in, in conclusion, plays a vital role, value proposition, looking forward to hearing, ...
Patterns:
- Negative parallelism (not X, but Y / aren't X — they're Y).
- Rule-of-three adjective lists (clear, sourced, and trustworthy).
- Trailing participle clauses (, ensuring X, , driving Y).
- Whether you're X or Y…, Excited to ___.
Punctuation: em-dash use (zero allowed by default — the strongest single tell in 2026), smart/curly quotes.
Structure: --- thematic breaks inside body copy.
Capitalization (when --allow-lowercase not set): sentence starts capitalized, pronoun I capitalized.

What it does NOT catch

Factual hallucinations. Run a separate fact-check pass.
Voice mismatch with a personal brand. Pair with a per-author voice prompt.
Tone-deaf framing. The validator catches form, not judgment.

Implementation notes

Prefetch policy: the Wikipedia page is fetched at every CLI invocation by default. A 1-hour mtime cache at ~/.cache/ai-tells-validator/wiki.md prevents repeat hits within a session. --fresh busts the cache; --cache-ok skips the network entirely (useful for CI / offline).
Parse strategy: the Wikipedia page is plain wikitext; the parser pulls bullet entries under known section headings, plus a hardcoded list of always-banned items the article doesn't yet name explicitly.
Retry loop in rewrite: Claude is called with the failing tells in the user prompt. After 3 failed attempts the original text is returned unchanged with exit_code = 2.

Install

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/<you>/ai-tells-validator ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator

That's it — Claude Code auto-discovers the skill on next session.

Run tests

cd ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator
node --test tests/

Source of truth

Catalog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing. The skill refetches before every run.

name

ai-tells-validator

description

ai-tells-validator

When to use

Invoke this skill before sending or publishing any of:

Cold outbound emails (any touch in a sequence).
LinkedIn DMs / connection notes.
Marketing-page copy, landing-page hero text.
Founder posts, customer-facing announcements.
Auto-generated blog drafts.

Do not use for:

Internal code comments or commit messages (different bar; signs-of-AI doesn't translate).
Conversational chat with the user.
Long-form technical documentation (the rule-of-three pattern is genuinely useful in docs).

How to invoke

Validate (find tells):

node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/validate.mjs < draft.txt
# or
echo "your text" | node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/validate.mjs

Exit code is 0 when the text is clean and 1 when any tell fires. JSON output goes to stdout:

{
  "ok": false,
  "tells": [
    { "tag": "banned_word:delve", "quote": "…we delve into…", "category": "word" },
    { "tag": "punctuation:em_dash_overuse", "quote": "3 em-dashes", "category": "punctuation" }
  ],
  "word_count": 84,
  "source_freshness": "fetched 2026-05-17T15:12:00Z (3 min ago)"
}

Rewrite (clean a draft until it passes):

node ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator/scripts/rewrite.mjs < draft.txt

Flags (both CLIs)

--fresh — force refetch of the Wikipedia source (default: refetch if cache > 1h old).
--cache-ok — use the cached copy unconditionally (skip network).
--source <url> — override the source page (default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing).
--max-em-dashes <n> — relax the em-dash cap (default: 0, no em-dashes allowed).
--allow-lowercase — disable the proper-capitalization check (default: required).
--allow <tag,tag> — suppress specific tell tags (e.g. --allow banned_word:landscape if your domain is geography).

What it catches

Pulled live from the Wikipedia article + hardcoded augmentations:

Words: delve, tapestry, intricate, landscape, meticulous, pivotal, robust, showcase, testament, underscore, plus the modern SaaS-pitch vocabulary (leverage, streamline, transformative, unlock, empower, seamless, synergy, ...).
Phrases: I hope this email finds you well, circling back, just checking in, in conclusion, plays a vital role, value proposition, looking forward to hearing, ...
Patterns:
- Negative parallelism (not X, but Y / aren't X — they're Y).
- Rule-of-three adjective lists (clear, sourced, and trustworthy).
- Trailing participle clauses (, ensuring X, , driving Y).
- Whether you're X or Y…, Excited to ___.
Punctuation: em-dash use (zero allowed by default — the strongest single tell in 2026), smart/curly quotes.
Structure: --- thematic breaks inside body copy.
Capitalization (when --allow-lowercase not set): sentence starts capitalized, pronoun I capitalized.

What it does NOT catch

Factual hallucinations. Run a separate fact-check pass.
Voice mismatch with a personal brand. Pair with a per-author voice prompt.
Tone-deaf framing. The validator catches form, not judgment.

Implementation notes

Prefetch policy: the Wikipedia page is fetched at every CLI invocation by default. A 1-hour mtime cache at ~/.cache/ai-tells-validator/wiki.md prevents repeat hits within a session. --fresh busts the cache; --cache-ok skips the network entirely (useful for CI / offline).
Parse strategy: the Wikipedia page is plain wikitext; the parser pulls bullet entries under known section headings, plus a hardcoded list of always-banned items the article doesn't yet name explicitly.
Retry loop in rewrite: Claude is called with the failing tells in the user prompt. After 3 failed attempts the original text is returned unchanged with exit_code = 2.

Install

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/<you>/ai-tells-validator ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator

That's it — Claude Code auto-discovers the skill on next session.

Run tests

cd ~/.claude/skills/ai-tells-validator
node --test tests/

Source of truth

Catalog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing. The skill refetches before every run.