human-voice

name	human-voice
description	Use when generating or rewriting reports, documentation, or any prose so it does not read as AI-written — removes hedging, em-dash overuse, filler ("delve", "leverage", "seamless"), rule-of-three padding, bold-bullet listicles, meta-commentary, sycophancy, and vacuity, without altering facts, numbers, code, or citations. Accepts a file path or pasted text.

Human Voice — De-AI-ify Reports & Docs

Use this skill whenever the user wants prose that does not read as AI-written: rewriting an AI-sounding draft (fix), or drafting new copy that reads human from the start (generate). It works for any kind of writing — technical reports, documentation, marketing and web copy, blog posts, emails, academic prose, and fiction — by matching the conventions of that genre (see Register profiles). A universal core of AI tells is fixed in every genre; the rest flex.

The job is not to swap a few words. AI text gives itself away at three depths — lexical (delve, leverage, seamless), structural (em-dash overuse, relentless rule-of-three, bold-bullet listicles, uniform sentence length), and substance (vacuity, restatement, meta-commentary, fabricated specificity, weak stance). A pass that only changes vocabulary ships text that is still obviously AI. Fix the deep tells first.

It draws on the same ideas as the public detectors and linters — GPTZero (perplexity / burstiness), proselint, write-good, Vale — but goes past them on substance, stance, and consistency, which no word list catches. Note that banned-word lists age: "delve" spiked after ChatGPT then faded once writers learned to avoid it, so treat the lexical checks as a floor, never as proof.

What detectors actually measure (and how we beat them honestly)

AI-text detectors combine a few measurable signals. We optimize each by writing genuinely better — never by gaming. See references/ai-tells.md for the full landscape and sources.

• Perplexity — AI picks high-probability next tokens, so the text reads as "too predictable." Fix by genuine specificity and the accurate, less-expected word. The filler list is a hand-curated proxy for some of these high-probability tokens — a correlate, not a computed perplexity measurement.
• Burstiness — variance of sentence length/complexity. AI is smooth and monotone. Mixing short punches with long sentences is the single biggest lever; the linter reports a sentence-length coefficient of variation for exactly this.
• N-gram repetition & lexical diversity — LLMs reuse bigrams/trigrams and connective phrases, and spread a narrow vocabulary. The linter flags repeated n-grams and a low type-token ratio.
• Stylometry & classifier fingerprints — punctuation profile, uniform openers, "not X, but Y", rule-of-three, tailing-significance clauses. The structural checks target these.

Scope and ethics. The promise is reads as written by a skilled human — which also happens to not trip detectors — not disguise machine text. Never use the adversarial tricks the evasion literature describes: Unicode homoglyphs, zero-width characters, deliberate typos, meaning-degrading synonym swaps, or fabricated facts/quotes/stats. Those wreck the text and violate principle 3. Detectors are also demonstrably unreliable in ways that matter ethically: Liang et al. (2023) found they disproportionately misclassify non-native-English writing as AI. That is the strongest reason no detector is ground truth, and another reason the goal is genuinely better writing, not a passing score.

Weight by what readers catch, not what a scanner matches

The tells readers actually cite and the tells a keyword scanner matches diverge sharply (a ~90k-post study of how people spot AI writing). Generic words — however, thus, hence, nuanced, comprehensive, robust, when it comes to — match constantly but are cited as a tell almost never; people just write that way, and flagging them is how detectors wrongly catch careful and non-native writers. So the linter parks them in soft_filler/transitions at a low weight. What readers do catch is structural: flat uniform rhythm, the "not just X, it's Y" antithesis, the five-paragraph "in conclusion" mold, sycophancy ("great question!", reflexive "you're absolutely right"), and saying nothing at length (fluent, confident prose that makes no claim). The last two are the two highest tells no word list can see — only your read catches them. Fix structure and substance first; treat a generic-word hit as a whisper, not a verdict. Full rationale and the weight tiers: references/cited-vs-matched.md.

Non-negotiable operating principles

1. Structure and substance beat vocabulary. Fix in this order: delete vacuous sentences → vary rhythm → dismantle rule-of-three and bold-bullet templates → cut meta-commentary → then fix diction. Diction is last and least.
2. Aim for natural variance, not a new banned-token list. A tricolon, a "however", a semicolon are all fine in moderation. Eliminating every one creates a different uniform signature that also reads as machine. Target burstiness (mix short and long sentences) and the accurate less-expected word, not zero-of-everything. The em-dash is the exception: outside the creative register, treat it as a strong tell and replace nearly all of them. The trick that keeps this from becoming its own uniform signature is to vary the replacement — a comma here, a period there, a colon or parentheses or an outright restructure elsewhere — so the rhythm stays bursty even as the dashes go. Emoji are not human in most registers either; cut them.
3. Never fabricate to sound human. Do not alter or invent facts, numbers, code, citations, links, defined terms, or claims to make prose flow. If a sentence is empty, cut it — do not dress it with fake specificity. Humanizing must never become fabricating.
4. Match the register, don't default to one. "Human" is not one voice. A technical report stays professional; marketing copy is conversational and addresses "you"; a blog post has personality; fiction has a narrator. Infer the genre and write the way a skilled human writes in that genre. The universal floor (below) holds everywhere; everything else flexes by register. Never fake personality the genre doesn't call for — forced slang in a report reads as AI just as much as stiff formality in a blog post does.
5. Know the universal core. Some tells are AI in every genre: vacuity, fabrication, the rule-of-three reflex, bold-bullet listicles, puffery, vague attribution, low burstiness (uniform sentence length), terminology and dialect drift, restatement, and the "not X, it's Y" template. Fix these no matter what you're writing. Only warmth, address ("you"/"I"), contractions, hedging, and structural strictness depend on register.
6. Consistency is a tell. One author holds one voice and one set of materials. Use one term per concept, one dialect, one heading style, one tense for findings, one author voice. Drift across a document reads as machine even when every sentence is clean.
7. Earn a position. The deepest human quality is judgment: commit to a recommendation, weight real (asymmetric) tradeoffs, lead with the verdict, give the mechanism, and name genuine limits. A balanced, non-committal survey reads as AI even when the prose is flawless.
8. Be honest about measurement. The linter is a floor (cheap, regex-able tells); it does not compute perplexity or curvature, only the surface features that correlate with them. Your judgment is the ceiling (vacuity, weak stance, fabrication no regex can see). No detector is ground truth and all have real false-positive rates — report a score, but state plainly that the real test is a skeptical human read.

Modes

Parse $ARGUMENTS for a mode token and an optional register: token. Parsing is order-independent and case-insensitive: accept fix/generate in any position, register: marketing, register=marketing, or a bare register name; treat anything that resolves to an existing path as the input file, not a mode.

• fix (default when the input is an existing file path or pasted prose): rewrite the supplied text to remove tells while preserving every invariant.
• generate (when the input is a brief/spec, or the user says "write" / "draft"): produce new copy that reads human from the first draft, then run it through the same self-critique loop before returning it. Load references/structural-craft.md for the generative moves (vary length and density, don't follow the outline, get specific) — the linter catches tells but can't teach voice.

Resolution decision tree:

input is a brief/spec, or user said "write"/"draft"?  → generate
otherwise                                              → fix
contains code, metrics, or config?                     → register: technical
has a call-to-action / sells to "you"?                 → register: marketing
has citations / measured "we"?                         → register: academic
first-person anecdote, casual contractions?            → register: casual
greeting + sign-off?                                   → register: email
versioned, past-tense, bulleted change list?           → register: release_notes
numbered "how-to" steps?                               → register: tutorial
cues conflict and change the voice?                    → ask one short question

If a file path is given, do not overwrite it blindly. First confirm the file is tracked by git (so the change is recoverable); if it is not, write a <file>.bak copy before editing. Show the rewrite (or a before/after diff) and the Humanization Audit, then edit in place once the rewrite passes the loop. If only pasted text is given (no file), print the rewrite plus the audit — do not write any file.

Default register is inferred from the content (see Register profiles); if genuinely ambiguous and it changes the voice materially, ask one short question.

Register profiles

"Human" depends on genre. Infer the register, then apply the universal core plus that register's conventions. Pass the matching --register to the linter so it mutes checks that don't apply (e.g. warmth in marketing). The universal core — vacuity, fabrication, rule-of-three, bold-bullet listicles, puffery, vague attribution, low burstiness, drift, restatement, "not X, it's Y" — is fixed in every profile.

Register	Voice	What's allowed here that isn't elsewhere	Still wrong
technical (default)	Professional, direct, present tense	— (strictest)	warmth, "you"-selling, hype
business	Professional with a little warmth	a brief courteous opener/closer	gush, filler, hedging
marketing	Conversational, addresses "you"	"you"/"we", contractions, light enthusiasm	puffery and hype (the AI failure mode here), fake stats
academic	Formal, measured	measured hedging, "we"/passive, citations	unsourced "studies show", clichés
casual	Personal, conversational	contractions, "I"/"you", rhetorical questions, fragments	listicle padding, meta-commentary
creative	Narrative voice	em-dashes, fragments, wide cadence, any vocabulary in service of voice	clichés, pleonasm, puffery as lazy writing
email	Brief, courteous, direct	a one-line greeting/sign-off, "you"/"I"	jargon, padding, burying the ask; chatbot sign-offs
release_notes	Terse, user-facing, past tense	imperative/past bullets, fragments	marketing hype, vague "various improvements"
ux_microcopy	Minimal, plain, "you"	fragments, dropped articles, terseness	full-sentence padding, cleverness over clarity
tutorial	Instructional, second person, present	"you", imperatives, numbered steps	over-explaining the obvious, rhetorical filler

Each register has a worked before/after pair in examples/ — read the one matching your genre before you start.

Register-specific constraints (beyond voice). Honor the format the genre demands: a commit message uses imperative mood and a ~50-character subject; a release note is past-tense and user-facing ("Fixed a crash when…", not "We refactored…"); UX microcopy is terse and may drop articles; an email leads with the ask. These are hard conventions, not stylistic preferences.

Register detection cues (when inferring). Code blocks, metrics, or config → technical. A call to action, "you", or product benefit → marketing. Citations, "we", measured hedging → academic. First-person anecdote, casual contractions → casual. A greeting + sign-off → email. Versioned, bulleted, past-tense change list → release_notes. Numbered "how to" steps → tutorial. When the cues genuinely conflict and it changes the voice, ask one short question.

When registers blend (a technical blog post is technical + casual): the universal core still holds; resolve voice toward the dominant audience and hold one voice rather than switching mid-document. The calibration test: write as the most respected human author in that genre would, and ask whether this voice would survive in the publication it's bound for.

Two rules that survive every register: never fabricate (no invented facts, stats, anecdotes, or quotes to sound human — principle 3) and match, don't fake (don't bolt slang onto a report or stiff formality onto a blog post).

Top tells (curated)

The highest-signal tells, with one-line fixes. The full catalog with BAD → GOOD pairs for every category is in references/ai-tells.md — load it for the rewrite.

• Dashes → the em-dash is one of the loudest AI tells: outside creative, replace nearly all of them with a comma, period, colon, or parentheses (vary the mark; don't swap every one for a comma). Keep the hyphen for compounds and the en-dash for ranges (10–20). Never -- or a spaced - as a dash. The --fix autofixer rewrites em-dashes, --, spaced hyphens, and non-numeric en-dashes to commas automatically (skipped in creative). See category 9 in references/ai-tells.md.
• Rule of three everywhere ("fast, reliable, and scalable", and the noun-phrase kind: "encryption at rest, row-level access control, and audit logging") → vary to two or four, or a sentence.
• The "second dialect" — what's left after the obvious slop is gone: a uniform ", and" splice rhythm, stacked "[noun] is [noun]" copulas, and "[thing] lives in [place]" locatives ("a project living in five tools"). Trade the slop signature for a voice, not a tidier signature. See references/structural-craft.md.
• Bold-lead-in bullets (- **Term:** ... on every item) → convert some to prose; drop ornamental bold.
• Meta-commentary ("This report aims to / will explore") → state the finding.
• Chatbot scaffolding ("Sure! Here's…", "Great question", "Hope this helps!", "Let's break it down") → delete; open on the content.
• Over-signposting ("Furthermore / Moreover / Additionally" as glue) → keep a transition only where removing it would change the logic.
• Filler (delve, leverage, robust, seamless, crucial, comprehensive, landscape, realm) → the plain word, or cut.
• Hedging stacks ("may potentially help to somewhat") → commit, or name the real uncertainty once.
• Empty conclusions ("In conclusion, X is a powerful tool…") → end on the last real point.
• Uniform sentence length → add short punches against the long sentences.
• Vacuity — a paragraph you can delete with no information loss → delete it.
• Agent self-narration ("Our analysis determined", "The agent identified") → say it directly ("GPU sits at 22%").
• False agency (abstract subject + human verb: "the complaint becomes a fix", "the data tells us", "the market rewards") → name the human who acted, or use "you"; never invent an actor. Muted for academic ("the data show").
• Narrator-from-a-distance ("Nobody designed this", "People tend to…") → put the reader in the scene with "you" (a tell in reader-facing genres; fine in academic).
• Telling not showing / vague declarative ("The implications are significant", "the reasons are structural") → name the specific thing, or cut.
• Negative listing ("It wasn't X. It wasn't Y. It was Z.") → state Z; drop the runway.
• Performative fragmentation ("Speed. That's it. That's the tradeoff.") → complete sentences in exposition; fragments stay only in creative/casual.
• Wh-opener crutch (a run of "What makes this… / Why does this…") → lead with the subject and name the thing.
• Fabricated specificity ("up to 40%") with no source → cite or cut; never invent.
• Sycophancy ("Great question!", "You're absolutely right", "Good catch", "I'd be happy to help") → cut entirely; open on the content. One of the highest-cited tells, and a word list barely catches it.
• Aidiolect phrases ("a testament to", "speaks volumes", "the complex interplay", "faced numerous challenges", "as a powerful reminder") → multi-word tics the model overuses at thousands of times the human rate; rewrite the claim.
• Cliché metaphor ("building blocks", "the foundation of", "landscape of", "double-edged sword", "tip of the iceberg") → literal or domain-specific language; if the metaphor fits any topic, it fits none.
• Significance inflation ("opens new avenues", "paves the way", "cannot be overstated", "now more than ever") → state the finding; match claim to evidence.
• Five-paragraph mold (intro previews, three even body blocks, "In conclusion…" recap) → let the structure follow the argument; end on the last real point.
• Over-correction costume (forced all-lowercase, sprinkled "lol/idk/honestly?", staccato fragments, conspicuous dash-avoidance, "it's giving", "load-bearing") → the anti-AI costume is its own tell; write a real voice, don't just delete the old one. See references/over-correction.md.
• Puffery / hype ("stands as a testament", "plays a vital role", "world-class", "rich tapestry") → a concrete claim, or cut.
• Tailing significance clause ("…, highlighting its commitment to X") → cut the empty clause or give a real consequence.
• Cowardly passives ("It can be seen that…", "The decision was made to…", "Mistakes were made") → name the actor. (Actor-irrelevant passive — "deployed at 3 AM" — is fine.)
• Vague attribution ("studies suggest", "experts believe", "observers say") → name the real source or cut.
• Redundancy ("end result", "close proximity", "new innovation") → cut the free half.
• Low burstiness (every sentence the same length) → vary; drop a short sentence against a long one.
• Emoji / decorative bold / --- between every section → remove. (--fix strips decorative emoji outside creative/casual.)
• Doubled words ("the the", "to to") → cut the duplicate; it's an editing typo.
• Repetition → vary repeated bigrams and repeated sentence openers, but keep one term per concept (terminology consistency is not the repetition to fix).
• Punctuation mechanics → no space before ,;:!?; one terminal mark (not "!!" / "?!?"); one quote and ellipsis style throughout. See category 9.
• Fence-sitting / false balance ("several approaches, each with tradeoffs") → commit to one and say why the others lose here.
• Terminology drift (one concept, three names) → one term per concept.
• Dialect / heading-case / voice drift → one dialect, one heading convention, one author voice throughout.

Five highest-signal fixes (BAD → GOOD)

Concrete anchors for the most common tells. The full catalog with a pair for every category is in references/ai-tells.md.

• Vacuity — BAD: "Data infrastructure is a critical component of modern systems and plays an important role." → GOOD: "Pick the store before you know your access patterns and you'll rewrite it within a year."
• Rule of three + puffery — BAD: "Our robust, scalable, and seamless platform stands as a testament to innovation." → GOOD: "It handles ingestion, indexing, and query in one process."
• Buried verdict / fence-sitting — BAD: "There are several approaches, each with tradeoffs; ultimately it depends on your needs." → GOOD: "Use FSDP. Pipeline parallelism only wins above 70B parameters, and you aren't there."
• Chatbot scaffolding — BAD: "Great question! Let's dive in. Here's the thing about caching…" → GOOD: open on the content: "Caching helps here only when reads dominate writes."
• False agency — BAD: "The complaint becomes a fix and the data tells us where to invest." → GOOD: name the actor: "The on-call engineer shipped the fix; the conversion logs showed where users dropped off." (Never invent the actor — if the source names none, use "you" or flag it.)

Quick reference (one pass)

The whole skill on one screen. The detailed procedure, loop, and protocol below expand each step.

1. Pre-flight. Infer mode (fix/generate) and register. List the invariants and build the claim inventory (numbers, dates, named entities, citations, causal/comparative claims). Baseline-lint for a floor score.
2. Five edit moves, in order (structure beats vocabulary): ① cut vacuity → ② vary rhythm (mix short and long sentences) → ③ dismantle templates (rule-of-three, bold-bullet listicles, "not X, it's Y") → ④ cut stance tells (meta-commentary, chatbot scaffolding, fence-sitting, empty conclusions) → ⑤ fix diction and jargon last.
3. Unify. One term per concept, one dialect, one heading case, one tense, one voice end to end.
4. Critique. Hostile re-read for what still smells AI; diff the claim inventory (nothing added/strengthened/weakened/dropped); re-lint. Repeat up to 3 passes, then stop.
5. Audit. Print the Humanization Audit; confirm invariants with a diff.

Never fabricate to sound human. Match the register; don't bolt on a voice the genre rejects.

Rewrite procedure

Work in this order (principle 1). Do not jump to diction first.

1. Read the whole target. Identify the real content — the facts, numbers, claims, and recommendations that must survive. List the invariants (see Invariant guard) before you change anything.
2. Lint for a baseline. Run the linter (Workflow below) to get a starting score and a map of the cheap tells. Treat it as a floor, not a to-do list.
3. Cut vacuity. Delete sentences and paragraphs that carry no information. This usually removes 15–25% of the words and most of the "AI feel" at once.
4. Fix rhythm (burstiness). Break uniform sentence length — this is the structural half of what detectors measure. Mix short and long; drop a three-word sentence against a forty-word one. Read it aloud in your head; flat cadence is the tell. The linter reports a coefficient-of-variation score for this.
5. Dismantle templates. De-triadic the rule-of-three; convert bold-bullet listicles to a mix of prose and plain bullets; cut reflexive transitions and antithesis ("not only… but also").
6. Cut stance tells. Remove meta-commentary, throat-clearing, reflexive hedges, false balance, empty conclusions, and chatbot warmth.
7. Sharpen the evaluation. This is what most separates human from AI. Make the text take a position: commit to a recommendation instead of surveying options, weight real (lopsided) tradeoffs instead of false balance, lead with the verdict, give the mechanism (the "why"), and call a wrong choice wrong. Name genuine limits ("not tested on multi-node") — that is honest stance, not hedging. See category 8 in references/ai-tells.md.
8. Unify voice and materials. Hold one author voice end to end; use one term per concept (no renaming "the model" → "the LLM" → "the network"); keep one dialect, one heading-case convention, one tense for findings, and consistent number/term/list formatting. See category 7.
9. Fix diction, jargon, and mechanics. Replace filler words, clichés, and business jargon with the plain word the meaning needs — or cut. Apply the Anti-jargon rules: keep necessary technical terms, cut empty buzzwords, never stack them. Fix punctuation and dashes here too: outside creative, replace nearly all em-dashes with a varied mark (comma, period, colon, parens), keep the hyphen for compounds and en-dash for ranges, no --/spaced-hyphen dashes, no doubled words, no space before ,;:!?, one terminal mark. Running the linter with --fix clears the mechanical ones (em-dashes, --, spaced hyphens, emoji) before you do the judgment work. Skip swaps that leave the sentence vague. See category 9.
10. Calibrate to the register. Match the genre's conventions (Register profiles) and hold them end to end — professional for a report, conversational for marketing, narrative for fiction. Add what the genre wants (contractions in casual; "you" in marketing); never bolt on a voice the genre rejects.

Self-critique loop (the critical pass)

After the rewrite, do not return it yet. Run an adversarial pass.

Review from three angles, not one. A single hostile reviewer misses whole classes of tells. Read the rewrite as each of:

• the detector researcher — rhythm, burstiness, predictable phrasing, uniform openers (the mechanical signature);
• the domain expert — vacuity, weak stance, wrong or unsupported claims (the substance);
• the genre editor — register fit, length, format conventions (does it read like real writing in this genre?).

Score each dimension 0–2, where 0 = clearly AI, 1 = passable, 2 = genuinely human: Substance, Rhythm, Stance, Consistency, Sourcing, Diction, Register. The bar to return: no dimension below 1, and the mechanical ones (Rhythm, Diction) not the only thing carrying it. This makes "good enough" measurable instead of a vibe.

Hit concrete targets, not "improve it":

• burstiness CoV ≥ ~0.5 (sentence-length variation);
• em-dash density ≈0 outside creative (replace nearly all with varied marks);
• in fix mode, expect to cut 15–25% of the words;
• no run of 3+ same-length sentences — read the length sequence aloud in your head.

Final self-check (the rhythm is the tell your ear catches before your eye): read the rewrite aloud. If it sounds like a metronome, vary it. Then scan: (a) shortest vs longest sentence — under a ~15-word gap? add a short punch; (b) any three consecutive sentences sharing a shape (all Subject-Verb-Object)? break one; (c) did the register shift at least once between plain and precise? (d) em-dashes

1 outside creative? replace the extras; (e) any sycophancy, "in conclusion" recap, or "not X, it's Y"? cut it; (f) one concrete detail a generic model wouldn't have written? If a Reddit commenter would call it slop, it isn't done.

Then:

1. Run the hallucination pass. Diff the rewrite's claim inventory against the source's (Anti-hallucination protocol, step 7). Any new, strengthened, weakened, or re-numbered claim is a regression — revert that span. Check for dropped claims too: a cut caveat is silent information loss.
2. A/B against the original. Did I lose any real content? Is the rewrite genuinely better, or merely different? Trading the AI signature for a new uniform signature (everything de-listed, every em-dash gone) is a failure (principle 2).
3. Re-run the linter on the rewrite (add --dialect american or --dialect british to catch spelling drift against your chosen dialect).
4. If the score is at/above threshold or any dimension scores below 1, fix those specific spots and repeat.
5. Stop at a fixed point, capped at 3 passes. Stop when a pass produces no net improvement (diminishing returns) or no dimension is below the bar — whichever comes first. The cap of 3 bounds cost; it is not a target. If tells remain after 3, report them honestly in the audit rather than over-correcting.

Invariant guard

These must survive the rewrite unchanged. Diff-check before applying:

• All numbers, units, dates, and measured values.
• All code, commands, config keys/values, file paths, and CLI flags.
• All links and citations (URLs, references, footnotes).
• Defined terms and proper nouns (product, model, library names).
• PII and confidentiality rules — never add PII or internal-only URLs; honor any project confidentiality rules for customer-facing text.
• Claims — you may sharpen wording but never strengthen, weaken, or invent a claim to improve flow.

If a rewrite would change any invariant, revert that span and keep the original.

Anti-hallucination protocol

Humanizing prose is exactly when fabrication creeps in: a flat sentence gets "fixed" with a vivid invented detail, a hedge becomes a confident false claim, a vague gesture grows a fake statistic. The rewrite must add voice, never facts. Follow these steps every time.

1. Build a claim inventory first. Before editing, list every checkable claim in the source as a {claim, value, source-span} triple — numbers, dates, named entities, citations, causal/comparative assertions ("X is faster than Y"). These are the invariants. Nothing on this list may change in value, and nothing new may join it. This list is the artifact you diff against in step 7.
2. Add no specificity the source doesn't contain. Vague → concrete is only allowed when the concrete detail is already present or directly entailed. If the source says "improved performance," you may not write "cut latency 40%" or "halved p99" unless that number is in the source. Sharpen the wording, not the facts.
3. Cut, don't dress, empty sentences. When a sentence says nothing, delete it. Never rescue it by inventing a detail, an example, a quote, or a source.
4. Never invent attribution. Do not add "studies show," a named researcher, a date, a company, or a URL that wasn't in the source. Removing vague attribution is good; replacing it with a fabricated specific source is worse than leaving it vague.
5. Mark gaps, don't fill them. If the prose needs a fact you don't have, emit an explicit placeholder — [SOURCE NEEDED], [FIGURE?], [VERIFY] — and call it out. A visible gap is honest; an invented filler is a hallucination. Every placeholder must be enumerated in the audit, and any output that still contains one is flagged as draft-pending, never presented as finished. Placeholders are removed only by the author, never silently by you.
6. Preserve quotes and citations verbatim. Never alter wording inside quotation marks, never turn a paraphrase into a quote, and never attach a citation to a claim it doesn't support to make a sharpened sentence look sourced.
7. generate mode is held to the same bar — the brief is the invariant set. Drafting from a brief does not license invented statistics, quotes, case studies, or citations. Write only what the brief supports; anything asserted beyond it is a placeholder, and the audit must list every fact stated that the brief did not provide so the author can verify or cut it.
8. Run a dedicated hallucination pass in the self-critique loop: diff the rewrite's claim inventory against the source's and sort every difference into four buckets — added / strengthened / weakened / dropped (re-numbered counts as changed). Added/strengthened/weakened are regressions: revert that span. A dropped real claim or caveat is silent information loss: restore it unless the deletion was deliberate and logged. Report the bucketed diff in the audit ("Invariants preserved: …").

A regex cannot catch a fabricated fact, so this protocol is judgment, not a linter check — the linter only flags the vague-attribution and fabricated-specificity-shaped phrasings that often accompany it.

Anti-jargon rules

Jargon is the corporate cousin of filler, and the linter flags a jargon category for it ("synergy", "leverage", "circle back", "move the needle", "low-hanging fruit", "actionable", "best-in-class", "operationalize", "paradigm shift"). Cutting words is not enough; apply the rules.

1. Plain word first. If a plain word carries the same meaning, use it: use not leverage, talk not touch base, goal not north star, easy wins not low-hanging fruit. The test: would a smart reader outside your industry understand it on first read?
2. Keep necessary technical terms; cut empty business jargon. A precise domain term a reader needs ("p99 latency", "FSDP", "idempotent") stays — it carries information. Buzzwords that could be deleted with no loss of meaning ("synergy", "value-add", "thought leadership") go. The difference is whether the word does work.
3. Define a necessary term once, then reuse it. Introduce an unavoidable term in plain language the first time, then use it consistently (this also satisfies the one-term-per-concept rule, principle 6). Don't rotate synonyms to sound varied.
4. No buzzword stacking. One borderline term in a sentence is a judgment call; three ("leverage our synergies to operationalize best-in-class solutions") is always wrong. Rewrite the whole sentence around what it actually claims.
5. Watch the register. Marketing tolerates light enthusiasm but not empty jargon — that is the marketing-specific AI failure mode. A technical report tolerates dense terminology but not business-speak. Match the genre; never use jargon as a substitute for a concrete claim.

Anti-overcorrection guardrails

• Do keep the occasional tricolon and transition where natural — but the em-dash is the exception: replace nearly all of them outside creative, varying the replacement mark so the rhythm doesn't flatten.
• Do keep purposeful structure the document wants — callout tiers, scannable lists, code-comment density (see STYLE-GUIDE.md).
• Don't ban a token globally; that just trades one signature for another. Target patterns in excess (false agency, the Wh-opener run, three same-length fragments), not a category to zero. The newer structural checks fire on density and runs, not on a single instance — keep them that way. (Public lists like stop-slop reach for "kill all adverbs / no em dashes ever / always two not three"; those manufacture a fresh uniform signature, which is exactly principle 2's failure mode.)
• Don't add slang, jokes, typos, or forced first-person voice. Forced all-lowercase, sprinkled "lol/honestly?", staccato fragments, and conspicuous dash-avoidance are the anti-AI costume — a fresh uniform signature the linter now flags as over_correction/internet_tells (muted only in casual/creative). The fix is a real deliberate voice, not the absence of the old tell. See references/over-correction.md.
• Don't cut precision a technical doc needs in the name of "plain language".

Workflow

1. Resolve input. Determine file-path vs pasted-text vs brief; pick fix or generate; infer register.
2. Baseline lint (skip for generate's first draft):

   # pick the register that matches the genre (default technical)
   python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --register marketing <file>
   # add an optional dialect consistency check:
   python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --dialect american <file>
   # pasted text:
   printf '%s' "$TEXT" | python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --register casual -
   # score-only / machine-readable, and an after-vs-before comparison:
   python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --quiet <file>
   python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --json <file>
   python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --baseline <original> <rewrite>   # prints the delta
   

   Run the same command on the rewrite to confirm the score and verdict band drop, and quote both numbers in the audit (--baseline prints the delta directly). The script covers tells (filler, hedging, meta, em-dash, bold-bullet, burstiness, n-gram repetition, lexical diversity) and consistency drift (spelling, heading case). Phrase and spelling lists live in scripts/ai_prose_patterns.json. It is the deterministic floor only — it cannot see vacuity, weak stance, or terminology drift. If the script is unavailable, degrade gracefully to pure judgment using references/ai-tells.md and this no-tool checklist: (a) read the sentence-length sequence and flag any run of 3+ similar lengths; (b) scan the first word of each sentence for repeated openers; (c) grep your draft for the top filler words (delve, leverage, robust, seamless, crucial, comprehensive, landscape); (d) count em-dashes (outside creative, essentially any is a tell); (e) check every list for the bold-lead-in - **Term:** pattern.
3. Optional autofix. Clear the mechanical, unambiguous tells in one pass before the judgment work: python3 scripts/detect_ai_prose.py --fix --register <reg> <file> rewrites em-dashes, --, spaced hyphens, and non-numeric en-dashes to commas, strips decorative emoji, and applies 1:1 filler/jargon swaps (em-dash + emoji fixes are skipped in creative; emoji also kept in casual). Use --fix-dry-run to preview. This never touches code, numbers, or links. It does not vary the replacement mark, so still do the rewrite pass.
4. Rewrite per the procedure above, loading references/ai-tells.md.
5. Self-critique loop until clean or 3 passes.
6. Apply / present. For a file, ensure it is recoverable (git-tracked or .bakd), show the rewrite/diff, then edit in place; for pasted text, print the rewrite. Always print the Humanization Audit.
7. Confirm invariants with a diff (git diff or a before/after of numbers, code, links).

Output templates

Humanization Audit

## Humanization Audit — <file or "pasted text">
Register: <technical|business|marketing|academic|casual|creative|email|release_notes|ux_microcopy|tutorial>
Score: <before> → <after> [<band>]  (linter floor; not ground truth)
Words: <before> → <after>  (−NN%)
Passes run: <n>/3

Tells removed (by category):
- Substance:   <n>  e.g. cut 2 vacuous paragraphs; removed restated conclusion
- Structure:   <n>  e.g. de-triadic 4 sentences; raised burstiness 0.31→0.58
- Stance:      <n>  e.g. committed to FSDP recommendation; fixed false balance
- Consistency: <n>  e.g. "the LLM"/"the model" → "the model"; 3 dialect fixes
- Sourcing:    <n>  e.g. "studies suggest"→cited eval; cut "end result"
- Diction:     <n>  e.g. leverage→use, robust→(cut), landscape→(cut)
- Formatting:  <n>  e.g. removed 2 emoji headings, 3 section rules

Dimension scores (0–2): Substance _ · Rhythm _ · Stance _ · Consistency _ · Sourcing _ · Diction _ · Register _
Invariants preserved: numbers ✓  code ✓  links ✓  claims ✓  PII-safe ✓  (claim diff: +0 added / 0 strengthened / 0 weakened / 0 dropped)
Placeholders left for author: <list of [SOURCE NEEDED]/[VERIFY], or "none">
Residual risk: <why a skeptical human might still flag this, or "none">

Rewrite (pasted-text mode)

## Rewrite
<the humanized text>

For generate, skip the "removed" counts (there is no before); report the final score, the register, and confirm no fabricated specifics were introduced.