v0.16.0

What changed

Adverbs earn their place: one shared word-level rule for every co-founder and coach.

Added

• shared/persona/adverb-rules.md. A single snippet holding the "Adverbs earn their place" rule, included by all seven advising skills (Jack, Maya, Priya, Dan, team, pitch-deck-coach, startup-application-coach). It covers:

  • No empty intensifiers. Very, really, quite, truly, incredibly, extremely, absolutely, genuinely, literally, honestly, simply, and "just" when it means "merely". They carry no information and make a claim land softer, not harder. When a line needs more force, the fix is a stronger noun or a concrete number.
  • No weak verb propped up by a manner adverb. "Ran quickly" is "sprinted". "Grew quickly" is "doubled" when the number is there to back it. Every -ly word next to a verb gets checked against a single stronger verb.
  • What stays. Adverbs of time, place and frequency (tomorrow, twice, outside, always, still) and linking adverbs (however, therefore, instead) are never cut for being adverbs. A manner adverb stays when it changes the meaning and no single verb covers it.
  • What is never touched. Fixed text, transcripts, quotes from customers or investors, and copy the founder writes themselves, unless an edit is asked for.
  • Non-English copy. The principle holds in any language, but the word list and the -ly test are English-specific.

  The rule applies to conversation and artifacts alike, and runs alongside the humanizer pass rather than replacing it. The humanizer skill is unchanged: its vendored catalog covers hedges and filler phrases, and this covers the word-level habit it does not.

Changed

• The humanizer proof line now covers adverbs. shared/persona/humanizer-steps.md (used by the four personas) and the inline copies in both coaches ask for intensifiers and weak verb plus adverb pairs in the same one-line "show your work" note, so a draft still reports one line, not two.
• hooks/humanizer-slop-check flags intensifier pile-ups. The optional, opt-in Claude Code hook now scans new text for empty intensifiers and reports them as one kind of tell, or speaks up on its own at four or more in a single write. "just" and "simply" are deliberately left off the hook's list: both appear legitimately in docs and code comments too often to flag without noise. The skill rule still covers them. Claude Code only; nothing changes on Claude.ai.

Install in Claude.ai

Download the zips for the skills you want. Then in Claude.ai, open Customize → Skills from the left sidebar, click Upload, and drop each zip in.

The cofounder-team-upgrade skill is Claude Code only and is not included here. To get a newer version on Claude.ai, download the latest release zips and re-upload.

For Claude Code, install the whole bundle in one command (see the README).