An agent skill that removes AI text tells and tropes from drafts. Works with any tool that supports the vercel-labs/skills format, including Claude Code, Codex, and others.
SKILL.md lists the categories. The full catalogue with examples lives in references/tropes.md, which only loads when the agent is actually drafting or editing prose.
Requires skills (vercel-labs/skills).
npx skills add woerndl/unsloppify -g -a <agent> # claude-code | codex | ...Or from a local clone (if you want to edit the catalogue):
git clone https://github.com/woerndl/unsloppify.git
cd unsloppify
npx skills add . -g -a <agent>Verify:
npx skills listThen start a fresh Claude Code session and ask it to draft something. unsloppify should appear in the available-skills list and run on prose tasks.
Six categories, taken from @ossa-ma's gist plus additions from the gist comments:
- Word choice: magic adverbs, "delve" family, ornate nouns, "serves as" dodge, gravitas words
- Sentence structure: negative parallelism, "Not X. Not Y. Just Z.", rhetorical self-Q&A, anaphora, tricolons, "it's worth noting", superficial -ing tails, false ranges
- Paragraph structure: short punchy fragments, listicle in a trench coat, numbered phase labels
- Tone: "here's the kicker", "think of it as", "imagine a world", false vulnerability, "the truth is simple", stakes inflation, "let's break this down", vague attributions, invented concept labels, compliment sandwich, false exclusivity, clichéd idioms, fake casual quotes
- Formatting: em-dash addiction, bold-first bullets, unicode decoration
- Composition: fractal summaries, dead metaphor, historical analogy stacking, one-point dilution, content duplication, signposted conclusion, "despite its challenges"
Full examples for each are in references/tropes.md.
This catalogue is collaborative. It grew from @ossa-ma's original gist plus tropes contributed in the comments (see Acknowledgments), and new models keep producing new tells. If you spot a pattern that isn't catalogued, or have a sharper example for one that is, open an issue or a PR. To try a new entry locally first, fork the repo and edit references/tropes.md.
Sources: gist by @ossa-ma, tropes.fyi by ossama.is. Additional tropes contributed by @khaosdoctor (False Exclusivity, Clichéd Idioms), @felikcat (Numbered Phase Labels), and @finrunsfar (Gravitas Words, Compliment Sandwich, Fake Casual Quotes) in gist comments.
The original gist has no explicit license. @ossa-ma's comments encourage sharing with citation but don't grant a formal license, so credit them when redistributing the catalogue. The packaging in this repo is MIT licensed (see LICENSE).