de-ai-prose

de-ai-prose is a skill for Claude Code from Fergius-Engineering/instincts. It costs 30 tokens per session (674 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for text that people read, including documentation, commit messages, interface text, and store descriptions. It helps make that writing sound natural and direct.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review and simplify READMEs, documentation, commit and pull-request messages, changelogs, interface copy, and catalogue text.
Why use it?
It removes common signs of machine-written prose, such as empty introductions, repeated sentence patterns, and unnecessary punctuation.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the instincts plugin — 20 skills, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to review and simplify READMEs, documentation, commit and pull-request messages…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/de-ai-prose
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Fergius-Engineering/instincts --skill de-ai-prose
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Fergius-Engineering/instincts

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install instincts, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 20 skills, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for de-ai-prose

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/de-ai-prose.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/de-ai-prose)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/de-ai-prose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fergius-engineering/instincts/de-ai-prose.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 674 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00030 $0.00674
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00337
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00135
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00067

Measured 6d ago against content hash 81596b1782f5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

de-ai-prose scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/de-ai-prose/SKILL.md · 57 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 57 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The rule

Readers can tell when a machine wrote the text, and it costs trust the same way sloppy code does. After you write any prose a person will read, read it back once and cut the tells. Plain words, varied sentences, say the thing instead of announcing you're about to say it.

Fires when

About to show a human a README, a doc page, a commit or PR body, a changelog entry, a UI string, store copy — anything a person will read as writing rather than run as code.

Tells to cut

  • Signposting sentences: "Here's the thing.", "That's the point.", "This is the important part.", "By the end you'll know what, why, and how."
  • Closers like "That's it." or "And that's all there is to it."
  • Em-dash overuse as the default connector. The constant em-dash rhythm is a fingerprint.
  • Parallel triads everywhere ("a texture, a config, a script"), over-balanced sentences, the list-of-three cadence.
  • Arrow constructions in prose ("write one function -> the whole thing appears").
  • A table for everything; bold sprinkled on every other phrase as decoration.
  • Bullet lists where every item opens with a bold label ("Fast: ...", "Simple: ..."), parallel from top to bottom.
  • Cutesy section names and peppy filler ("the payoff", "the ones that bite").
  • Paragraphs that are all the same length and shape. Too tidy.

How to apply

Plain, varied sentences. Some short. Let one run long and a little uneven, like a person typing.

Say it directly instead of signposting it. Use em-dashes rarely. Prefer periods, commas, "and". Vary connectors. Cutting an em-dash means rebuilding the sentence (a comma, a colon, parentheses, or two sentences), not swapping a different mark into the same joint.

Keep bold for genuinely key terms, not decoration. Drop a table where a sentence reads more naturally.

Read it back and ask: "would a tired engineer writing this actually phrase it this way?" If it sounds like a polished AI explainer, flatten it.

Before / after

Before (AI voice):

Here's the thing about our caching layer — it's fast, it's simple, and it's reliable. The payoff? Sub-millisecond reads.

Read the full file on GitHub · 57 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 57 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A 81596b1782f5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

de-ai-prose is a skill published in the GitHub repository Fergius-Engineering/instincts (2 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 674 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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