ai-tells-review

ai-tells-review is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NickCrew/Claude-Cortex. It costs 75 tokens per session (2,242 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review method for finding subtle signs that public or technical prose sounds machine-written, including awkward rhythm, hedging, and exaggerated emphasis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review READMEs, shipped documentation, release notes, blog posts, and other prose after an initial surface scan.
Why use it?
It catches style problems that a mechanical scan may miss, so important writing feels more natural and deliberate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Good fit Use it to review READMEs, shipped documentation, release notes, blog posts, and other prose after an initial surface scan.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review
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 NickCrew/Claude-Cortex --skill ai-tells-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NickCrew/Claude-Cortex

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 ai-tells-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ai-tells-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,242 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 $0.00075 $0.02242
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01121
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00448
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00224

Measured 7d ago against content hash 17eb9ccd2ef7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ai-tells-review 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 7d 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/ai-tells-review/SKILL.md · 159 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 159 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

AI Tells — Structural Review

A judgment-based pass that catches the subtle tells the surface scan misses. Cite each finding, name the family, suggest a fix-direction. Then offer to rewrite.

When To Use

  • Public-facing artifacts: READMEs, shipped docs, blog posts, release notes
  • Technical writing where the prose itself is the deliverable
  • After ai-tells-scan has already stripped the obvious tokens
  • When a draft "reads AI" but you can't articulate why
  • Before publishing anything Nick wouldn't want attributed to a machine

Skip when: the artifact is internal-only and nobody cares, or the user only wants the mechanical pass (ai-tells-scan is enough).

Workflow

  1. Read the artifact end to end. Don't pattern-match line by line yet. Get the rhythm and shape first.
  2. Run the four-family rubric below. For each tell found, note: line(s), family, why it reads as a tell, fix-direction.
  3. Produce the findings report in the structure under "Output Shape."
  4. Offer the rewrite explicitly: "Want me to do a pass that fixes these?"
  5. If yes, rewrite preserving structure and content. Don't change what the doc is saying — change how it's saying it.

The user can stop at the report. Don't rewrite without explicit consent.

The Four-Family Rubric

1. Structural Reflexes

Default shapes the model reaches for regardless of fit.

  • Aphoristic closer. Sentence trying to land like a punchline at the end of a section. Examples: "Premature alerts produce numbness." / "the auditor is always ahead." / "No artefact, no promotion." Fix-direction: end on the substantive point, not the epigram.
  • Definitional opener. Every section starts "X is a Y that…" even when X was already established. Fix-direction: start with the action or the question instead.
  • Echo paragraph. Paragraph N+1 restates paragraph N with synonyms. Fix-direction: delete one. Usually the second.
  • Summary-of-summary closer. "In essence…" / "Ultimately…" wrapping up what was just said. Fix-direction: delete the closer; the section already ended.
  • Over-signposting. "There are three things to consider. First…" when headers already do this. Fix-direction: delete the meta-narration.
  • Self-narration. Prose commenting on what the doc is doing: "That's the dashboard's reason for existing." / "(this is where we start)" inside a diagram. Fix-direction: let the doc do the thing instead of describing itself.
  • Decision-stamp formality. **Decided 2026-05-18:** court-ruling style in personal notes. Fix-direction: drop the stamp; state the decision in prose.
  • Labeled callback scheme. Q1–Q6, Layer 1/2/3, deliberately numbered cross-refs in a doc that didn't need them. Fix-direction: use names, not numbers; let prose carry the references.

Read the full file on GitHub · 159 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. 7d ago First seen · 159 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 17eb9ccd2ef7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ai-tells-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository NickCrew/Claude-Cortex (40 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 2,242 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.