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.
npx skills add NickCrew/Claude-Cortex --skill ai-tells-scangit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NickCrew/Claude-CortexWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-scan)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-scan/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-scan"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nickcrew/claude-cortex/ai-tells-scan.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00103 | $0.01465 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00051 | $0.00732 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00293 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00146 |
Grade A, and why
ai-tells-scan 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 5d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
AI Tells — Surface Scan
A near-mechanical pass that strips the obvious AI fingerprints from prose. Runs before any prose artifact is presented as final.
When This Runs
Auto-engages whenever the task produces prose-as-artifact:
- READMEs, CONTRIBUTING, CHANGELOG
- Technical documentation under
docs/ - PR descriptions, PR comments, commit message bodies
- Tutorials, guides, blog posts, release notes
- Any markdown intended for human readers
Skip for: code comments (different rules), inline chat replies, structured data (YAML/JSON), or anything pure-config.
How To Use
After drafting prose, scan it once against each list below. Every match is a rewrite, not a debate. The lists are deliberately short and high-leverage — if a tell isn't here, it belongs in ai-tells-review.
Banned Punctuation
- Em dashes connecting clauses. Replace with period, comma, colon, or parentheses depending on the relationship. The em dash is the single most diagnostic AI tell in prose.
- Smart quotes when the source is plain ASCII. Mixing curly and straight quotes in a doc is a copy-paste fingerprint.
- Ellipses for dramatic pause in technical writing (
it's...complicated). Reads as performance.
Banned Sentence Openers
- "Importantly," "Notably," "Crucially," "Interestingly"
- "Furthermore," "Moreover," "Additionally"
- "It's worth noting that…" / "It bears mentioning…"
- "In essence," "Ultimately," "At its core"
- "In conclusion," "To summarize," "In summary"
- "Great question!" or any sycophantic acknowledgement
If the sentence after the opener stands on its own, delete the opener. It almost always does.
Banned Vocabulary
These words appear far more often in machine-generated prose than human prose. Each has a fix-direction.
| Word / Phrase | Why it's a tell | Fix direction |
|---|---|---|
delve |
Diagnostic on its own | use look at, examine, or just delete |
leverage (verb) |
Corporate-AI fingerprint | use use |
robust, comprehensive, seamless, streamlined |
Empty positive adjectives | name the specific property |
cutting-edge, innovative, state-of-the-art |
Marketing puff | describe what it actually does |
elegantly, seamlessly, gracefully |
Empty positive adverbs | delete the adverb |
modulo (in non-math prose) |
Claude tic | use except for or aside from |
stakeholders |
Generic abstraction | name the people or roles |
passionate about, excited to, thrilled to |
Performative enthusiasm | state what was done |
it's worth noting |
Throat-clearing | delete; state the thing |
at the end of the day |
Verbal filler | delete |
move the needle, circle back, align on |
Corporate cliche | name the actual action |
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 120 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A f8463f8fe264
ai-tells-scan is a skill published in the GitHub repository NickCrew/Claude-Cortex (39 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 103 tokens to every session and 1,465 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.
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