The gap
The skill assumes its input is AI-generated — the whole prompt is written for "rewrite freely, inject voice, cover every paragraph." That's exactly right when someone hands you slop.
But a large share of real usage is people running humanizer on their own writing to "clean it up" or "make it read better." On human-written input, rewrite-everything is the wrong reflex: it sands the author off — polishing a specific, quirky voice into a smooth, sourceless one. The skill has no guardrail for this today; it treats a person's prose the same as a machine's.
Proposal: name two modes explicitly
Decide the job before touching anything, because the two modes pull in opposite directions:
- Mode A — Humanize AI-generated text (current default). Danger = leftover AI tells. Rewrite freely. This is what the skill already does.
- Mode B — Light-edit human-written text. Danger flips: the threat is over-editing. Rules for this mode:
- Subtraction first — cut what genuinely trips the reader; don't swap a plain line for a "better" one. Clear obstacles, don't improve.
- Hard cap — a passage needing more than ~3 changes is rare. If you're making ten, you've quit editing and started rewriting someone's voice.
- No crafted phrases — a neat parallelism or a metaphor you added is the editor performing, not the author speaking. That's its own AI tell.
- Author keeps veto over every change.
The governing test (useful in both modes, decisive in Mode B)
Human writing carries three things AI flattens — before any cut, check you're not erasing one:
- Position — a specific person speaking from one time and place, not an interchangeable everyman view. "I saw X on the 7am train" beats a generic claim.
- Cost — signs of real observation and effort behind the words; hard-to-fake specifics. AI generates frictionlessly and it shows.
- Handwriting — the quirks, cadence, and repetitions that make a voice identifiable, including the "redundant" bits that carry feeling.
Then the one question that governs Mode B: after this cut, is the speaker still in the room? If the edit makes it sound like anyone — or a brand, or a press release — wrote it, revert it. "Cleaner" isn't the goal; "still them" is.
When unsure which mode applies, default to Mode B's restraint — over-editing a human is harder to undo than leaving one AI tell.
I've been running this as a local section for a while; it meaningfully changes behavior on human-written input. Posting as a discussion first since it changes the skill's default framing — happy to open a PR if you'd want it as a section. Feel free to rework the wording in your own voice.
The gap
The skill assumes its input is AI-generated — the whole prompt is written for "rewrite freely, inject voice, cover every paragraph." That's exactly right when someone hands you slop.
But a large share of real usage is people running humanizer on their own writing to "clean it up" or "make it read better." On human-written input, rewrite-everything is the wrong reflex: it sands the author off — polishing a specific, quirky voice into a smooth, sourceless one. The skill has no guardrail for this today; it treats a person's prose the same as a machine's.
Proposal: name two modes explicitly
Decide the job before touching anything, because the two modes pull in opposite directions:
The governing test (useful in both modes, decisive in Mode B)
Human writing carries three things AI flattens — before any cut, check you're not erasing one:
Then the one question that governs Mode B: after this cut, is the speaker still in the room? If the edit makes it sound like anyone — or a brand, or a press release — wrote it, revert it. "Cleaner" isn't the goal; "still them" is.
When unsure which mode applies, default to Mode B's restraint — over-editing a human is harder to undo than leaving one AI tell.
I've been running this as a local section for a while; it meaningfully changes behavior on human-written input. Posting as a discussion first since it changes the skill's default framing — happy to open a PR if you'd want it as a section. Feel free to rework the wording in your own voice.