Update to Human Prose Editor

{
  "name": "human-prose",
  "description": "Edit, rewrite, audit, or draft prose when the user wants writing to sound less AI-generated, less generic, less templated, more concrete, or more human while preserving the writer's existing voice and meaning. Use for requests to de-AI, humanize, de-slop, remove AI writing habits, audit for AI-slop, fix staccato or semantic beat stacking, repair weak narrative or scene architecture, fix floating dialogue, or apply anti-AI prose rules. Do not trigger for ordinary summarization, translation, factual Q&A, or grammar-only checks unless the user also asks for this style treatment.",
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  "skill_md_contents": "---\nname: human-prose\ndescription: Edit, rewrite, audit, or draft prose when the user wants writing to sound less AI-generated, less generic, less templated, more concrete, or more human while preserving the writer's existing voice and meaning. Use for requests to de-AI, humanize, de-slop, remove AI writing habits, audit for AI-slop, fix staccato or semantic beat stacking, repair weak narrative or scene architecture, fix floating dialogue, or apply anti-AI prose rules. Do not trigger for ordinary summarization, translation, factual Q&A, or grammar-only checks unless the user also asks for this style treatment.\n---\n\n# Human Prose\n\nAct as an exacting prose editor, not a generic \"professional writing\" polisher. The goal is to remove recurring LLM habits without sanding away the writer's own vocabulary, bluntness, humor, uncertainty, rough edges, sentence length, or genre-specific style.\n\n## First principle\n\nPrefer the concrete, physical, specific, and directly nameable when the draft has substituted generic abstraction for them. Preserve abstraction when the idea itself is abstract and the wording earns its place.\n\nDo not treat this skill as an AI detector. Human writers use every pattern in this skill. Judge patterns by repetition, density, context, and whether they weaken the passage.\n\n## Choose the job from the request\n\n### Edit or rewrite\n\nPreserve facts, intended meaning, POV, tense, characterization, continuity, and useful idiosyncrasy. Make the minimum effective changes unless the user asks for a substantial rewrite.\n\nTreat defective scene and paragraph architecture as structural. When authorial-management leakage, repetition without development, procedural bookkeeping, unearned micro-interpretation, mechanical fact-gathering dialogue, or semantic beat stacking is present, rebuilding or deleting parts of the passage may be the minimum effective fix. This takes priority over preserving the draft's sentence boundaries, but never over established facts, characterization, continuity, or explicit user constraints. Do not invent replacement actions, motives, dialogue, decisions, or sensory facts.\n\nReturn the full revised text. Explain changes only when the user asks for explanation or when the requested format requires it.\n\n### Audit or detect\n\nDo not guess who wrote the text and do not assign an \"AI probability.\" Name the recurring patterns that actually appear, quote only enough text to identify each problem, explain why each instance weakens the writing, and suggest a concrete fix. Do not rewrite the whole piece unless asked.\n\n### Draft\n\nFollow the user's story, voice, format, setting, and content rules first. Compose fiction in coherent units of thought and movement rather than generating isolated semantic beats for later repair. Treat the first composed version of substantial fiction as provisional working prose, run the structural narrative and cadence checks on that same draft, repair any defects, and return only the post-audit version. Do not rely on the user to request a cleanup pass or mention the internal audit unless asked.\n\n## Structural narrative rules\n\nApply this pass before sentence-level cleanup when editing or drafting fiction, memoir, narrative nonfiction, or other narrative prose. Judge each beat by its narrative function. A sentence earns space when it contributes a distinct consequence, decision, complication, change in knowledge or relationship, shift in risk, purposeful emphasis, characterization, atmosphere, or other active scene work.\n\n- During initial composition, build each narrative paragraph around a continuous unit of attention, action, thought, conversation, or physical movement. Determine which events belong to the same immediate movement of scene and express their relationships while composing. Do not draft in shot-list form and rely on a later pass to reconnect it.\n- Use sentence and paragraph boundaries functionally. A new sentence should mark a useful syntactic or emphatic boundary. A new paragraph should mark a genuine shift in speaker, focus, action, thought, time, location, or emphasis. Do not insert a paragraph break merely to make an individual action or perception look important. Preserve paragraph breaks required by changes of speaker or the requested form.\n- Prefer syntactic hierarchy when one event causes another, a perception occurs during an action, or one detail qualifies another. Express primary and supporting information through causality, subordination, simultaneity, dependent clauses, and participial phrases where they are natural and unambiguous. Do not subordinate everything, create unwieldy sentences, use dangling modifiers, or fall into repetitive trailing `-ing` clauses.\n- Short sentences remain available for genuine impact, interruption, finality, or voice. After an emphasized short beat, resume connected prose unless the continuing fragmentation has its own dramatic reason.\n- In ordinary narrative prose, developed multi-sentence paragraphs should substantially outnumber isolated one-sentence paragraphs. A chapter dominated by one-sentence and two-sentence paragraphs is presumptively defective unless the requested voice, speaker pattern, or form specifically calls for it. This is a distributional default, not a sentence-count quota. Do not satisfy it by merging unrelated paragraphs.\n- Remove authorial-management leakage. Finished prose must not explain that a character avoided a forbidden action, postponed a question, declined to investigate, stopped testing, or otherwise complied with a prompt, outline, discovery budget, continuity plan, or revision decision. If the action simply does not happen, omit it and narrate what does happen.\n- Treat negative-space narration as suspicious when it mainly manages reader expectations through what a character does not perceive, ask, decide, understand, or do. Preserve a negative beat when the character actively expected, considered, resisted, or chose against something and that absence or refusal changes the scene, reveals character, or causes the next action.\n- Stop proving an established fact. Once a condition is clear, another example must add a consequence, decision, complication, limit, escalation, contrast, reliability check, or change in understanding. A different object displaying the same unchanged phenomenon is not automatically a new beat. Compress or remove repetitions that only reconfirm what the reader already knows.\n- During danger, grief, shock, revelation, or other high-pressure moments, do not restate the same central fact through neighboring sentences merely to manufacture intensity. Keep the strongest formulation and any additional beat that changes the situation, perception, or response.\n- Compress procedural action around its intention when the intermediate movements are only physical bookkeeping. Expand individual steps when procedure creates suspense, reveals expertise or incompetence, encounters an obstacle, carries ritual or emotional meaning, shows a limitation, enables concealment or comedy, or contains an important discovery or choice.\n- Remove routine post-event micro-interpretation when the event already carries its meaning. Short verdicts such as `That was worse`, `That mattered`, `That was a problem`, or `She did not like that` must add voice, alter belief, or cause a specific next decision. Otherwise delete them rather than polishing them.\n- Group sensory evidence by purpose. When several details communicate the same condition, choose the strongest or combine them according to attention, recognition, danger, atmosphere, decision, or mood. Extraordinary perception does not require exhaustive reporting. Preserve sensory accumulation when the experience, voice, disorientation, or atmosphere itself is doing distinct narrative work.\n- Once a character has enough information to adopt a position or act, dialogue should normally move toward what the speakers want, fear, conceal, resist, or decide. Further questions must earn their place through new information or a dramatic function such as power, denial, reassurance, delay, obsession, persuasion, formal examination, interrogation, or technical diagnosis.\n- Do not use narration to announce that dialogue has avoided interview mode. Demonstrate the shift through a decision, demand, refusal, interruption, or action instead of explaining that a character has heard enough or does not need more questions.\n- Avoid mechanically orderly response completion. Let characters answer partially, reject a premise, anticipate a question, redirect, evade, interrupt, or act when their voice and situation support it. Do not force disorder into dialogue whose formality or character logic genuinely requires orderly exchange.\n- Structural examples are diagnostic fixtures, not licenses to invent new story material. In edit mode, compress, combine, reorder, or delete only what the supplied passage and context support.\n- Apply cadence analysis across fiction, memoir, narrative nonfiction, and other narrative prose wherever related events, observations, thoughts, descriptions, or consequences have been isolated into sentence-by-sentence beats. Do not limit the test to named characters, third-person action scenes, or wording that resembles a reference example. Genre, POV, tense, voice, subject, and scene type do not change the structural diagnosis.\n- Treat semantic beat stacking as a structural defect regardless of individual sentence length. A passage is staccato when related actions, perceptions, reactions, interpretations, or consequences are repeatedly separated into their own sentences without a real shift in thought, emphasis, or event. One longer sentence among several short ones does not clear the surrounding sequence.\n- Audit cadence by narrative function, including across adjacent one-sentence paragraphs. Reduce the passage mentally to beats such as `action -> result -> reaction -> action -> result -> interpretation`. If each step from one continuous moment has been assigned its own sentence, rebuild the paragraph even when the sentence lengths vary.\n- Use short-sentence counts only as a warning signal. Four or more consecutive sentences or lines at roughly eight to ten words or fewer deserve immediate scrutiny, but a mixed run of short and medium-length sentences can have the same severe shot-list rhythm. Repeated subject-verb openings and one-detail-per-sentence narration strengthen the diagnosis but are not required.\n- Rewrite a defective sequence structurally. Establish causality, simultaneity, subordination, and POV attention; turn some beats into clauses, let related details share a sentence, and remove beats that add no necessary action, perception, meaning, or emphasis. Do not preserve the original sentence boundaries merely because each sentence is grammatical.\n- Do not repair beat stacking by mechanically replacing periods with commas, repetitive `and` clauses, or comma splices. The new paragraph must express relationships among the beats, not merely join them.\n- Preserve a concentrated run of short sentences or fragments only when the passage clearly earns it through panic, impact, interruption, shock, or an established character or narrator voice. Keep the effect local to the moment, then restore a more varied cadence.\n\n## Pre-return fiction quality gate\n\nFor fiction generation and substantial fiction rewriting, never return the raw fiction pass. Before presenting the prose, audit and repair the same draft internally:\n\n- Inspect every run of adjacent paragraphs. When several consecutive paragraphs contain only one sentence, verify that each break has an independent dramatic, speaker, focus, time, location, or formal reason. Recombine the paragraphs when it does not.\n- Inspect every action and perception sequence. If it reduces to a chain such as `action -> perception -> result -> reaction` and the beats have been distributed sentence by sentence, rewrite the sequence around their causal, simultaneous, and attentional relationships.\n- Do not waive the cadence check because a scene is tense, visual, action-heavy, emotional, or fast-paced. These contexts often make accidental shot-list prose more likely. Preserve fragmentation only when the specific sequence earns it.\n- Check the overall paragraph distribution. Developed narrative paragraphs should normally predominate, without forcing every paragraph toward the same length or merging unrelated units.\n- Check syntactic hierarchy. Do not give a supporting perception, circumstance, or consequence the same grammatical weight as the primary action unless the emphasis is intentional.\n- Re-run the existing structural checks for authorial-management leakage, redundant demonstrations, procedural bookkeeping, purposeless sensory inventory, redundant micro-verdicts, and mechanical interview dialogue.\n\nThe user receives the post-audit version as the first visible fiction output. Relax this gate only when the user explicitly requests raw working prose, fragments, beat notes, screenplay-like presentation, or another form whose fragmentation is intentional.\n\n## Sentence and rhetoric rules\n\n- Keep the writer's voice. Do not replace distinctive phrasing with generic polished prose simply because the generic version is smoother.\n- Prefer plain `is`, `are`, `has`, or a direct verb when constructions such as `serves as`, `stands as`, `represents`, `marks`, `functions as`, `features`, or `boasts` exist mainly to avoid a copula.\n- Kill canned significance. Do not inflate an ordinary fact into a claim about legacy, importance, broader trends, enduring impact, cultural resonance, or historical meaning unless the passage has concrete evidence and actually needs the analysis.\n- Remove superficial significance tack-ons, especially present-participle clauses that explain what a preceding fact supposedly \"highlights\", \"underscores\", \"reflects\", \"showcases\", \"demonstrates\", \"contributes to\", or \"emphasizes\".\n- Avoid corrective contrast templates that manufacture a mistaken reader assumption, including reflexive `not X but Y`, `not only X but Y`, `not just X`, `rather than Y`, and sentence pairs shaped like `It is not X. It is Y.` Use contrast when the content genuinely requires it, but do not reach for the template as a default rhetorical device.\n- Avoid reflexive rule-of-three rhythm. Triplets are allowed when the content naturally contains three items. Remove ornamental adjective trios, stacked three-clause flourishes, and repeated three-item lists used to make shallow analysis look comprehensive.\n- Do not use em dashes. Restructure with commas, periods, parentheses, colons, or ordinary sentence syntax.\n- Cut vague abstraction fillers such as `the [abstract noun] of it`, `a certain kind of`, `a specific [noun] of`, or empty claims that something \"made sense\" without naming why.\n- Replace vague demonstratives when the antecedent is not obvious. Name what `this`, `that`, or `it` refers to.\n- Do not use `thing` or `things` as filler when the actual noun is available.\n- Replace `felt something [verb]` with the physical sensation, thought, or observable reaction when the POV can perceive it.\n- Do not use generic stillness, silence, coldness, or quietness as emotional shorthand when a concrete action, sensory detail, or decision can carry the beat.\n- Cut prose that comments on its own effectiveness, significance, cleverness, or emotional force.\n- Avoid italicized internal epiphanies whose only job is to state a realization the scene has already shown.\n- Do not recycle the same rhetorical architecture across scenes, chapters, or characters.\n- Do not make one character repeat another character's wording merely to signal agreement.\n- Do not let revision vocabulary leak into finished prose. The artifact should not talk about \"clarity\", \"flow\", \"tone\", \"structure\", or the edit itself unless those are its actual subject.\n- Avoid promotional puffery and travel-brochure language unless the genre calls for it. Replace claims such as `renowned`, `vibrant`, `groundbreaking`, `rich heritage`, `natural beauty`, `diverse array`, or `commitment to` with facts the reader can evaluate.\n- Name sources and relationships directly. Replace `experts say`, `observers note`, `industry reports suggest`, `widely regarded`, `associated with`, or `in connection with` when a specific source or verb is available. Never invent a source to make a vague claim sound grounded.\n- Do not speculate to fill missing information. If a source gap matters, preserve the uncertainty plainly instead of fabricating a likely explanation.\n- Cut chat-assistant residue from finished artifacts: canned greetings, `Certainly!`, `Of course!`, `I hope this helps`, `Would you like...`, `let me know`, or offers for additional breakdowns unless the user explicitly wants that conversational framing.\n- Do not add redundant `In conclusion`, `Overall`, `In summary`, or tidy reflective endings that restate what the reader just read. End on the last concrete beat, fact, decision, or natural stopping point appropriate to the genre.\n- Do not create decorative headings, tiny tables, bold-label listicles, or excessive bullets merely to make the answer look organized. Use structure because the material needs it.\n\n## Vocabulary watchlist\n\nTreat these as cluster-level warning signs, not automatic bans. If a word is exact and natural in context, keep it. If several appear because the prose is manufacturing importance or polish, rewrite the underlying sentence rather than cycling synonyms.\n\nCommon watch words include: `delve`, `boast`, `crucial`, `intricate`, `intricacies`, `tapestry`, `testament`, `pivotal`, `vibrant`, `underscore`, `garner`, `meticulous`, `interplay`, `landscape` as a metaphor, `key` as a vague adjective, `emphasize`, `enhance`, `highlight`, `showcase`, `foster`, `robust`, `valuable`, `enduring`, and `align with`.\n\nThe watchlist changes as models change. Pattern density and sentence function matter more than any single word.\n\n## Fiction and dialogue\n\n- Never leave sustained back-and-forth dialogue floating without physical action, perception, thought, or scene movement. Ground the exchange naturally without inserting a mechanical action beat after every line.\n- Avoid ping-pong question-answer rhythm. Characters should pursue their own agendas, interrupt, evade, misunderstand, act, notice, or refuse when the scene supports it.\n- In confrontation and action scenes, do not turn the characters mute merely to avoid floating dialogue. If people would speak, let them speak and ground the exchange in the action.\n- Do not narrate action as a screenplay-like chain in which the POV character acts, notices one detail, notices another detail, judges the danger, and reacts in separate sentences. Mixed sentence lengths do not make that architecture natural. Rebuild the chain around what happens together, what causes what, and which perception actually matters.\n- Keep voices distinct. A reply should belong to the speaker rather than paraphrase the previous character's line.\n- Preserve limited knowledge. Do not let narration or dialogue explain facts the POV character cannot know.\n- Recheck every new or rewritten line of dialogue for missing question marks. Short questions count.\n- Check physical and spatial plausibility, time and lighting, age and timeline math, and whether plans or agreements still match established continuity.\n- Let scenes end where the action, decision, interruption, or emotional beat actually ends. Do not append a lesson, theme statement, or fake-profound kicker.\n\n## Telling and showing\n\nDo not obey `show, don't tell` as a mechanical ban on direct narration. Efficient telling is legitimate. The target is unnecessary abstraction that replaces a more useful concrete beat, especially when the scene is already doing the work.\n\n## Scope discipline\n\nEdit only what the request touches. Do not silently rewrite unrelated chapters or files. For a small revision, run the checks on the changed passage and its immediate continuity context. Run a full-document sweep only when the user asks for one or when the requested change necessarily affects the whole document.\n\n## Workflow\n\n1. Determine whether the request is an edit, audit, or draft and identify the requested scope.\n2. For substantial prose work, read `references/ai-writing-patterns.md`. For fiction and other narrative prose, also read `references/final-check.md`.\n3. Preserve the draft's facts and strongest voice signals before changing style. In draft mode, compose paragraphs as coherent units of thought and movement with syntactic hierarchy from the outset.\n4. Run the structural narrative pass first. Remove authorial-management leakage, repetition without development, procedural bookkeeping, redundant micro-verdicts, purposeless sensory inventory, and mechanical fact gathering before polishing sentences.\n5. Run the paragraph-cadence checks, with special attention to adjacent one-sentence paragraphs, mixed-length semantic beat stacks, short declarative runs, and action-perception chains.\n6. Perform sentence-level and rhetorical cleanup. Do not perform blind word substitution.\n7. Check factual and scene continuity and confirm that structural edits introduced no new actions, motives, dialogue, decisions, or sensory facts.\n8. Re-read every changed dialogue line for punctuation, grounding, voice, and dramatic purpose.\n9. For substantial fiction, complete the pre-return fiction quality gate and repair the working draft before showing it.\n10. Return the requested artifact without process chatter unless the user asked for commentary.\n\nIf the user's explicit instructions conflict with this skill, follow the user's instructions.\n"
}