Wikipedia has a small army of volunteer editors whose actual job right now includes spotting AI-written submissions before they hit a page. Months of that work turned into a public style guide called “Signs of AI Writing,” basically a field manual listing every tic that gives a bot away. A Redditor posting as u/Street_Actuator_9747 read that guide this week and shipped something clever with it: an open-source skill called Writ that turns the whole checklist into a self-edit pass for AI agents.
That’s the part worth sitting with before you even open the repo. This isn’t one developer’s personal pet peeves about AI writing. It’s a checklist built from months of real editors flagging real submissions, which gives it a kind of authority most style guides never earn.
What’s New
Writ is a loadable skill that checks agent output against the exact patterns Wikipedia’s editors flagged. Picture spellcheck, but tuned for AI tells instead of typos.
Here’s what it flags:
- Stock vocabulary like “delve,” “tapestry,” “testament,” “seamless,” and “robust”
- The “not just X, but Y” false-contrast habit, the kind that turns a plain fact into fake drama
- Tacked-on significance lines that end with something like “highlighting a shift toward modern efficiency”
- Overused dashes and flat, samey sentence rhythm
- Narrow transition words such as moreover, furthermore, and that said, repeated past the point of usefulness
- Over-formatting, meaning headers and bullet lists where plain prose would actually read better
- Leftover assistant voice, the “I hope this helps!” sign-off nobody asked for
The repo is MIT licensed and open for contributions, and the creator is actively inviting people to expand the checklist.
The Twist
Here’s the part that caught me off guard. Writ doesn’t rewrite your text for you. It runs as a silent self-edit pass right before your agent delivers a response, checking the output against the list instead of bulldozing it into something robotic and over-corrected.
That design choice matters more than it looks. A tool that mechanically strips banned words tends to leave behind stiff, over-sanitized prose that reads worse than the original. Writ is built to catch the tells without flattening the voice underneath them, and it works with any framework that supports loadable skills, including Claude Code, Antigravity, and Cursor. If your setup doesn’t support skills, the author built it so you can just paste the checklist into your system prompt instead.
One commenter, u/Deep_Ad1959, raised a catch worth sitting with. Banning a word doesn’t fix a rhythm problem on its own. Tell an agent to avoid “delve” and it just reaches for a different word that reads exactly as flat, because the giveaway was never really the vocabulary. It was the sentence structure sitting underneath it. That’s less a flaw in Writ than a reminder that no checklist catches everything by itself, and it’s worth watching how the project handles that as more people contribute.
How To Add It To Your Workflow
- 📥 Grab the skill file from the GitHub repo.
- 🔌 Load it into your agent framework as a skill, or paste the checklist straight into your system prompt if your tool doesn’t support loadable skills.
- Draft as normal. Nothing about your actual prompting needs to change.
- 🧹 Let Writ run its pass right before the agent delivers the response, catching tells before you ever see the draft.
- Send back anything it misses. The checklist is community-maintained, and the author is actively collecting feedback.
Pro Tips
Pair Writ with a tone tool instead of relying on it alone. A couple of commenters pointed to the Humanizer skill as doing similar work, and it’s a fair comparison, but the two aren’t identical. Writ leans on one very specific, documented checklist pulled straight from Wikipedia’s editors, while broader humanizer tools tend to work off general tone rules. Running both catches more than either one on its own.
Don’t treat a clean pass as proof the writing is done. After Writ clears a paragraph, read it out loud and ask whether it still sounds like a person talking, not just a person carefully avoiding twelve specific words. That’s exactly the gap u/Deep_Ad1959 flagged, and it’s the one thing worth checking by hand every time.
If you’re building agents that ship customer-facing text (emails, landing pages, support replies) this is worth wiring in now rather than after someone notices the “delve” problem for you. It costs nothing to add and it runs quietly, so there’s no real reason to skip it once you know the checklist exists.
Go check out the repo, read through the full checklist, and if you spot a tell it’s missing, the project is open for contributions.
I turned Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI Writing” into an open-source self-edit checklist skill for LLM agents
by u/Street_Actuator_9747 in PromptEngineering