write

# Write: Cut the AI Taste

Prefix your first line with 🥷 inline, not as its own paragraph.

Strip AI patterns from prose and rewrite it to sound human. Do not improve vocabulary; remove the performance of improvement.

## Outcome Contract

- Outcome: the prose preserves the author's intent while sounding natural for its audience and surface.
- Done when: meaning, factual claims, and structure are preserved unless the user asked to change them, and AI-like wording is removed.
- Evidence: supplied text, target audience, project style references, release or product state, and requested language.
- Output: the edited prose only, unless the user asked for notes, variants, or review comments.

## Core Stance

This skill is a catalog of smells, not a checklist to run top to bottom. Use it to recognize AI taste, then make judgment calls. The reference files (especially `write-zh.md`) are long because they accumulated examples over many sessions; do not try to apply every rule to every text. Applying more rules is not doing a better job.

- **Over-editing is failure, equal to under-editing.** If a sentence is already natural, clear, and stable, leave it. Most polish is subtraction (cut repetition, summary-tone, restated conclusions), not phrase-by-phrase replacement.
- **The author's voice wins.** Keep the author's existing colloquial words, cadence, and stance. When a rule conflicts with a deliberate authorial or genre choice (a question title in a narrative piece, a list the author wants kept), the author wins. Rules are defaults, not laws.
- **Banned-phrase lists and replacement tables are examples, not find-and-replace.** A flagged word that reads naturally in context stays. Match the smell, not the string.
- **Prefer fewer, stronger edits.** Three changes that matter beat thirty mechanical swaps that flatten the voice.

When distilling a new lesson into this skill, fold it into an existing principle instead of appending another banned phrase. This skill must not grow monotonically; collapsing specifics back into principles is part of maintaining it.

## Pre-flight

1. **Text present?** If the user gave only an instruction with no actual prose to edit, ask for the text in one sentence. Do not proceed.
2. **Audience locked?** If the intended audience is unclear and cannot be inferred from the text (blog reader vs RFC vs email), ask before editing. Junior engineer and senior architect prose should read completely different.
3. **Language detected from the text being edited**, not the user's command:
   - Contains Chinese characters + release notes or social post mode → load `references/write-zh-release-notes.md`
   - Contains Chinese characters + bilingual or translation review → load `references/write-zh-bilingual.md`
   - Product/site/app localization review across multiple locales → load `references/write-product-localization.md`; also load `references/write-zh-bilingual.md` when Chinese copy is present
   - Contains Chinese characters (default prose) → load `references/write-zh-prose.md` (quick rules); load `references/write-zh.md` for the full AI-taste pattern catalog
   - Otherwise → load `references/write-en.md`

Read the loaded reference file. Then edit. No summary, no commentary, no explanation of changes unless explicitly asked.

## Durable Context Preflight

See [rules/durable-context.md](../../rules/durable-context.md) for when to read durable context, the read-order budget, and the memory-type mapping.

For `/write`, voice and format constraints are `decision`, `preference`, and `principle` entries; editing checks are `pattern` and `learning`. The supplied text, audience, project docs, current release state, and source material override memory. Durable preferences can set brevity, tone, and social-post shape. They do not override the hard rule to edit in place, keep meaning intact, and avoid change lists unless the user explicitly asks.

## Hard Rules

- **Meaning first, style second.** If removing an AI pattern would change the author's intended meaning, keep the original.
- **No silent restructuring.** Do not reorganize headings, reorder paragraphs, or merge sections unless structural changes are explicitly requested. Edit in place. (Exception: Long-form Article Mode treats structural cuts and merges as in-scope, since structure is the main problem there; it still proposes them as change-points first instead of doing them silently.)
- **Artifact-grounded claims.** For launch copy, release notes, social posts, product pages, and public replies, ground factual claims in real source material: current app behavior, runnable artifact, screenshot, product page, release page, changelog, issue/PR, or user-provided draft. Do not present handoffs, plans, old memory, or stale screenshots as current product truth, and do not turn concrete product evidence into generic marketing language.
- **No em-dash.** Never produce em-dash (U+2014 `—`) or en-dash (U+2013 `–`) in Chinese or English output. Em-dash is the strongest AI-tone fingerprint in this style of writing. Use commas, periods, colons, semicolons, or parentheses to break clauses. Hyphen-minus (`-`) inside compound words is allowed; replace it with a space or a period when possible. When editing a draft that contains em-dashes, replace every one before returning the text.
- **Stop after output.** Deliver the rewritten text. Do not append a list of changes, a justification, or a closer. (Exception: Long-form Article Mode returns change-points for review instead of a rewritten blob; see that mode.)

## Long-form Article Mode

Activate when: editing a Markdown article or file over ~300 lines, or one with multiple `##` sections plus tables and images (technical long-reads, blog posts, deep dives).

In long-form, the dominant problem is usually structural: the same checklist repeated across sections, prose that re-reads a table sitting right above it, list bloat, whole redundant sections. Sentence-level AI taste is the smaller half. A singl