The message was already sent.
I read it back one more time, the way you reread something when it feels wrong before you know why, and there it was at the bottom, in my own message, under my own name, to my own boss:
"If you'd like me to try another approach, let me know and I'll rewrite it."
The agent's sign-off. I had pasted the draft and hit send without reading all the way to the last line. She caught it. I still wince when I think about it.
Keep that story in mind. This whole thing is about that message.
The tells
The em dash is the first thing I see now. Nobody typed it; there's no key for it on a keyboard. It shows up in a post the way a watermark shows up in a photo, and once you notice, you can't stop noticing. Launch announcements. Leadership takes. The comments under both.
Then the antithesis, the big one. "This isn't just a product launch. It's a mindset shift." Deny the small thing, deliver the grand thing. Read your feed with that shape in mind and it's everywhere. Once per post, minimum. The feed has a voice now, and it belongs to nobody.
My file catches others on sight: the emoji bullet lists, "let that sink in," ideas that only travel in threes, the closer where the future is always bright. But the dash and the antithesis are the two that end my reading fastest.
Yesterday it was a CEO. A post about something I actually cared about. Two paragraphs in, I stopped reading and scrolled on to the next thing. There was probably a real point in there, and I'll never know what it was, and neither will most of the people who scrolled past at the speed I did.
And last week it left the internet entirely. I was at the Digital Government Summit, sitting in a panel session, when the host started reading her intro. Multiple antitheses. Out loud. Into a microphone. A real person, standing on a real stage, telling a room full of government IT people that this panel wasn't just a conversation, it was an opportunity to reimagine something or other. I sat there shaking my head, and I want to be careful here, because hosting a panel is work, somebody had to do it, and standing on a stage is its own kind of hard. Reading from a script in front of people is a skill I don't even have. When I speak, I prepare hard and then I just talk, because following a script up there is beyond me. So this comes with sympathy. It was still rough. I used to think this stuff couldn't survive being said out loud. It turns out it survives fine when it sounds great to the person who wrote it, and they never notice it sounds like everything else.
What the tells actually mean
Here's my hot take, the same one I posted. It's opinionated by design, and it comes from inside the boat, from a guy with his own receipts in this game. The goal is that we all get a little better at this, me included. With that on the table: those tells prove something much smaller than "a model wrote this."
I think most people read their drafts before they post them. That's what gets me about it. They read words they would never say, in a voice that has nothing to do with them, and they ship anyway, because the draft was free and it was close enough. Call that what it is: lazy. The output has a name too. Slop.
And why would I ask anybody to get better? I can only speak for readers wired like me, and maybe we're a minority. Plenty of people scroll right past a dash without registering it; not everybody has caught on yet. But here's what happens on my screen: the first em dash puts me on alert. The second one is a verdict. By the second dash I know the writing itself didn't get the effort, that the robots were left alone with it, and I lose interest mid-paragraph and move on to the next scroll. That's one reader's wiring. I just don't think it's rare wiring, and I'd bet it gets more common every month, because the tells are being learned faster than they're being unlearned. The readers who leave over this leave quietly. You'll never see it in your metrics. You'll just wonder why the people you most wanted to reach never seem to engage.
And the sameness has reached places with higher stakes than a feed. My recruiting buddy Chris Sellers talks about this constantly from the hiring side: AI writes most resumes now, and most job descriptions too, so both sides of the hiring table sound identical, and the whole game becomes differentiation. When every candidate ships the default voice, sounding like yourself stops being a style choice. It's a competitive advantage.
And the sentiment is spreading. On Monday, a post went around titled "Don't be a meat proxy", asking people to stop relaying agent output they never actually read. Same disease, different door: that one's about what lands in your inbox. This one's about what you publish under your face.
I hold myself to the same deal, which is the other half of why this article exists. If you're giving my writing your time, effort is what you're owed back. It's why this piece went through the same rules file it's telling you about.
I understand exactly why people ship the default. I use AI for every single thing I write. This article included. There are agents running on three different machines in my house right now, and a lot of what they do all day is writing. The cost of a decent draft has collapsed to nothing, and mostly that's great. People who never wrote are publishing. Executives are posting under their own names instead of routing everything through marketing.
But the cost of sounding like you didn't collapse. It stayed exactly where it's always been. It costs a read, out loud, and the will to fix the lines that aren't yours. We have to reclaim our tone, our voice, us. The agents write with me all day and I would not give that up. Letting them replace the part of me that people actually recognize is a different transaction, and most of the feed took the deal without reading the terms.
Where my rules came from
I keep a rules file. Every draft I write with an agent gets run through it, in three passes: words, then structure, then voice. People ask what's in it, and the honest answer is that every rule in the file is a mistake I actually made. It isn't a style guide. It's scar tissue.
The em dash ban is the oldest rule, and it didn't start with AI. I write fiction on the side, and my author-rules file said NO EM DASHES EVER, ZERO TOLERANCE, back before the tells discourse existed. When the models flooded everything with them, I already had the allergy. That one rule has caught more slop than any other line in the file.
The chat-residue rule came from the message to my boss. Anything that sounds like the agent talking to me instead of me talking to you: "let me know if you'd like," "I hope this helps," "would you like me to." One embarrassing morning, one permanent rule. The check for it has fired more times than I'd like to admit.
The antithesis rule came from the feed wearing me down. And after the summit, it moved up the list. It's the tell my eye catches fastest now, faster than the dash, because the dash is a character and the antithesis is a whole way of thinking. When every claim arrives dressed as the denial of a smaller claim, nothing means anything. My rule: state the real thing and delete the denial.
The false-honesty rule is mine too. "To be honest," "I'll be real with you," "not gonna lie." Announcing that you're being honest implies you weren't a sentence ago. Say the thing and let the plain admission carry the weight.
There are more, and the file is below, free. But that's the shape of all of them: something got past me, someone caught it or I caught it late, and now there's a rule.
What a pass actually looks like
Words on a page, because nobody shows their editing work. Here's a paragraph the way the default voice writes it:
We're thrilled to announce our new deployment pipeline — it isn't just an upgrade, it's a fundamental shift in how we ship software. By leveraging cutting-edge automation, teams can seamlessly deliver features faster than ever before. The future of our platform looks bright.
Pass one strips the words: the dash, the antithesis, "cutting-edge," "seamlessly," "the future looks bright." Pass two finds the structure problems: there's no actual information in it, nothing is named, nothing is numbered, and it resolves into a bow. Pass three asks what I would say to a person standing in front of me. What's left:
The new pipeline is live. Deploys that took forty minutes take six. The old one broke twice last quarter during releases; this one hasn't broken yet, and when it does, rollback is one command. Ask me about it in six months.
Same event. One of these was written by a default. The other one has a person in it.
Take the file
Everything I use is here, free. No email gate, nothing for sale, no surprise on the other side of the click. Take it, change it, disagree with half of it. It's a starting point for your version, not a standard for mine.
- rules.md · the canonical rules, all three passes
- claude-code-SKILL.md · drop into
~/.claude/skills/redpen/SKILL.md - codex-AGENTS.md · merge into your global or repo
AGENTS.md - github-copilot-instructions.md · drop into
.github/copilot-instructions.md - ms-copilot-prompt.md · paste into a Microsoft Copilot chat or agent instructions
It's also on my GitHub, if you'd rather clone it and follow along as it grows.
One warning from experience: the file catches the mechanical stuff. The last pass is still you. Even now, after the rules and the checks, there are one or two lines in everything I write that only I can catch, because the tell isn't on any list. It just doesn't sound like me. I fix those by hand, and I don't hand them back to the agent.
Your name is on it.
Tell me I'm wrong. What's the tell that makes you stop reading? I want the pushback, and I want it in your voice.