ai-tells-scanlisted

# AI Tells — Surface Scan A near-mechanical pass that strips the obvious AI fingerprints from prose. Runs before any prose artifact is presented as final. ## When This Runs Auto-engages whenever the task produces prose-as-artifact: - READMEs, CONTRIBUTING, CHANGELOG - Technical documentation under `docs/` - PR descriptions, PR comments, commit message bodies - Tutorials, guides, blog posts, release notes - Any markdown intended for human readers Skip for: code comments (different rules), inline chat replies, structured data (YAML/JSON), or anything pure-config. ## How To Use After drafting prose, scan it once against each list below. Every match is a rewrite, not a debate. The lists are deliberately short and high-leverage — if a tell isn't here, it belongs in `ai-tells-review`. --- ## Banned Punctuation - **Em dashes connecting clauses.** Replace with period, comma, colon, or parentheses depending on the relationship. The em dash is the single most diagnostic AI tell in prose. - **Smart quotes when the source is plain ASCII.** Mixing curly and straight quotes in a doc is a copy-paste fingerprint. - **Ellipses for dramatic pause** in technical writing (`it's...complicated`). Reads as performance. ## Banned Sentence Openers - "Importantly," "Notably," "Crucially," "Interestingly" - "Furthermore," "Moreover," "Additionally" - "It's worth noting that…" / "It bears mentioning…" - "In essence," "Ultimately," "At its core" - "In conclusion," "To summarize," "In summary"