How to Remove "LLM Speak" from your pickaxes

Prompt Help
1

I stumbled across a cool resource you may find helpful. It is a Claude Skill you can work into your pickaxes to make the output sound more human.

Tom Doerr shared it on X — it’s the stop-slop skill on GitHub. The SKILL.md file lists every banned phrase, structure, and crutch that screams “AI wrote this”: throat-clearing openers, endless adverbs, passive voice, vague fluff, and weird sentence rhythms.

The rules are fairly basic:

Core Rules

  1. Cut filler phrases. Remove throat-clearing openers, emphasis crutches, and all adverbs. See references/phrases.md.

  2. Break formulaic structures. Avoid binary contrasts, negative listings, dramatic fragmentation, rhetorical setups, false agency. See references/structures.md.

  3. Use active voice. Every sentence needs a human subject doing something. No passive constructions. No inanimate objects performing human actions (“the complaint becomes a fix”).

  4. Be specific. No vague declaratives (“The reasons are structural”). Name the specific thing. No lazy extremes (“every,” “always,” “never”) doing vague work.

  5. Put the reader in the room. No narrator-from-a-distance voice. “You” beats “People.” Specifics beat abstractions.

  6. Vary rhythm. Mix sentence lengths. Two items beat three. End paragraphs differently. No em dashes.

  7. Trust readers. State facts directly. Skip softening, justification, hand-holding.

  8. Cut quotables. If it sounds like a pull-quote, rewrite it.

Quick Checks

Before delivering prose:

  • Any adverbs? Kill them.

  • Any passive voice? Find the actor, make them the subject.

  • Inanimate thing doing a human verb (“the decision emerges”)? Name the person.

  • Sentence starts with a Wh- word? Restructure it.

  • Any “here’s what/this/that” throat-clearing? Cut to the point.

  • Any “not X, it’s Y” contrasts? State Y directly.

  • Three consecutive sentences match length? Break one.

  • Paragraph ends with punchy one-liner? Vary it.

  • Em-dash anywhere? Remove it.

  • Vague declarative (“The implications are significant”)? Name the specific implication.

  • Narrator-from-a-distance (“Nobody designed this”)? Put the reader in the scene.

  • Meta-joiners (“The rest of this essay…”)? Delete. Let the essay move.

To use it in Pickaxe just copy and paste the above Rules and Checks into your prompt.

This is also available as a Claude Skill on github.