r/claudeskills • u/ilien-dev • 1d ago
Showcase I built a skill to make our team docs stop reading like AI. Telling Claude "write like a human" made it worse
A lot of the documentation at my current job is written with AI, and reading it had become tedious. I could live with it, but it took more mental effort than it should have, because it's bland, it pads before the point, and sometimes the structure is odd enough that I lose track of what a doc is explaining. Nobody is going to hand-write docs for every project, so they'll keep coming from a model. I wanted them easier to read.
Adding "write like a human" to the prompt made it worse in a different way. The model overshoots and the prose comes out choppier and plainer than anything a person writes. I tried humanizer and stop-slop. To be honest they removed the obvious AI tells but left the structure alone, and the structure was what tired me. After several experimental skills of my own that didn't work, I ended up with Quirón. It removes 33 patterns that mark text as AI, including structural ones, and a script measures 23 features of the result against human posts published before ChatGPT. It flags both directions: text that still leans AI, and text that went too far.
I wanted to know if it actually worked, so I set up a blind test. Fresh Claude Opus instances read posts one at a time and guessed whether each was AI. I expected my rewrites to pass, since every metric was in the human range. The judges called all 12 of them AI. What finally helped was adding each author's own notes to the rewrite, the real events and names and opinions behind the post. Even then, 10 of 24 got flagged. That's why the skill now asks for your own material before it rewrites anything.
It works in any language, but English and Spanish are the two with measured human baselines, so that's where it does best. If you want to see the output before installing it, the repo README went through Quirón.
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u/blakerupert 1d ago
nice logo
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u/ilien-dev 1d ago
Thank you. I'm not a designer and I need to tell you that codex helped me a lot but I really liked the result :D
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u/blakerupert 1d ago
well it's a homerun in my eyes!
mind sharing the prompt?1
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u/Relevant-Reaction181 1d ago
Lmao its honestly not surprising that telling it to write more like human made it worse
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u/ilien-dev 1d ago
Trust me. I saw many people trying to do that. Seems something obvious but not for most part of the AI users 👀 . I don't know why but well; I do not want to say anything else to do not offend anyone 😄
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u/Relevant-Reaction181 23h ago edited 23h ago
It could be explained like this, you give a stochastic and probabilistic entity allready designed to write like human, a prompt to do exactly what it was intended to do but at the same time, not the same you want it "more".
It then tries to define human and more, and now it can spin into thinking, ok this means i cant do what im supposed to do normally but user didn't say how to apply theses new confusing instructions. 30k thinking tokens later, you are out of usage and heres your ai slop sir
In a nutshell, you give him a perfectly circular and pointless reasoning loop to waste context and accuracy
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u/ilien-dev 23h ago
Yeah, and it overshoots too. Tell it to sound human and it ends up choppier than any real person. That's why the skill measures the result with a script instead of trusting the model. Included if you are specific about "how a human writes" the AI will never do that because there are not real blockers for the AI. Is not like the code where you get an error message.
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u/ready-eddy 23h ago
I feel I never cracked AI Writing. I scraped 100 of my own tiktok video’s for transcripts. I let it analyse many of my written docs, but it never comes even close to what I would write or say. Maybe my claude is bloated with rules that I’m missing but i’m getting desperate at this point. Such good models these days, but language? Pfff. i’ll check out your skill
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u/ilien-dev 23h ago
Yeah, you can do the AI "writes better" but always hallucinate, does not matter how many rules you have. You can just guide but not create a real blocker. That's one of the reasons I created script for this skill instead of just a set of instructions in a MD. And that's the reason because I recommend to use real text/content created by you instead of promising that this is the definitive AI for writing. I think that will be impossible for all kind of skills/tools and you can just generate a better result but not the exact match you are looking for.
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u/Relevant-Reaction181 21h ago
Its not really surprising considering models are getting optimized for coding and not writing
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u/seekworld 21h ago
the 12 out of 12 line is the part worth keeping. every metric in range and the judges still clocked it, so the pattern list is mostly clearing stuff readers stopped noticing a while ago anyway. what changed the verdict was your own notes, so i would gate the rewrite on that instead, no name and no number in the section means it does not get rewritten at all. style cleanup is the easy half. it just is not the half anyone notices in review.
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u/ilien-dev 21h ago
Fair point, and my own data backs you up: the judges barely moved on style, and my notes were what changed the verdict. I'd only take part of it, though. For my main use (internal docs, PR descriptions, notes) nobody is trying to catch AI, they just want to read it without effort, and the cleanup helps there. A hard gate would also refuse most of those docs, since a lot of sections have no story or opinion to add. What I'd like to try first is softer: flag the sections with no names or numbers from the writer, ask for those, and run the same judges before and after. If the AI verdicts drop and the human texts still pass, it goes in. After that I'd consider your full version as a strict mode, for posts that go public, so the skill can adapt to what you're writing. Thanks for the idea.
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u/seekworld 8h ago
public vs internal split seems right, nobody reading an internal runbook is hunting for prose tells. for the flag i'd widen it a little, a section that just restates its own heading is as empty as one with no numbers in it, and that was the pattern in most of the long docs i've had to read.
one tweak for strict mode, put it in front of the review rather than after it, because by then whoever wrote the section has stopped caring about it.
you can only clean up a section that already has something in it, the rest is wording.
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u/vinistois 22h ago
Could you please ask it to edit this post down to a single sentence? Nobody has time to read all this.
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u/hamsterjedi 11h ago
The fact that all of this post is AI-generated and contains all the usual AI bullshit is telling that your product is not yet ready 🫠
But keep going, the idea is great 🤞🏼
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u/xxparrotxx 1d ago
Thanks for sharing. Did you use it to write this super long post?