A catalogue of AI writing tells, each with a plain rewrite. Drop this into any workflow to reduce the frequency of AI writing tells by between 30-70% based on Fireside tests. Free to copy, paste into a system prompt, or install as an agent skill.
Language models have habits. They reach for delve and leverage, open on "In today's fast-paced world", close on a motivational line nobody asked for, and hedge every claim into mush. Better Tropes names those habits and shows the version a careful human writer would produce instead.
It comes in two shapes, with identical content.
| File | Use it for |
|---|---|
better-tropes.md |
Reading, editing, or pasting into a system prompt, a CLAUDE.md, or a Cursor rule |
better-tropes/SKILL.md |
Installing as an agent skill, so it applies without anyone remembering to paste it |
The skill is the catalogue with a header on it. Nothing is written twice, so the two can never disagree.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fromfireside/better-tropes/main/better-tropes.mdThen drop better-tropes.md into your system prompt as-is. It works unmodified, but it works better tuned to your workflow: a technical blog post has different tells from a social post.
To install it as a skill instead, save better-tropes/SKILL.md to .claude/skills/better-tropes/SKILL.md inside a project, or to ~/.claude/skills/better-tropes/SKILL.md to have it everywhere. Your agent loads it when the task involves writing.
Most "make it sound less like AI" files are full of editorial commentary: explanations of why a phrase is bad, arguments with the reader, meta-instructions about tone. That commentary competes with the rest of your prompt and degrades performance on the actual task.
This one strips it out. Every entry names a tell, explains it in a sentence, and shows the two lines side by side.
Verbs that sound important but carry no more meaning than a plain one:
delve,leverage,utilize,harness,foster,streamline,unlock,embark,spearhead,navigate. Prefer the shortest verb that is true.
- ✗ We leverage data to unlock growth and streamline collaboration.
- ✓ We use data to grow and to help teams work together.
| Section | Covers |
|---|---|
| Word Choice | Filler verbs, magic adverbs, abstraction nouns, empty superlatives |
| Sentence Structure | Rhythm tics, the negation flip, symmetrical constructions |
| Paragraph Structure | Openers and transitions that announce rather than say |
| Tone | Relentless positivity, false vulnerability, grandiose stakes |
| Formatting | Em-dash overuse, heading inflation, fragment emphasis |
| Composition | Definition openers, scope inflation, invented sources |
| Whole-Piece Patterns | Dead metaphors, one-point dilution, the motivational closer |
A rendered, searchable version lives at fromfireside.com/tools/better-tropes.
Better Tropes comes from Fireside, which turns the work a company already does — merged pull requests, customer calls, meeting transcripts — into posts written in that company's own voice. Every tell in this file is one we had to catch by hand before it reached a customer's feed.
It began as a superset of tropes.fyi, which taught us to expect better.
This repository is a mirror. The catalogue is maintained upstream and synced here on every change, so a pull request merged into this repo would be overwritten by the next sync.
Open one anyway — it is the easiest way to propose a specific wording, and it gets read. An accepted suggestion is applied upstream, ships back here on the next sync, and your PR is closed with a link to the commit that carried it. The change lands; it just enters through a different door, and you are credited here.
Issues are just as welcome, and are the better format for "this tell is missing" or "this rewrite is worse than the original" — neither needs a diff.
The bar for a new entry: it has to be a tell a careful human writer would not produce, and the rewrite has to be something a careful human writer would. Entries that swap one fashionable word for another do not earn their place.
CC BY 4.0 — copy it, paste it into a system prompt, ship it inside a product, sell what you make with it. Keep the attribution.