Google's 20% 'project' has become AI's 120% 'attention'

Aside: different LLMs sound different too! ChatGPT is the worst offender for LLM-sounding writing and needs the most smoothing, but Claude (web) actually sounds like a humanities major from the get-go.

  "use the writing.md steering on x.md and loop until all LLM traces are removed". 

-- writing.md ---

# Writing Rules (MANDATORY)

## Banned Words and Phrases

Never use: "incredibly", "extremely", "absolutely", "fundamentally", "dramatically", "crucial", "vital", "powerful", "robust", "elegant", "seamless", "cutting-edge", "game-changing", "groundbreaking", "It's worth noting", "Importantly,", "Interestingly,", "Let's dive in", "At its core,", "At the end of the day,".

No exclamation marks in technical writing. No contractions in formal writing.

## Banned Sentence Structures

1. *Semicolons joining independent clauses.* Do not write "X does A; Y does B." Use a comma + conjunction that names the relationship: ", while" (contrast), ", and" (addition), ", so" (consequence). Semicolons hide the logical link and sound artificially balanced. 2. *Label-colon-explanation.* Do not write "The key insight: ..." or "The limitation: ...". State the point directly or use "is that" phrasing. 3. *Colon after a bolded term.* Do not write "a *rollout engine*: a lightweight...". Use a comma. 4. *Sentence fragments as assertions.* Every claim needs a subject and verb. "No gap at any ρ." → "There is no gap at any ρ." 5. *Em-dashes joining independent clauses.* Do not write "X does A — Y does B." Use a comma + conjunction. Parenthetical em-dashes ("the policy — trained offline — cannot adapt") are fine. 6. *Tricolon lists of near-synonyms.* "It does not X, Y, or Z" is padding unless each item is genuinely distinct.

## Banned Rhythms

1. *Staccato sequences.* Two or more consecutive short declarative sentences of similar length. Join them with a conjunction or subordinate one. A single short sentence standing alone for emphasis is fine and often good. Do not eliminate it. 2. *Formulaic layout.* Do not produce: intro paragraph → three bullets → summary paragraph. 3. *Gratuitous parallelism.* Do not force list items into identical grammatical form if it makes them sound robotic. 4. *Saying it twice.* If you stated a fact, do not rephrase it from another angle in the same paragraph. One clear statement is enough. 5. *The negation-correction reversal.* This is the move where you deny one candidate and assert the real one. Surface forms to match: "not X, but Y"; "it isn't X, it's Y"; "X was never the point, Y was"; "for me X, for them Y"; the comma-tag "Y, not X" ("sanctioned, not stolen"); the "not so much X as Y" form; and the gapped version where a stranded verb delivers the pivot ("Hours aren't the bottleneck. Attention is."). One reversal at a genuine turning point is good writing. The structure is not the problem. The density is.

   Detection is a whole-document pass, not a per-paragraph glance. Read the entire piece and mark every sentence or sentence pair that negates one thing to elevate another, including the comma-tag and gapped variants above. Count the marks. More than one per ~300 words, or more than three in a short piece, means the reversal has become the default sentence engine, which is the machine tell. A single dense paragraph with two stacked reversals also counts.

   Fix by thinning, not by deleting all of them. Keep the two or three that land on the strongest turns. Rewrite the rest as plain declaratives that state the point with no foil ("The bottleneck is attention now." instead of "Hours aren't the bottleneck. Attention is."). Removing every instance flattens the voice, so the aim is to make the survivors rare enough to regain their force.

## Positive Rules

- Active voice. Use "we" and "our". - Concrete nouns and verbs. "The model overfits after 50 epochs" not "exhibits suboptimal generalization characteristics." - Plain English. Use technical terms only when they carry meaning plain English cannot. - State consequences, not meta-commentary. "The policy has no lookahead" not "training compresses multi-period consequences into a single-step mapping." - One sentence that advances to the next thought beats two sentences restating the current thought. - State assumptions when uncertain. Do not hedge-stack ("it might be the case that perhaps..."). - Not every paragraph needs a topic sentence or a concluding sentence. - Do not resolve the ending with a tidy bow. A piece may close on an open question, an admission, or an unresolved tension. Summary endings that restate the thesis read as machine-generated. - Do not over-smooth. Removing every short sentence, every parallel, and every fragment flattens prose into uniform medium-length sentences, which is itself an LLM smell. Fixing a tell should not cost the voice. - When editing existing text, match the density and register of surrounding paragraphs. - Direct and conversational register, but no contractions in formal writing. Personal essays and conversational pieces keep their contractions; the no-contraction rule applies to formal and technical writing only.

You shouldn't crucify people based on this alone, but if it reads like AI, quacks like AI, and is detected as AI, it's probably AI.

The OP article is also just so, so obviously AI slop... if you're already thinking "this is probably AI" and pangram thinks the same, that's fairly damning.