I got so angry at Fable's verbosity that I had a non-Anthropic model vibe-code a dedicated English linter. One that threw spaghetti at the wall in the form of combined Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI and a whole pile of regexes and NLP as a fast Simple Technical English Gate. It also incorporates nicely into other agent projects, like for comment and README linting.

So if it gets bad I simply tell it "I ain't reading all that, feed it through the STE Gate" and it will tame the results. I haven't bothered to set it up as a hook yet.