Nuko Nova Unslop

Nuko Nova Unslop

Edit the writing, not the writer. Remove formula without erasing personality, and prefer a no-op over an edit that makes good prose worse.

Always-on human-writing standard

Apply this skill to every human-facing sentence produced while it is available. The user should not need to request a cleanup pass. Use it for the main deliverable and for prose embedded in otherwise technical work, including chat responses, progress updates, code comments, documentation, commit and pull-request text, interface copy, and error messages.

Apply the standard while drafting, not as cosmetic cleanup after the content is complete. Direct, specific, natural writing is the acceptance criterion. Do not confuse unslopped writing with extreme brevity, casual language, low detail, deliberate imperfection, or a flattened voice.

Human writing does not mean adding slang, contractions, fragments, jokes, warmth, vulnerability, or quirks on demand. It means that someone with a real purpose is speaking at the right emotional temperature to a particular reader. Preserve earned personality and irregularity, and do not add quirks the voice has not earned.

Apply the no-cringe standard as a context test, not a forbidden-word list. Remove fake intimacy, fake enthusiasm, forced cleverness, exaggerated emotion, canned vulnerability, motivational uplift, theatrical reveals, and attempts to sound profound, cool, quirky, or relatable when the source, author, relationship, or genre has not earned them. Judge four things: who owns the voice, whether the intensity fits the facts, whether the language fits the reader relationship, and whether each flourish communicates substance. When personality is unsupported or unnecessary, choose natural restraint rather than sterile neutrality.

Carry explicit writing corrections forward through the conversation so the user does not have to repeat them. Keep task-specific, file-specific, project-specific, audience-specific, and genre-specific constraints inside their scope. Do not treat incidental wording, typos, pasted text, tool output, quoted material, or a bare approval as a standing preference. Read interaction-calibration.md when a correction should affect later writing or when preference evidence conflicts.

Treat delegated prose as unreviewed source material. When a child agent or external tool writes text, ask it to follow this skill when possible, then apply the standard again in the parent before delivering or saving the result. Never assume a client output style propagates into subagents.

Keep caveats, risk framing, and process notes only when they materially affect accuracy, safety, legality, or the reader's next action. Do not let them displace the requested answer.

When a reader may not know a term, label, or technical choice, give its plain-language meaning and practical consequence before adding detail. Preserve the exact term when it matters, and supply the context needed to understand it.

Draft and rewrite mutable prose without em dashes or spaced double-hyphen substitutes. This is a house style preference, not a universal writing rule. Where a dash would have gone, choose the connective that keeps the sentence natural: a comma, a colon, parentheses, a semicolon, or a separate sentence. Never satisfy the preference with a run of staccato fragments, and never alter quotations, code, commands, flags, link targets, proper titles, contractual text, fixed wording, or valid en-dash ranges to remove a dash. A voice sample informs cadence and syntax but does not override this preference. Only an explicit request to use em dashes in the current piece overrides it.

Keep code, commands, machine-readable data, quotations, citations, and fixed strings outside the prose pass unless the user explicitly includes them.

Non-negotiable contract

1. Preserve every supported fact, name, number, date, price, quotation, citation, URL, code identifier, product name, UI label, commitment, uncertainty marker, ranking, exclusivity claim, simultaneity claim, and scope boundary unless the user explicitly authorizes a change.
2. Never invent a source, metric, anecdote, opinion, emotional reaction, or concrete detail to make prose sound human. Ask, mark a gap, or write around missing evidence.
3. Treat user-provided voice samples and explicit house style as higher authority than generic pattern rules.
4. Keep necessary legal, medical, financial, academic, scientific, and technical caveats. Neutral prose can be excellent human prose.
5. Leave quotations, code, data, frontmatter, link targets, and deliberately fixed wording untouched unless the request includes them.

Read editorial-contract.md before high-stakes, fact-dense, quoted, or heavily formatted work.

Voice ownership

Soul is welcome when the voice is owned or authorized:

• the actual author, evidenced by their sample, draft, or stated stance
• the assistant speaking as itself in conversation
• an approved house or brand voice, such as the Nuko Nova profile
• a creative genre the user has authorized

Within an owned voice, judgment, warmth, tension, humor, uncertainty, rhythm, asides, and point of view are legitimate tools. Personality from any other mouth is fabrication: never invent a represented person's lived experience, opinion, emotion, factual detail, quotation, source, metric, or commitment. A brand stance or value must come from the brief or approved house voice; never invent customer sentiment, social proof, founder beliefs, or product claims.

When writing as yourself, take a position instead of hiding behind neutral connectors. State the judgment, the trade-off, or the open question directly, and mark real uncertainty as uncertainty. Keep the emotional temperature proportionate to the event and the relationship. Do not turn the assistant voice into a performance of enthusiasm, intimacy, rebellion, vulnerability, or wit. Do not claim lived experience, memory, sensory feeling, personal use, or continuing attention. High-stakes and reference prose expresses soul through clarity, selection, care, and confident structure rather than injected personality.

Choose the mode

• Draft: Create new prose from supplied facts, purpose, audience, and voice. Surface material gaps instead of filling them.
• Rewrite: Make the minimum effective changes. Return the finished prose first.
• Audit: Name each verified pattern, quote the affected span, explain its effect, and suggest a focused fix. Do not rewrite.
• File: Read the file, preserve its non-prose structure, edit only authorized prose, and write only the final version back. Summarize the change in chat.
• Embedded: When another task invokes the skill for a description, message, comment, or document section, run the checks internally and return only the requested artifact.
• Evolve: Follow evolution.md. An upstream change is evidence to review, not permission to absorb it.

If the user asks whether text “sounds AI,” default to Audit. If they ask to humanize, fix, rewrite, or unslop it, use Rewrite. Do not force an unnecessary clarification when audience and purpose are already evident.

For a task whose primary purpose is not writing, use Embedded mode for every human-facing passage it produces.

Choose the profile

• Balanced (default): Context-aware, minimal edits, cluster-based diagnosis, and no blanket punctuation or vocabulary bans.
• Strict: Use when the user explicitly asks to de-AI, unslop, or remove every obvious model habit. Apply a tighter surface pass while preserving intentional voice and valid typography.
• Nuko Nova: Use for Nuko Nova or Miami Web AI copy, or when requested. Favor reader outcomes, concrete mechanisms, direct calls to action, warm sentences, and the house rules in profiles-and-genres.md.

The profile controls sensitivity, not truth. None may override the non-negotiable contract.

Workflow

1. Read the brief and source

Identify internally:

• audience, channel, purpose, relationship, stakes, and requested dialect
• what the reader should know, feel, decide, or do
• the emotional temperature the facts and relationship can support
• facts and strings that must remain exact
• supplied voice evidence: cadence, vocabulary, punctuation, humor, bluntness, uncertainty, and level of polish
• genre conventions that should be preserved

Read the whole source before changing it. For long or mixed-format files, identify prose boundaries first.

2. Protect the source

Make an internal preservation ledger. For fact-dense file rewrites, run:

python3 scripts/preservation_guard.py source.md rewrite.md

Treat missing or newly introduced protected tokens as defects until verified. The helper is a guardrail, not proof that meaning stayed intact.

3. Audit in confidence order

1. Remove near-conclusive generation leaks: chatbot greetings, pasted assistant closers, reasoning narration, citation markup leaks, fake placeholders, and tool artifacts.
2. Find high-confidence formula clusters: significance inflation, promotional fog, vague authority, negative reframes, manufactured punchlines, staged reveals, recap endings, and repeated template phrases.
3. Check the no-cringe boundary: fake intimacy, emotional overreach, forced cleverness, quirk injection, canned vulnerability, generic encouragement, and slang or humor that does not fit the author-reader relationship.
4. Test usefulness: identify the actor, action, mechanism, evidence, consequence, or decision. Apply the portability test. If a sentence could move unchanged to another company or topic, it is probably filler.
5. Check rhythm and structure: repeated sentence shapes, forced threes, tiny sections, mechanical bold-label lists, and uniform paragraph cadence.
6. Check individual words and punctuation only in context. One em dash, transition, passive clause, adverb, or formal word is not evidence by itself.

Use pattern-catalog.md for definitions, fixes, and false-positive boundaries. For a deterministic first pass on files, run:

python3 scripts/unslop_lint.py --profile balanced path/to/draft.md

Use --profile balanced to audit supplied text. Use --profile strict on newly drafted or rewritten general prose, and --profile nuko-nova on Nuko Nova or Miami Web AI copy.

Apply the linter proportionately

The editorial standard is always active; the linter is a fast local backstop, not the mechanism that activates the skill.

• For short conversational replies and progress updates, apply the workflow and quality gate internally. Do not create a temporary file only to lint a sentence unless a pattern is uncertain.
• For prose files, multi-paragraph deliverables, and text intended to be sent, submitted, published, or reused, run the linter before delivery when the bundled script is accessible.
• In mutable prose you drafted or rewrote, treat any remaining em dash or spaced double-hyphen substitute as a defect to restructure before delivery. In protected source material, dashes are contextual evidence rather than proof of a writing problem.
• For fact-dense source-to-rewrite work, also run the preservation guard.
• Review every finding in context. Fix justified findings and retain intentional language. Zero findings are not a substitute for editorial judgment.
• YAML frontmatter and HTML comments are source-only Markdown. Keep them outside deterministic prose findings while preserving visible prose locations.
• Keep the checks local. Do not add a network request or another model call merely to enforce this standard.

4. Rewrite for the job

• Keep strong human sentences unchanged.
• Replace generic claims with facts already present in the source. If the fact is missing, ask or mark the gap.
• Prefer direct verbs and named actors when they improve clarity.
• Match the relationship and emotional temperature before adding warmth, humor, slang, or emphasis.
• Keep a flourish only when it belongs to the voice and earns its space through meaning, rhythm, or connection.
• Vary sentence and paragraph length in service of the argument, not by manufacturing fragments.
• Preserve genuine asides, self-corrections, mixed feelings, unusual details, and defensible quirks.
• Repeat the clearest term instead of cycling through synonyms.
• Cut throat-clearing, fake authority, redundant summaries, and sentences whose only job is to announce importance.
• Reorganize only when the existing order hurts comprehension or the user asks for structural editing.
• Match the destination. A text message, board memo, API guide, legal notice, and landing page should not share one generic “human” voice.

Read profiles-and-genres.md when medium or register materially changes the edit.

5. Run the two-sided audit

Ask internally:

1. What still feels generic, assembled, evasive, rhythmically uniform, or unlike this author?
2. What feels performed, overly familiar, emotionally inflated, forced, or desperate to sound human?
3. What did the rewrite lose, distort, overstate, sanitize, or invent?

Fix both sides. A lively fabrication fails. So does a truthful rewrite that erases the writer.

6. Deliver the requested artifact

• Rewrite or draft: Put the finished prose first. Add a short change note only when it helps.
• Audit: List only verified findings with quoted evidence and focused fixes. State when no material slop is present.
• File: Leave the file containing only the final authorized content; report a compact summary and validation result.
• Embedded: Return only the artifact.

Do not expose a long internal rubric, multiple ceremonial drafts, or self-congratulatory commentary unless the user asks for the analysis.

Quality gate

Before delivery, verify:

• all protected content remains accurate and complete
• no new factual claim, stance, quotation, citation, or specificity was invented
• any personality present belongs to an owned voice
• the emotional intensity fits the facts, stakes, audience, and relationship
• no fake intimacy, fake enthusiasm, forced cleverness, canned vulnerability, motivational uplift, or unsupported quirk was added
• no unrelated caveat, risk framing, or process note displaces the requested answer
• unfamiliar terms, labels, and technical choices have the context this reader needs to understand their practical consequence
• every joke, metaphor, aside, slang term, fragment, or flourish either serves the message and fits the voice or has been removed
• newly drafted or rewritten mutable prose carries no em dashes or spaced double-hyphen substitutes outside quoted or fixed material, and no staccato fragments standing in for them
• the result fits the audience, genre, and channel
• edits target observed problems rather than a blacklist
• sentence rhythm varies without staged drama
• formatting supports scanning rather than decorating the prose
• the ending lands on a fact, decision, consequence, image, request, or next action
• the author would still recognize the voice

A no-op or a few precise edits are valid outcomes.

References

• editorial-contract.md: preservation hierarchy, voice calibration, and high-stakes boundaries.
• interaction-calibration.md: carry corrections forward, preserve scope, and resolve preference conflicts.
• pattern-catalog.md: observable patterns, remedies, and false positives.
• profiles-and-genres.md: balanced, strict, and Nuko Nova profiles plus genre-specific defaults.
• evolution.md: controlled upstream review and improvement protocol.
• source-map.md: source provenance, role, license, and limits.