# Inject Vernacular > - Skill: `petar-djukic/inject-vernacular` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add petar-djukic/inject-vernacular` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/petar-djukic/inject-vernacular/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: petar-djukic (https://skillmd.com/u/petar-djukic) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/petar-djukic/inject-vernacular --- --- name: inject-vernacular description: >- Terminal, non-generative vernacular stage: apply the deterministic idiolect operators from writing-voice/idiolect.yaml (colon-verdicts, em-dashes, antitheses, connective and hedge swaps, spoken-marker strips, sentence splits) at per-register target rates, plus the substrate calque catalog (zapravo, recimo, ne ide) at site-matched landing spots. Substitution and restoration only — nothing samples, so it may run after every generative stage. Keeps a machine-readable edit log for marker-survival analysis; an optional verifier model judges each edit keep/drop but never writes. Triggers: inject vernacular, terminal stage, idiolect operators, apply my idiolect, restore my markers, vernacular pass. --- # Inject Vernacular (terminal stage) Every generative pass regresses text toward the model's distribution center — the Strategy Theatre provenance logs showed match-voice injecting bold lead-ins against instructions, tighten-style inventing a sentence, and a rerun rewriting hand-cleaned prose eight times out of eight. The voice therefore cannot be *protected* by prompts, and it cannot be *restored* by another generative pass either. This stage is the answer to the second half: a deterministic operator bank, applied mechanically, as the LAST stage that writes. After it, models read but never write (the humanize pipeline invariant). ## What it does `scripts/inject_vernacular.py ` discovers `writing-voice/` by walking up from the draft, loads `idiolect.yaml`, and applies each marker's operator toward its `essay_target` (per 1000 words, ±30% tolerance before anything fires — the bank's `essay_target_rule`). It refuses to run without the bank: this stage has no defaults, because the operator bank IS the configuration. Every edit is a substitution or restoration over text already in the document or a fixed swap from the bank. Nothing samples; nothing is generated. Runs are idempotent — a second pass over its own output makes no edits. | marker | operator here | |---|---| | colon-verdict | RESTORE: join "X. That is, / This means / In other words, y" into "X: y". REDUCE from the document's end (no provenance for "latest-added"). | | em-dash | RESTORE: parenthetical asides become em-dash pairs. REDUCE: dash pairs back to parentheses. | | antithesis-not | RESTORE: "X rather than Y" / "X instead of Y" → "X, not Y". REDUCE reverses it. | | kind-of | Delete excess over the trace target, reverse document order; **never injected**. | | okay, you-know | STRIP outside quoted speech; quoted speech survives. | | right-tag | STRIP the ", right?" tag, keep the sentence. | | so-initial | CAP: delete sentence-initial "So" above target; never injected. | | ai-connectives | Sentence-initial "However," → "But"; "Moreover,/Furthermore,/Additionally," → "And". | | i-think | REDUCE receipts-first (paragraphs carrying a number or citation lose their hedge first). RESTORE below target only at voice-critic unhedged-prediction flags (`--critic-flags report.json`): the flagged sentence gets an "I think" prefix, never past target, never on a sentence carrying a number or citation, and only when the first word is safely lowercasable (a determiner or pronoun — a possible proper noun skips the flag rather than risking "I think claude"). Which claims are unhedged predictions is the critic's judgment; the application stays deterministic over its spans. | | maybe | "perhaps" → "maybe" always; excess capped. | | sentence-length | SPLIT any sentence over 30 words at the semicolon or the top-level ", and/, but". MERGE is manual and never performed. | | probably, be-able-to | RETAIN: structurally no-ops — never injected, never deleted. Listed in the report as intentionally untouched. | | he-agent, article-density | Gate-read territory. The bank itself marks the referent/POS judgment not machine-checkable; this script never attempts them. | ### Calque operators (substrate layer) The bank's `substrate.calques` catalog is applied by the same engine, as injection-only site substitutions. A site is a regex over English that marks where the Serbian form would land; the catalog records the Serbian key and the English gloss, and this script owns the sites. There is no REDUCE direction — an excess "actually" in its native sense is not the calque, and removing it would be a register edit, not a substrate one. | key | tier | site → substitution | |---|---|---| | zapravo | attested | a sentence-initial "But …" / "No, …" gets "actually" after its first copula or auxiliary ("But the gate is closed" → "is actually closed"); "you/we/they get/see/need/want" → "you actually get". | | recimo | attested | sentence-initial "Suppose / Imagine" before a clause subject, "Say" before a pronoun or "that", and "For example/instance, you/we/I" → "Let's say". | | ne ide | attested | "doesn't / does not / won't work" → "doesn't go", except before a phrasal particle (work out / on / with / …). | | konkretno | proposed | sentence-initial "Specifically," → "Concretely,". | | drzati predavanje | proposed | "give / gave a talk / lecture / presentation" → "hold / held a …". | | doneti odluku | proposed | "make / made a decision" → "bring / brought a decision". | | do petka | proposed | "by " → "till ". | Every other catalog entry (nekako, sve u svemu, kontrolisati, …) is reported, not guessed at: `covered by marker kind-of` when the particle table already routes it to a marker operator, `no site operator (gate-read)` when no regex would land it without rewriting the native sense too. `--calques` picks the tiers: `attested` (default), `proposed` (both tiers), `none`. The cap per entry follows the bank's `essay_target_rule`: an explicit `essay_target` on the catalog entry wins, zero included; otherwise the particle table's journal rate for that key, damped to the midpoint toward the paper rate (zero for every calque), floored at the kind-of trace rate (0.3/1000) so an attested entry with no journal rate still lands at trace. The report names the source of each target. Budgets round to whole applications, so a short draft under a real-bank target reports `below target, budget rounds to zero` rather than pretending the target is met. Each application is one edit-log entry (`calque:`, with the tier and site in its note), guarded by quoted speech and span locks like every other operator, judged by the verifier when `--verify` is on, and otherwise left to the author's gate read per `substrate.policy`. Deviations from the bank's letter, where the bank asks for judgment a mechanical stage cannot supply, are deliberate and visible in the report: kind-of deletes in reverse document order rather than "before-adjectives-first" (no POS tagging), and colon-verdict REDUCE works from the document's end rather than "latest-added" (no provenance). ## Substrate policy — no diff ceremony Per the 2026-08-21 amendment (idiolect.yaml `substrate.policy`): markers are written directly into the text at target rates. No proposal tags, no per-use approval, no diff presented to the author. The author's gate read is the filter — he rewrites whatever reads unnatural, and marker survival across the gate (observable from git history) informs promotion and retirement in the bank. The machine-readable edit log exists for that survival analysis, not for review: every edit — kept and dropped — lands in `.vernacular.json` (or `--edit-log PATH`) with operator, paragraph, and full before/after text. Replaying the kept entries reproduces the entire diff; the tests hold that as an invariant. ## Span locks Protection is inherited from the shared drivers, not re-implemented: block-locked regions never reach this script, and inline locks travel as `[[LOCK-n]]` anchor tokens no operator pattern can match. A locked "okay" survives; an unlocked one is stripped. ## The verifier gate (optional) `--verify` judges each mechanical edit with an Ollama model (`--model`, `--endpoint`; same defaults and no-silent-fallback rule as match-voice): the model answers KEEP or DROP, a dropped edit reverts, and the model's text goes nowhere — **the verifier judges, it never writes**. Requested but unreachable is a hard error, not a skip. Without `--verify` every mechanical edit stands, which is the normal offline mode. ## Pipeline position Terminal. Stage order: draft (with declared/locked spans) → humanize chain (lock-respecting) → **inject-vernacular** → the caller's review phase (Pangram, reverse-outline, critic-panel, voice-critic, cold reads, author gate; GH-208). Defects found after this stage are fixed by the author's hand or by re-running from a pre-terminal checkpoint — never by a model repair on the final text. Snark and disproportion are born at drafting and locked; this stage never inserts them (mechanical joke insertion is prohibited by design). ## Usage ```bash # normal run: apply in place, write the edit log python3 scripts/inject_vernacular.py draft.md # report only python3 scripts/inject_vernacular.py draft.md --dry-run --json # with the keep/drop verifier python3 scripts/inject_vernacular.py draft.md --verify # cohere default (GH-190) python3 scripts/inject_vernacular.py draft.md --verify --model gemma4:12b # keyless/local # proposed-tier calques too (default is attested only; --calques none disables) python3 scripts/inject_vernacular.py draft.md --calques proposed ``` Tests: `scripts/test_inject_vernacular.py` (offline; synthetic bank, no model, no network).