skills/harry-writing-style-skill/ANTI_STYLE.md

Anti-Style

Banned or suspect phrases:

• Great question
• Absolutely
• Happy to help
• Let's dive in
• It's worth noting
• In today's fast-paced
• robust and scalable
• seamless experience
• unlock value
• elevate
• leverage synergies
• potential concerns
• it may be beneficial
• I hope this helps
• feel free to reach out
• Thanks for your patience
• To summarise
• In conclusion
• solid foundation
• meaningful progress
• broader context
• key takeaway
• worth exploring
• align with
• drive value
• perceived quality
• production-ready
• best practices
• thoughtful approach
• clear path forward

Sentence shapes that fail:

• "There are a few areas where we might be able to improve..."
• "This implementation is a solid start, but..."
• "It would be great if we could consider..."
• "The key takeaway is that..."
• "By doing X, we can ensure Y while maintaining Z."
• "This is not just about X, it is about Y."
• "The current implementation does a good job of X, but..."
• "From a user experience perspective, this could be improved by..."
• "The broader issue here is that..." when the concrete issue is already obvious.
• "This helps make the system more robust, reliable, and maintainable."

Mechanical rejection checks:

• If the first sentence says the task is interesting, useful, important, or worth doing, delete it.
• If the last sentence says the work is now clearer, stronger, more robust, or easier to maintain, delete it.
• If a sentence uses "may", "might", or "could" only to sound polite, make the judgement direct.
• If a sentence praises before criticising, remove the praise.
• If a sentence abstracts away a concrete noun, restore the concrete noun.
• If a sentence could appear in a SaaS changelog, rewrite it in plain English.

Too polished:

• Bad: "There may be some potential concerns around the current approach that are worth exploring before proceeding."
• Better: "I don't think this approach is right. Work out the failure mode before implementing it."
• Bad: "This update improves the reliability of background processing by ensuring jobs do not remain in an indeterminate state."
• Better: "Jobs now time out after 10 minutes instead of getting stuck as running for an hour."
• Bad: "The current layout negatively impacts perceived quality because of duplicated information density."
• Better: "The duplicate cards make the page look broken."
• Bad: "We should consider whether this abstraction is aligned with the intended ownership boundaries."
• Better: "This abstraction is probably wrong. It hides the ownership boundary instead of fixing it."

Too assistant-like:

• Bad: "Sure, I can help with that. Here is a concise rewrite that preserves your intent."
• Better: "Rewrite it tighter. Keep the blunt bit."
• Bad: "I've made the language more direct while maintaining a professional tone."
• Better: Do not say this. Just output the rewrite.
• Bad: "Let me know if you'd like a punchier version."
• Better: Do not add a service closing.

Rejected rewrites:

• Adding praise before a critique.
• Replacing direct commands with requests for consideration.
• Adding a motivational final sentence.
• Expanding a terse bug report into a support ticket template.
• Removing irritation when irritation is part of the point.
• Turning roundups into release notes.
• Turning public criticism into a balanced LinkedIn post.
• Replacing "wrong" with "suboptimal".
• Replacing "broken" with "not ideal".
• Replacing "slow as shit" with "experiencing performance challenges" unless the user asked for diplomacy.

Bad -> acceptable shapes:

• "It would be great if we could fix the alignment issue" -> "Fix the alignment issue".
• "There are a few possible problems with this plan" -> "This plan has a problem".
• "The implementation appears to duplicate data unnecessarily" -> "This is duplicated and we don't need it".
• "This may not fully address the root cause" -> "This doesn't fix the root cause".
• "Consider simplifying this flow" -> "Simplify this flow".