The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer

Mohamed Abdallah — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:52:37 +0000

The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer

I built unslop to strip the

tells that mark text as AI-generated. I thought I knew what they were. I was
wrong about which ones hurt most.

The one I keep catching: the tricolon.

"X, Y, and Z" where all three are the same abstraction level. Every AI

output does this. Not because the writer means three things. Because the
model learned that three parallel items feel rhetorically complete.

Before:

Modern software engineering requires discipline, patience, and a deep

understanding of systems at scale.

After:

Modern software engineering requires discipline. The rest comes with time.

The second version has one claim and a closer. The first has three, because

the model is filling the shape. Discipline, patience, and understanding of
systems are not three separate things — patience is part of discipline and

understanding systems is what the discipline is for. The tricolon hides

that by flattening everything to a list.

Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Every cover letter I've read from a

junior dev in the last year opens with a tricolon. Every LinkedIn post from

a thought-leader account has one in the third paragraph. Every "humanizer"

tool I tested left it in, because it's grammatically correct and

individually the words are fine.

unslop kills tricolons at the balanced and full intensity levels. It

replaces them with the single claim or pair the writer probably meant. In

the full level, about a third of tricolons get replaced with a period and

a fragment, because that's what the claim usually needed.

If you write with AI assistance: read your output for tricolons. You don't

need a tool. You just need to notice that three things, listed, usually

mean one thing or two, padded.

If you're curious about what else shows up: the tool is MIT-licensed,

installs as a Claude Code plugin, and lists the full pattern catalog in its

README.

—

unslop on GitHub

DEV Community: Mohamed Abdallah

The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer

The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer