How I tell AI to write in my style, other people’s styles – and how to strip out shitty AI talk and LinkedIn language

Here’s the agent skill I use to guide how AI (ghost)writes for me and tries to match my various styles and registers of writing – and, well, writes for itself when I publish that kind of thing.

It does a lot of the load-bearing work when it comes to centaur writing.

I’ve also dumped a lot of prohibitions and checks for writing to strip out LinkedIn talk and common AI phrases (“load-bearing” and stuff like “doing the real work”). I also sucked in things like Simon Willison’s LLM cliché highlighter.

If you don’t want to or can’t install a skill, there’s also a prompt fragment you can paste into your user instructions, or right into a chat window: the short version, the long version. I have that in my Claude.app user instructions (as well as the skill added – belt and suspenders!) and my Gemini for Workspace instructions.

Also, being of the generation that was brought up doing hand-coded HTML, I have a lot of cantankerous formatting opinions I want followed.

And, yeah, of course it’s mostly Claude writing the skill. I’m not an animal!