agent-prose

Deterministic Anti-RLHF Stylometric Gate for Autonomous Agents. Created and maintained by Nitivra (gehe@nitivra.com.au).

The GitHub project, the PyPI package and the command are all agent-prose.

Traditional linters catch spelling and punctuation. Large language models almost never make those mistakes. The distortions they produce are structural: cadence uniformity, copula avoidance and forced rhetorical balance.

Foundation models trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback exhibit predictable stylometric habits:

• Monotone sentence cadence. Four or five consecutive sentences land at nearly the same word count, often 18 to 24 words.
• Copula avoidance. The plain verb "is" is replaced by evasive linking phrases such as "serves as" or "stands as".
• Prestige scaffolding. Academic filler (crucial, nuance, bedrock, linchpin, cornerstone) clusters together and adds no information.
• Synthetic balance. Clauses are forced into symmetry the underlying ideas do not have, including "not only X, but also Y".
• Trailing participial tails. Sentences acquire a weak ending such as ", ensuring that..." or ", enabling...".

agent-prose is a zero-dependency Python quality gate and pre-commit hook. It detects these distortions with the standard library.

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Why It Matters

When engineering teams deploy autonomous agents to generate documentation, pull request summaries and customer communications, text quality is part of company credibility.

A reader who meets generic boilerplate disengages. Text that passes a spelling check can still carry structural tells. Readers who notice those tells trust the page less.

agent-prose replaces a subjective edit debate with a repeatable gate in CI.

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What It Evaluates

1. Sliding-window burstiness. Measures sentence-length variance across five-sentence blocks. A standard deviation under 6.0 is a monotone run.
2. Direct copula check. Flags evasive linking verbs.
3. Dialect packs. Australian English (en-AU, Macquarie and the Australian Government Style Manual), American English (en-US, Chicago and AP) and British English (en-GB).
4. Technical shields. Fenced code blocks, inline code, markdown tables and YAML frontmatter are left out of the prose scan.
5. Two severities. Blocking defects exit 1. They include non-ASCII punctuation, invalid dialect spellings, contractions and raw flow arrows in narrative prose. Advisory findings cover cadence, prestige stems and synthetic balance. Four or more advisory findings exit 2. --strict promotes every advisory finding to a blocking failure.
6. Repair bound. The prose-gate skill tells an agent to stop after two repair passes. The scanner itself does not count passes.

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Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install agent-prose

Run without a permanent install:

uv tool run agent-prose path/to/document.md

Install from this repository:

git clone https://github.com/geheharidas/agent-prose.git
cd agent-prose
pip install -e .

There are no third-party runtime dependencies.

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Quickstart

agent-prose README.md

A clean file prints:

README.md: [PASSED] Clean

Scan complete: 1 file(s) evaluated. Status: PASSED.

Other entry points:

agent-prose docs/
agent-prose --locale en-AU docs/
agent-prose --locale en-US docs/
agent-prose --strict docs/
agent-prose --quiet docs/
agent-prose --json docs/

--locale en-AU requires -ise spellings and colour or centre, and it rejects the serial comma. --locale en-US permits -ize, color and the serial comma. Read stdin with agent-prose -.

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Pre-Commit Hook Integration

Add the hook to .pre-commit-config.yaml:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/geheharidas/agent-prose
    rev: v1.0.2
    hooks:
      - id: agent-prose
        args: ["--locale", "en-AU"]

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File Opt-Out Directive

Put one of these markers in the first five lines:

<!-- agent-prose: off -->

<!-- writing-quality: off -->

The file is reported as [EXEMPT] and the process exits 0 for that file.

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Dialect Resolution Cascade

agent-prose picks a dialect in this order:

1. --locale <code|path>
2. .proserc.json or [tool.agent-prose] in pyproject.toml
3. The AGENT_PROSE_LOCALE environment variable
4. locale.getlocale() on the host
5. Fallback: en-US

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Agent Platform Integrations

Grok Build

Copy integrations/grok/prose_gate.rhai into .grok/workflows/. The workflow runs agent-prose on a path.

Claude Code and Cursor

Copy integrations/claude/SKILL.md to ~/.claude/skills/prose-gate/SKILL.md, or the equivalent Cursor skills directory.

Model priming adapters

Adapter text lives in src/agent_prose/adapters/. Load one from Python:

from agent_prose.adapters import get_adapter_prompt

print(get_adapter_prompt("claude", profile=None))

The packs are Claude, Gemini, Grok, Muse or Llama, and Copilot. Each pack names the failure mode that family tends to produce. They do not call a model.

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Contributing and Security

• Contribution rules, including new dialect profiles: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Security reports: SECURITY.md
• Contact: gehe@nitivra.com.au

The sibling gate for epistemic sycophancy is agent-sycophancy.

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License

MIT License. Copyright (c) 2026 Nitivra (gehe@nitivra.com.au).