There’s a markdown file on GitHub that lists thirty-seven specific English words you can no longer use in writing. Delve, tapestry, realm, landscape, multifaceted, nuanced, testament. The list keeps going: cutting-edge, revolutionary, comprehensive, crucial, compelling, vibrant. I wrote that file. It lives inside an open-source repo I published two weeks ago, eleven Anthropic-format Skills covering the work I do at InhouseSEO.
The repo went from zero to a hundred and thirty stars in a week. Someone asked me about it in a Reddit thread, so I posted the link there. Someone on X with 220k followers picked it up after that, and the SEO trade newsletters did the rest.
The list isn’t novel. Anyone who’s read enough machine-written prose has felt the shape forming in the back of their head: plays a pivotal role, then stands as a testament to, then in today’s evolving landscape, then unlocks new opportunities for stakeholders. Four clichés stacked in a paragraph and the brain stops reading. What is interesting is what happens when you write that pattern down and give it to the model you’re trying to constrain.
The model uses the words anyway. Not always, but often enough that you notice. You can ban “leverage” in the system prompt and an obedient Claude reaches for it again on the eighth paragraph, because its training data is full of writers who reached for it on every eighth paragraph. That’s how RLHF works. It pulls the model toward the average of what it read, and the average of what it read is a freelancer on a Friday afternoon burning through a content brief for €0,06 a word.
So the skill writes a second rule. Thirty percent of every page must contain something no generic AI could produce. A specific number or a named example. A sentence only this author would risk publishing under their own name. The skill calls this the Horoscope Test. The test is whether the paragraph could sit in someone else’s article and nobody would notice. If it could, it fails, even if every banned word is gone.
This is the part that surprised me when I wrote it. The Horoscope Test catches AI prose, but it also catches most non-AI prose. Most magazine drafts I’ve reviewed fail it. Most LinkedIn posts fail it. Most drafts I reviewed from freelancers and even our in-house team at Keuze.nl failed it the hardest, with sentences about “the seamless way to compare and switch providers” that could appear on any comparison site, about any product, by any writer, in any year. Most academic abstracts pass it, because the specificity is forced by the genre.
This isn’t new. People wrote like this before ChatGPT. AI just made it cheap to produce a thousand pages of it a day.
I drafted this essay across four iterations. The first opened “In today’s content landscape” before I caught myself. The second used “leverage” twice in one paragraph about a list that bans “leverage.” The third was clean of banned vocabulary and still failed the Horoscope Test in its third paragraph, which I had to read twice to see why. The paragraph said true things, in clean prose, that any writer could have written about any topic.
And that was the problem. The paragraph was fine. It just didn’t need to come from me. Anyone running a similar list could have written it.
The repo’s traction surprised me less than I expected. Most people doing SEO have spent the last year watching AI copy saturate their drafts and noticing the same flatness this list catalogues. What the list actually does is sit there. I open it before every draft. The agent opens it before every task. That’s the whole tool. I haven’t invented anything. SEO Reddit and SEO X have been complaining about this since GPT-4 shipped, and half the agencies I know already had an internal version of this list. Mine just happened to be on GitHub.
The list will have grown by the time anyone reads this. Working version, for what it’s worth.
delve · tapestry · realm · landscape · multifaceted · nuanced · testament · cutting-edge · revolutionary · comprehensive · crucial · compelling · vibrant · game-changer · leverage · unlock potential · harness · endeavour · embark · navigate (as metaphor) · pivotal · intricate · innovative · seamless · robust · transformative · meticulous · facilitate · utilize · commence · paramount · plethora · myriad · culminate · underscore · bolster · spearhead
