Cadence

An AI-text humanizer — write in a voice you choose, with less AI tone, in any AI agent or straight from the command line.

Ready to use in:

📐 Verified by Cadence — this README's own prose scores grade A on the detector. The slop quoted in the examples below is there on purpose.

You can usually tell when a machine wrote something. Not from any single word — from the texture. The sentences come out the same length. Every paragraph opens with a transition. The point gets hedged, then the hedge gets hedged. There are three examples where one would have landed harder. You may not be able to underline the broken part, but you feel it, and the moment you feel it you start to skim.

Cadence exists to strip that signature out. (It's an AI-text humanizer, if you want the search term — but one that shows its work.)

What it's for

Two things. It scores prose for how machine-made it reads, and it recasts prose so it reads like a person wrote it. The score is your baseline and your to-do list. The recast is the fix.

The one rule it never breaks: Cadence works on the words, not the meaning or the layout. It changes how a sentence reads. It does not touch what the sentence claims, or how the document is built. A smoother line that quietly drops a fact is a failure, not a win.

Why rhythm, not grammar

Slop isn't a grammar problem. AI prose is often spotless and still obviously synthetic, because the tell is rhythmic. Real writing breathes — a long, winding clause that earns its commas, then a stop. Machine writing flatlines at one comfortable length, sentence after sentence after sentence.

So the number Cadence watches hardest is rhythm variance (CV). Even, same-length sentences are the loudest fingerprint there is. If a rewrite doesn't move the variance, it didn't rewrite anything; it swapped synonyms and called it done.

Why bother

Flat prose costs you the reader. People trust writing that sounds like a person meant it. The moment a page reads as generated, your argument inherits the doubt — even a good argument, even a true one.

A clean score is not the goal, though. Clarity is. A spotless score on an empty point is still an empty point. Find the real thing you have to say, say it in a voice, and let the low score fall out as a side effect.

Commands

You type these in Claude Code as /cadence <command>:

New here? MANUAL.md is the full guide — install, the workflows, and every command and flag, in one place.

Examples

Every score below comes straight from skills/cadence/scripts/deslop.mjs. Reproduce them with the commands shown.

deslop then recast — strip the AI tells

Start with raw model marketing copy:

In today's world, finding the right productivity app can be a daunting task. Our cutting-edge platform leverages powerful AI to seamlessly streamline your workflow. Whether you're a busy professional or a student, our comprehensive solution empowers you to do more. It's not just an app, it's a game-changer. When it comes to getting things done, we've got you covered.

node skills/cadence/scripts/deslop.mjs before.txt

Cadence de-slop  ·  score 61/100  ·  grade D
  banned-phrase (4): "In today's world", "When it comes to", "game-changer", "Whether you're"
  hollow-confidence (5): "seamlessly", "powerful", "comprehensive", "cutting-edge", "streamline"
  negation-pivot (1): "It's not just an app, it's a game-changer."
  cliche-opener (1): "When it comes to getting things done…"

/cadence recast into the plain voice, fixing each named tell:

Most productivity apps add work instead of removing it. This one starts with your real day. It reads what's due and what's blocking you, then shows the single next thing to do. Students use it. So do people running teams. You won't get a dashboard to admire. You'll get fewer open tabs.

Cadence de-slop  ·  score 0/100  ·  grade A     (61 → 0)

write — one idea, two voices

Brief: "reassure someone who feels they're falling behind their peers." Same thought, two profiles. Notice the structure change, not just the wording.

/cadence write --voice counsel (reframes the question; long-wind-then-snap rhythm):

You open the app and everyone is ahead of you. Engaged, promoted, somewhere sunlit. Underneath is a quiet arithmetic: they have more, so I have less, so I must be less.

But notice what that smuggles in. It assumes one shared finish line, and that the people posting are reporting rather than performing. Neither holds. Nobody posts the afternoon they spent staring at the ceiling.

Here is a question to set beside "am I falling behind?" — behind whom, and toward what? Name the finish line and you usually can't. The race dissolves.

score 0/100 · grade A · rhythm CV 0.57

/cadence write --voice reckoning (scene first, hard truth, aphoristic close):

At your ten-year reunion someone will have the house, the title, the symmetrical children, and you will do the math on the drive home. Here is what the math leaves out. Every person in that room ran a different race on a different track, and the clock you keep reading was never theirs to begin with. The comparison isn't wrong. It is measuring nothing. You are not behind. There is no line to be behind.

score 0/100 · grade A

learn — add your own voice

/cadence learn https://example.com/an-essay-you-love
/cadence learn ~/writing/my-best-newsletter.txt

Cadence reads the sample, measures its real rhythm with the detector, and writes a profile to voices/<name>.md. The shipped counsel voice was built this way. voices/counsel.md shows what a learned profile looks like.

Voices that ship with it

• counsel — a philosopher answering a private worry; reframes your question into a better one.
• reckoning — scene first, then a hard truth.
• measured-academic — careful first-person reasoning that concedes before it concludes.
• plain — say it once, in the fewest honest words.
• punchy — high contrast; long build, short hit.
• seminar — a professor demystifying a hard text; direct, wry, metaphor-driven.
• dispatch — narrative science-journalism: open on a scene, then land the idea.
• column — calm analytical essay: a fact, the reasoning, a usable principle.
• kin — a parent's unsparing letter to a child; every truth anchored in the body, landing on a short imperative.
• essence — first-principles tech-blog writing: strip a domain to its laws, reason up, and land on conviction.

Add your own with /cadence learn. Profiles are plain markdown in voices/. Read them, edit them, share them.

The detector

The detector is the front door — try it in five seconds, no install:

npx cadence-deslop draft.txt          # any file: .txt .md .pdf .html .docx .epub
npx cadence-deslop ./some-repo        # scan a whole folder/repo, ranked worst-first
npx cadence-deslop page.html          # scores the visible text of a web page
npx cadence-deslop https://a.blog/post  # fetch a live URL and score it
pbpaste | npx cadence-deslop          # score whatever's on your clipboard
npx cadence-deslop --json draft.txt   # machine-readable JSON
npx cadence-deslop --strict draft.txt # exit 1 if score > 25 (CI gate)

deslop.mjs is the engine — pure Node, zero dependencies. It only reaches the network if you hand it a URL. Run it from a clone the same way:

node skills/cadence/scripts/deslop.mjs draft.txt
cat draft.txt | node skills/cadence/scripts/deslop.mjs

It measures sentence-length variance (the strongest tell), a banned-phrase list, hollow-confidence words, triad density, negation pivots, hedge-stacking, adverb and em-dash rates. It returns a transparent 0–100 score plus a letter grade. Same text, same score, every time.

Install

The full plugin. It writes in voices and learns new ones from samples. Cadence is a Claude Code plugin, and this repo is its own marketplace; plugins are free, with no store and no fee:

/plugin marketplace add wuisabel-gif/Cadence
/plugin install cadence@cadence

Then /cadence write …, /cadence deslop …, /cadence learn …, etc. are available in a new session. New voices you create with /cadence learn are written to a voices/ folder in whatever project you're working in. (Developing on Cadence? Point the marketplace at a local clone instead: /plugin marketplace add ~/cadence.)

/cadence not recognized? It runs only in Claude Code — not the claude.ai website or the desktop app's regular chat. MANUAL.md covers that and the rest of the activation pitfalls.

In a regular Claude conversation (claude.ai or the desktop app). That chat doesn't read the plugin marketplace — it takes an uploaded skill bundle instead. Build one and drag it in:

npm run build:claude-skill   # writes cadence-skill.zip (SKILL.md + scripts + voices)

Then Settings → Skills → Add → Upload skill, and drop in cadence-skill.zip. The voices and de-slop guidance work immediately; the live detector runs only where that conversation has code execution — otherwise score in a terminal with npx cadence-deslop.

Just the detector. Score prose anywhere, no plugin needed:

npx cadence-deslop draft.txt     # run it without installing
npm install -g cadence-deslop    # or install the `cadence-deslop` / `deslop` command

In Codex. The skill ships an AGENTS.md next to SKILL.md, so the same folder works in Codex too. The detector is portable as-is (npx cadence-deslop runs in any shell); to give a Codex agent the voices and writing laws, point it at skills/cadence/AGENTS.md — drop it into your project's AGENTS.md, or copy the parts you want.

In Gemini CLI. There's an installable extension at integrations/gemini/ — symlink it into ~/.gemini/extensions/cadence and the GEMINI.md context loads every session.

In DeepSeek. DeepSeek's Skills are markdown you toggle from the drawer. Paste in integrations/deepseek/cadence-skill.md and score drafts in a terminal with npx cadence-deslop.

In VS Code. There's an extension at integrations/vscode/ — a live grade in the status bar, the AI tells squiggled inline, and a score-on-demand report. Build it with npm run build:vscode, then press F5 to try it or package a .vsix to install.

Documentation

Each of these is scored by the detector on every push and must stay grade A.

Layout

cadence/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   ├── plugin.json              # plugin manifest
│   └── marketplace.json         # marketplace catalog (this repo lists itself)
├── skills/
│   └── cadence/
│       ├── SKILL.md             # router, shared writing laws, setup (Claude Code)
│       ├── AGENTS.md            # the same skill for Codex
│       ├── reference/           # one file per command + the voice schema
│       └── scripts/
│           ├── deslop.mjs       # the detector (real code, tested)
│           └── extract-text.mjs # pure-Node prose extraction from .pdf/.txt/.md
├── voices/                      # shipped voice profiles (seed set)
├── extension/                   # the Chrome extension (generated detector)
├── integrations/                # Codex, Gemini, DeepSeek, and VS Code surfaces
│   └── vscode/                  # the VS Code extension (generated detector)
└── tests/                       # 32 tests — `npm test`
    ├── deslop.test.mjs
    └── extract-text.test.mjs

Test

npm test          # 32 tests over the detector, the extractors, and the bundled builds
npm run check:docs  # dogfood: the repo's own docs must score grade A

Status

v0.2 — the detector and the ten seed voices work and are tested. The detector is on npm as cadence-deslop, and Cadence runs across seven surfaces: Claude Code, a regular Claude conversation, Codex, Gemini CLI, DeepSeek, the Chrome extension, and the VS Code extension.