Lacking the grammatical sophistication to describe the symptoms precisely, I was forced to manually correct the style sentence by sentence—or publish the material as obviously vibecoded.
In this article, I present a set of rules to aid in automated detection of the worst of “AI slop”-type grammatical constructions. I started with a loose list of such rules gathered from various sources and told Claude to rephrase the rules until no two rules match the same text, over a corpus of my own recent code. (Is it really mine if agents wrote all of it?)
As a quick experiment, choose a vibecoded codebase and ask AI to find some instances of the following:
finite object relative clause with an active verb and overt definite noun phrase as its subject
Then repeat on something you know was written by hand. In a random sample of about 3,000 lines taken from the Linux kernel, zero matches. Similar sample from something I’m working on, 13 matches. Another comparison: original Unix v7 code, one match, in my port to Arm, more than ten.
With just that simple rule, we can find some pretty horrible sentences:
“Writes a setting this daemon decides, keeping it and noting it, by swapping it for the value held: true when it stands.”
“The publisher says what the main loop said itself before: the same texts, the second’s values once per second, rates and levels as they move.”
“A schedule whose values the registers cannot hold spills more than the overlap gains: a longer ii holds fewer at once.”
Of course, models violate other rules, as spelled out in the next section. You can use the style sheet below in two ways: run it over an existing text to flag potential issues, or use it as a commit check to avoid adding more obvious slop into the existing text. The rules are not intended as a strict gate: they will flag acceptable text.
Object relative clause, with or without a relativizer, whose verb is active
and whose subject is an overt definite noun phrase. “Its bss, which exec
clears to zeros”; “what the store writes the next iteration reads”.[1]
Inanimate subject of a verb that, taken literally, needs an animate subject (know, want, expect, decide, say, show, owe, own, answer), in a finite clause other than an object relative clause. The match is the subject and its verb. “As the comment promises”; “the plot says how far a long block has come”; “a faulted DSP never answers”.[1]
Copula substitution: a lexical verb in place of “is” (“serves as”, “stands for”), or “is” in place of a lexical verb, where X means, yields, or indicates Y rather than being a kind of Y. The match is the verb with its “as” or “for”, or the “is” alone. “DEN 0 standing for 2^40”; “EINVAL is a driver without blanking”; “Busy is what ran”.[2]
History narration: an independent clause in the past tense telling what the code did before a change, in place of what it does now. The match is the clause. “The I register and DB used to sit at bits[26:24] and bit[32]”; “the folder answered a different question from the emitted code”.
Nominalization or gerund as subject or object, doing the work of a finite
clause, with an object, an of-phrase, or a possessor of its own. The match is
the noun and its arguments. “The return to the instruction after the svc
restores the user’s saved status”; “the averaging takes every
block”.[3]
Non-finite, verbless, or elliptical clause attached to a noun or a clause: a
participle with a dependent of its own, an absolute construction, or a clause
with its verb left out. A bare noun phrase labelling a declaration is not a
clause. “Continues in swtch, returning from it into whatever had called
swtch“; “measuring, the span started again; locked, the tag taken a period
short”.[3][2]
Prenominal packing: what an of-phrase would say, put before the noun, as a compound of three or more nouns, or an s-genitive with an inanimate possessor, its head noun often left out. The match is the premodifier. “The process table entry”; “each ADC channel’s largest conversion”; “the fit’s, the seconds’ scatter”.[1]
Coordination inside a phrase: two or more nouns, adjectives, or phrases joined within one noun phrase or one argument. “The address and cause of a data abort”; “with its own phase, filter and gain”.[3][2]
Interruption: a subject relative clause, an appositive, a parenthetical, or an aside between dashes, set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses, that separates a subject from its verb. An object relative clause is rule 1, a participle phrase rule 6. The match includes the punctuation. “A process that waits for something which is sure to happen soon, such as a disk transfer, can sleep”; “The LMX, which clocks the ADC, the CORDIC and the DSP, is retuned for every reference”.[1][4][2]
Denominal verb: a verb converted from a noun. “The MMU faults any access from user mode”; “one clock synthesizer clocks the ADC”; “one whose last round the DMA lapped”.[1]
Exclusion: a negator (not, no, never, nothing, neither), restrictive “only”, or a contrastive “rather than”, “instead of”, “unlike”, “except”, or “despite”. The match is the operator alone. “Needs no locks against other processes, only masked interrupts”; “out now, not at the end of the pass”; “nulled exactly rather than attenuated”.[2][5][6]
Colon apposition: a statement or a bare noun phrase, then a colon and a second statement that restates, lists, or explains it, where a full stop, “because”, or “so” would join them. The match is the colon. “How often the capture looks for new blocks: the ring holds seconds”; “the rings start over below: what was given out last is the chain’s before”.
Evaluative or intensifying word: a word of the excess-vocabulary lists
(delve, underscore, ensure, key as an adjective, matters, steady), an
intensifier (simply, exactly, whole, entirely, at all), or an emphatic
“own”. “Refers to it simply as u“; “the outputs remain quiet and steady”;
“the image sends a frame of its
own”.[7][8][9][3][2][10]
Sentence that restates an earlier one of the same paragraph. “A process running in the kernel is never preempted. It keeps the processor until it sleeps or returns to user mode”; “a process acts on its signals only on the way back to user mode. ... So a signal takes effect at the next return to user mode”.[10]
Recurring frame: the same opening, closing, or phrase in several sentences
of one text. “With two processors, ...” closing five paragraphs in a row;
“Next main calls ...”, “Next clkstart ...”, “Next main calls ...”
opening consecutive steps; “From 0 Hz ...” opening sentence after
sentence.[6][11][5]