A catalog of the words, phrases and sentence shapes that AI models overuse, kept because spotting them one at a time in a draft does not scale. Each entry names the tic, says why it fails, and gives a plainer replacement.
I'm Wes Pomeroy. I work on AI inside a large enterprise and write about what that actually looks like - what changes, what doesn't, and where to keep your hands on the wheel.
This started as a private scrub file. I draft with AI, and the same phrases kept turning up in my own work: "worth noting," "the whole game," a neat contrast built out of "it's not X, it's Y." Once I had a file of them I could check a draft against the list instead of trusting my ear. The file kept growing, so I put it online.
It grows the same way now. When a phrase turns up often enough to be a pattern rather than a one-off, it gets an entry, with a note on what to write instead. Some entries widen over time as the same move shows up in a new shape. For the longer argument behind it, read Your Name Is Still on It.
Take it. The list is released into the public domain under CC0 1.0 - no attribution required, no permission needed. Paste it into a system prompt, wire it into an editing script, or read it and argue with it. The Markdown and JSON versions exist so a machine can read it as easily as a person can. Corrections and new entries are welcome on GitHub.