A software engineer has turned the AI writing tic problem into a deployable artifact. Ossama Chaib launched tropes.fyi in February 2026, and this week published its flagship output: tropes.md, a single Markdown file cataloging dozens of recurring LLM writing patterns across six categories — word choice, sentence structure, paragraph structure, tone, formatting, and composition. The file is designed to be pasted directly into an AI system prompt, giving developers and content teams a one-shot mechanism to suppress the most recognizable tells of machine-generated prose.
The catalog is unusually granular. It names and documents specific constructions — 'Negative Parallelism' (the 'It's not X — it's Y' em-dash pattern, which Chaib calls the single most commonly identified AI writing tell), 'Tricolon Abuse', 'The Serves As Dodge', 'Gerund Fragment Litany', and 'The X? A Y.' rhetorical self-question — complete with real-world examples and analysis of why LLMs gravitate toward each. Chaib attributes several tics to model architecture: repetition penalties, for instance, push models toward pompous copula substitutions like 'serves as' and 'stands as' over simple 'is', a dynamic he says he has studied directly.
tropes.fyi is explicitly self-referential about its own AI use — Chaib acknowledges the tropes.md file itself was generated with AI assistance, defending the choice by drawing a sharp line between AI for code (machine-to-machine communication) and AI for prose (which he frames as a form of deception in a human-to-human medium). The broader site extends this thesis with additional tools: 'ai;dr' reverse-engineers long AI blog posts back to their probable prompt, and 'AI Vetter' accepts a URL and returns a slop verdict alongside identified tropes. A diff-style 'Deslopify' rewrite tool is listed as coming soon.
Chaib doesn't oversell the shelf life. The cat-and-mouse framing is on the homepage, not buried in a FAQ. His working assumption is that the window of effectiveness is real and finite — models will shift, the tic list will need updating, and the tooling on the site is built around that premise. What's notable is that he published the catalog publicly at all. Most teams running AI content pipelines accumulate this kind of list and keep it internal. tropes.md is the version that got out.