Before a recent one-on-one with Kate Lee, Every’s editor in chief, I opened our shared document and found a list of my own writing fails staring back at me. My drafts had picked up too many of the AI tells that both I—and you—know how to spot from across the room: the symmetrical sentence structures, the little rhetorical throat-clears, the phrases that sound profound on first pass but on closer inspection contain nothing but air, and those pesky sets of three.
The worst part was that I should know better. I am the person at Every who writes about writing with AI while using AI to write about writing with AI. I have custom agents, style guides, editorial workflows, and an apparently bottomless appetite for turning every lesson into a system. And still, I had let the machine’s smoothness pass for my own judgment enough times that my editors felt the need to intervene.
After the meeting, I did what I generally do when I learn something new, embarrassing or otherwise: I baked it into documentation for my agents. I opened the notes, pulled out the patterns Kate had flagged, and listed them in a new skill called /guardrails, which turns any agent I write with into an exacting editorial specialist that keeps me honest.
I’ll never be completely done with /guardrails, or any of the review skills like it that I’ve built, because my human tics and tendencies will move around like a squirmy toddler. But I’d rather make new mistakes than keep repeating the old ones. Review skills are the mechanism by which I do that. They’re another form of editor, one that can catch a draft’s more annoying weak spots before they become a human editor’s problem.
Skills rule everything around me
In the beginning of any good guardrail system, there are skills.
At the mechanical level, a skill is a Markdown file with instructions inside it. Practically, it’s a way of packaging judgment. When I invoke the guardrails skill, I am asking the model to read a draft through a set of lenses: Look for AI tells, vague claims, hedges, limp openings, and all the little ways a zombie draft can pass as finished without a pulse.
