Text output from LLMs doesn’t have a good reputation. It’s too long, hard to follow, and uses the wrong words or tone. That’s why I think it still holds that text meant for another person is better written by hand.

Still, the cases where we have to read something generated by agents will probably keep growing. So how do we make the text output better? First, upgrade an old model. Opus 5.5, for example, is miles better than Opus 5.

I often use a skill inspired by a tool for spotting odd AI clichés: https://tools.simonwillison.net/llm-cliche-highlighter I built a script for it that checks some of the principles deterministically too, e.g. the distribution of sentence lengths.

Another skill I have is trained on what I wrote myself. I use it when it annoys me how formal some text is.

And finally, when the agent’s answer is just needlessly long, I use the /tldr skill, which says: “Write it in 3 points at most”, and quite often that’s enough.

You can find the skills mentioned above in my marketplace: https://github.com/lttr/claude-marketplace/blob/master/plugins/writing/README.md