pilcrow

Pilcrow is a writing linter and editor skill suite that plugs into AI coding tools (like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot). A linter normally catches code style problems automatically; pilcrow does the same thing for written prose, applying rules from well-known style guides by Strunk, Williams, Zinsser, Pinker, Orwell, and King.

It works in two modes. The command-line tool (CLI) analyzes markdown, plain text, or HTML files and reports writing problems with their exact location, a snippet of the offending text, and an optional suggestion. These checks include both deterministic rules (things a pattern-matcher can catch reliably) and LLM-judged rules (things that require language understanding, like spotting "AI tells" — phrases that sound like they were written by an AI). It never edits your text; it only reports findings.

The skill layer runs inside your AI assistant. Running /pilcrow with no arguments finds the prose in scope, identifies what genre it is (essay, tutorial, readme, etc.), lints it, and proposes a sequence of editor commands for you to confirm before anything changes. Named commands like "polish," "tighten," "humanize," "clarify," and "argue" each apply a specific methodology drawn from one of the style guides. A separate "document" command scans your existing writing to build a VOICE.md file capturing your personal style, which then influences future suggestions.

You would use pilcrow if you write a lot of documentation, blog posts, or any prose in a code project and want systematic feedback beyond spell-checking. The full README is longer than what was provided. It is built in TypeScript and distributed as an npm package.