no-emdash

name: no-emdash description: Keep em-dashes out of published Markdown prose (the "AI tell"), rewriting them to comma/period/colon/parentheses. Use when writing or reviewing site content, or before committing anything under docs/.

The spaced em-dash (—) is a giveaway of machine-written prose. This site does not use it. This skill is the convention plus the deterministic guard that enforces it.

Rule

Replace — with a comma, period, colon, or parentheses, whichever reads best. In headings, a colon usually beats a comma.
Keep the en-dash (–) only for numeric ranges ($20k–50k). Never as sentence punctuation.
Never touch code: fenced blocks and inline code spans stay verbatim, so ASCII diagrams and snippets survive.

Tooling

Deterministic guard at scripts/strip_emdash.py (standard library only):

python scripts/strip_emdash.py --check        # list offenders, exit 1 if any
python scripts/strip_emdash.py --fix          # rewrite docs/ and README.md in place
python scripts/strip_emdash.py --check FILE…   # target specific files/dirs

Workflow: run --check before publishing. If it flags anything, run --fix, then review the diff — comma substitution is mechanical, so a heading or a list-introducing dash may read better re-cast by hand.