red-pen

A second reader that will not flatter you.

Three composable Claude skills that keep AI-assisted writing honest and yours. Built for resumes, cover letters, portfolio pages, case studies, proposals, and bios.

/plugin marketplace add cabbagecachekid/red-pen
View on GitHub

Why this exists

Small edits inflate quietly.

red-pen came out of a real problem. While refining a resume and portfolio with AI, edits crept in that quietly inflated a claim. "Solo," meaning "I did this project myself," drifted into something like "founded and ran a research program." Plain headers turned into generic filler that could have belonged to anyone.

founded and ran a research program did this project myself

Nobody approved those changes. They just accumulated.

red-pen is not about hiding that you used AI. It assumes the healthy case: you are collaborating with Claude on your own writing. Its job is to make sure the result still says what you meant and claims only what is true.

The full review

One review. Six passes.

The editor's pass: a rigorous second reader that holds your writing to a standard before it goes out. Two passes hand off to the specialist skills; the orchestrator owns the rest.

full-review

A before/after diff table with reasoning, and nothing in your file changes until you sign off.

  1. ai-written-check flags the mechanical tells of machine writing
  2. Operator vs. academic: does the copy position you as the person who shipped it
  3. Honesty and overclaim: the anti-inflation pass, the heart of it, never upgrades a claim's scope
  4. cringe-check audits tone and positioning
  5. Voice register: one register per paragraph, no concrete-to-abstract swerve
  6. Fact verification: a source for every checkable claim, unsourced ones flagged
  7. You sign off on the diff table. Nothing changes until you do.

Passes one and four hand off to the two specialist skills; full-review owns the other four. Install one skill or all three: full-review falls back to built-in notes when a specialist is not present.

Say this to Claude

Run a full review on my cover letter before I send it to a hiring manager.

The skills

Two specialists and an orchestrator.

full-review

The orchestrator for high-stakes copy. Six passes, a before/after diff table, and nothing changes until you sign off. It delegates the AI-tells and tone passes to the specialists below and owns the honesty, positioning, register, and fact passes itself.

“Review my cover letter.”

ai-written-check

Flags the mechanical tells of machine writing, from em dashes to engineered cadence, each with a concrete rewrite.

“Does this sound like AI?”

cringe-check

Audits tone and positioning: solo-hero framing, parroting the job description, overclaiming authority.

“Does this sound cocky?”

The contract

What it will and will not do.

Free, MIT-licensed

Install in one command.

In Claude Code, add the marketplace and install the pack:

/plugin marketplace add cabbagecachekid/red-pen
/plugin install red-pen@red-pen

Prefer just one skill? Each folder under skills/ stands alone. Copy it into ~/.claude/skills/, or upload it as a skill on claude.ai. full-review falls back to built-in notes when the specialists are not installed.