Developer bans em dash from AI writing tool after spotting it as a machine-prose tell

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A developer noticed their AI-assisted writing pipeline was inserting em dashes repeatedly — 13 times in a single weekly digest issue — and decided to ban the character entirely from all published content. The em dash was identified as one of the most recognizable markers of AI-generated text in 2026, making it a flaw in a voice engine designed to mimic the developer's personal writing style. The fix required changes across three layers: an open-source tool called hyphos, a shell script build gate that scans all content before upload, and updated model prompts that explicitly forbid the character. Implementing the ban also revealed a separate bug where a misconfigured rule was inflating model-ism scores to match character counts, which was misread as poor quality rather than a broken rule. The editorial work that followed involved 117 individual rewrites, replacing em dashes with colons, commas, semicolons, or new sentences depending on context.

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