desertthunder.dev / tropius
cli to detect tropes in prose
rust cli ai toml aho-corasick llm slop
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CLI / Matcher Plan#

Shape#

  • meta/tropes.md is source material only.
  • Pattern dictionaries live in crates/core/src/patterns/*.toml so contributors can add focused rule files without editing one giant dictionary.
  • crates/core owns:
    • loading all TOML pattern files
    • validating pattern ids and phrases
    • building one Aho-Corasick matcher from all phrase patterns
    • scanning text and returning plain finding structs
  • crates/cli owns:
    • clap argument parsing
    • reading a file or stdin
    • display with the bundled core patterns by default
    • display with owo_colors, respecting NO_COLOR
    • exit code behavior

Pattern TOML#

Example file: crates/core/src/patterns/word-choice.toml

[[patterns]]
id = "word_choice.delve"
name = "Delve and Friends"
severity = "medium"
phrases = [
  "delve into",
  "delving deeper",
  "certainly",
  "utilize",
  "leverage",
  "robust",
  "streamline",
  "harness",
]

Trope Coverage Checklist#

Current phrase coverage: 22 of 33 source sections. Implemented non-Aho detectors: 10.

  • Quietly and Other Magic Adverbs
  • Delve and Friends
  • Tapestry and Landscape
  • The Serves As Dodge
  • Negative Parallelism
  • Not X. Not Y. Just Z.
  • The X? A Y.
  • Anaphora Abuse - structural detector
  • Tricolon Abuse - structural detector
  • It's Worth Noting
  • Superficial Analyses
  • False Ranges
  • Short Punchy Fragments - structural detector
  • Listicle in a Trench Coat - structural detector
  • Here's the Kicker
  • Think of It As
  • Imagine a World Where
  • False Vulnerability
  • The Truth Is Simple
  • Grandiose Stakes Inflation
  • Let's Break This Down
  • Vague Attributions
  • Invented Concept Labels
  • Em-Dash Addiction
  • Bold-First Bullets - markdown-aware detector
  • Unicode Decoration - character-class detector
  • Fractal Summaries - structural detector
  • The Dead Metaphor - repetition detector
  • Historical Analogy Stacking - structural detector
  • One-Point Dilution - repetition detector
  • Content Duplication - repetition detector
  • The Signposted Conclusion
  • Despite Its Challenges

Non-Aho-Corasick Rules#

Aho-Corasick is for literal phrase signals.

Separate rule types are for when the trope depends on structure, repetition, markdown syntax, or document-level shape.

  • Anaphora Abuse: split into sentences and flag repeated sentence starts within a short window.
  • Tricolon Abuse: detect repeated clause patterns and dense comma/semicolon triples, not just fixed phrases.
  • Short Punchy Fragments: measure runs of very short sentences or paragraph fragments.
  • Listicle in a Trench Coat: detect paragraph openings like The first, The second, The third across adjacent paragraphs.
  • Bold-First Bullets: parse markdown list items and flag bullets that start with bold text.
  • Unicode Decoration: scan for configured Unicode punctuation and symbols. Actual Unicode em dashes belong here, not in phrase TOML. Keep ASCII " -- " as a phrase proxy for typed em-dash style until Em-Dash Addiction gets a count or density detector.
  • Fractal Summaries: detect repeated summary/conclusion signposts at section boundaries.
  • The Dead Metaphor: count repeated uncommon nouns or configured metaphor terms across a document.
  • Historical Analogy Stacking: detect runs of named examples and comparison verbs across adjacent sentences.
  • One-Point Dilution: likely needs repetition or semantic similarity scoring.
  • Content Duplication: compare normalized paragraphs or sentence shingles.

CLI#

Initial command:

tropius [FILE]

Behavior:

  • read stdin when FILE is omitted
  • print each finding with pattern name, matched phrase, and byte range
  • return 0 when no findings are found
  • return 1 when findings are found
  • return 2 for usage/configuration errors

Test Bed#

Use the lectito CLI to extract article text into fixtures when useful:

lectito --format text <url> > meta/examples/clean/example.txt

Unit Tests#

  • loading multiple crates/core/src/patterns/*.toml files
  • detecting phrases across files with one matcher
  • case-insensitive matching
  • duplicate pattern ids fail validation
  • duplicate phrases fail validation
  • empty pattern ids, names, phrase lists, and phrases fail validation
  • clean examples produce no findings, or only expected low-noise findings
  • slop examples produce expected pattern ids

Integration Tests#

  • file input
  • stdin input
  • NO_COLOR
  • exit code 0 for clean input
  • exit code 1 for matched input