sloplint 0.7.0 → 0.8.1

data/lib/sloplint/rules.rb

@@ -6,12 +6,14 @@ module Sloplint
   # count_group: a Regexp scanned over the matched text to tally items; when set,
   #   the Note carries `count` and the message may interpolate %{count}.
   # skip: Regexps that, if they match the matched text, drop the note (exclusions).
-  # default_on: false keeps a noisy rule out of the default run (still selectable).
+  # severity: what the construct costs the prose -- "error", "warning", "info".
+  # confidence: how likely a match is a false positive -- "high", "medium", "low".
+  #   A "low" rule stays out of the default run; --strict or its own id turns it on.
   Rule = Data.define(
-    :id, :category, :severity, :pattern, :message, :suggestion,
-    :examples_bad, :examples_ok, :count_group, :skip, :rationale, :default_on
+    :id, :category, :severity, :confidence, :pattern, :message, :suggestion,
+    :examples_bad, :examples_ok, :count_group, :skip, :rationale
   ) do
-    def initialize(count_group: nil, skip: [], rationale: nil, default_on: true, **rest)
+    def initialize(count_group: nil, skip: [], rationale: nil, **rest)
       super
     end
   end
@@ -83,11 +85,11 @@ module Sloplint
     "|time|world|numbers?|roots?|money|estate|user"
 
   RULES = [
-    # ── rhetorical-tic ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Rule.new(
       id: "no-x-no-y",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Comma chains only: "no fluff, no filler, no jargon". The comma is the
       # evidence -- it makes the parallelism deliberate. Fragment chains split
       # by sentence punctuation are a separate, quieter rule (no-x-no-y-frag),
@@ -104,10 +106,11 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "no-x-no-y-frag",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "cadence",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The same cadence built from sentence fragments: "No fluff. No filler."
-      # Ships at info, not warning, because the shape is genuinely ambiguous --
+      # Medium confidence, because the shape is genuinely ambiguous --
       # two short "no" sentences in a row is also just writing ("No one moved.
       # No one spoke."). The agent reading the flag decides; see rationale.
       #
@@ -147,8 +150,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "thats-the-whole",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The nouns are WHOLE_CLOSERS. "value" and "fix" are the closers agents
       # write in technical prose ("That's the whole fix"), where the
       # contraction keeps them out of is-the-whole-x, which sees only "is".
@@ -198,8 +202,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "is-the-whole-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "closer",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The generic form of thats-the-whole: a subject, then "is the whole /
       # real / actual / entire N" with N from a closed abstract list. "That
       # periodicity is the whole tell.", "Consistency is the real test." The
@@ -216,7 +221,7 @@ module Sloplint
       # "cost" because "the real deal", "the real thing" and "the whole cost"
       # are idioms or quantities. The noun may not run on into a compound
       # ("problem-solver"). Gaps may cross a hard-wrapped newline but never
-      # a paragraph break. Ships at info because "the real question" and
+      # a paragraph break. Medium confidence: "the real question" and
       # "the whole point" are also how people talk.
       pattern: /(?<![\w'’-])
                 (?!(?:that|this)#{WRAP_GAP}+(?:is)#{WRAP_GAP}+(?:the)#{WRAP_GAP}+(?:whole)#{WRAP_GAP}+(?:#{WHOLE_CLOSERS})(?![\w'’-]))
@@ -265,8 +270,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "bare-equative",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "closer",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # A sentence that opens on an abstract head noun and equates it with
       # something: "The tell here is the periodicity.", "The problem is not
       # the tool.", "The lesson is the handoff." The head noun list is closed
@@ -280,8 +286,8 @@ module Sloplint
       # answer is a mess"), a pointing complement ("the same", "the one",
       # "the first"), and a proper noun ("the Slack thread") are all out.
       # Gaps may cross a hard-wrapped newline but never a paragraph break.
-      # Ships at info: "The problem is the cost" is how people write too, at
-      # about four per million words on Hacker News; it is the density that
+      # Medium confidence: "The problem is the cost" is how people write too,
+      # at about four per million words on Hacker News; it is the density that
       # tells.
       pattern: /(?:^|(?<=[.!?])[ \t]{1,2})(?:[-*+•][ \t]+|\d+[.)][ \t]+)?\KThe(?:[ \t]|\r?\n(?!\s*\n))+
                 (?:tell|point|question|problem|issue|lesson|difference|trick|move|risk|goal|reason|pattern|insight|takeaway|shift|bet|catch|gap|bottleneck|failure|mistake|secret|magic|challenge|tension|trap)(?:[ \t]|\r?\n(?!\s*\n))+
@@ -322,9 +328,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "epistrophe",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
-      default_on: false,
+      confidence: "low",
       # Two clauses that end on the same two-word phrase, the second closing
       # the sentence: "built for one desk, and almost no job is done at one
       # desk." Two backreferences catch the repeat, one per word, so the
@@ -374,9 +380,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "phrase-echo",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
-      default_on: false,
+      confidence: "low",
       # The same three words again a few paragraphs on. Three consecutive
       # words, each four characters or more and lowercase-led, one of them
       # six letters with nothing but letters, and the same three again
@@ -458,8 +464,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "did-not-x-did-not-y",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\b(?:did\s+not|didn't)\s+[\w'-]+(?:,?\s+(?:and\s+)?(?:did\s+not|didn't)\s+[\w'-]+)+/i,
       message: '"did not X, did not Y" chain (%{count} items) reads as AI cadence.',
       suggestion: "Cut the chain or make it one plain sentence.",
@@ -470,8 +477,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "from-x-to-y-chain",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two or more "from X to Y" spans in a row, comma-separated: "from
       # private notes to shared files, from personal memory to team context".
       # Each span is "from", one to three words, "to", one to three words; the
@@ -546,8 +554,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "one-x-one-y",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Three or more "one X" items in a comma chain that stands on its own:
       # "One owner, one repository, one weekly prune." or, after a colon,
       # "the setup is narrow: one reviewer, one queue, one deadline". The
@@ -617,8 +626,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "and-what-it-should",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The elliptical tail: "List what the assistant knows about the client,
       # and what it should." The second "what" clause borrows its verb from the
       # first and ends on a bare modal or a negated auxiliary, so the sentence
@@ -664,8 +674,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "abstract-lives-in",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "puffery",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # An abstraction given an address: "the craft that lives between the two
       # desks", "its context lives in a folder nobody else can open", "the
       # value sits in the follow-up". The subject list is closed and abstract,
@@ -681,7 +692,7 @@ module Sloplint
       # lies in the assumption") and "resides in" are ordinary English for
       # where a fault or an authority is, at any register.
       #
-      # Ships at info. The same shape states where information literally is
+      # Medium confidence. The same shape states where information literally is
       # ("the knowledge lives in our heads", "the instructions live in the
       # README"), and a sample of pre-2022 Hacker News biased toward the
       # construction turns up a few of those per million words, all human.
@@ -724,8 +735,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "the-x-is-the-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "cadence",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The repeated-head equative: "the reason it holds up is the reason the
       # other half happens", "the problem with A is the problem with B". The
       # same abstract head noun sits on both sides of the copula, caught by a
@@ -787,8 +799,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "same-determiner-chain",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The quiet cousin of one-x-one-y and no-x-no-y: three or more items in
       # a comma chain that all open on the same determiner or quantifier,
       # caught with a backreference: "every faculty, every thought, every
@@ -849,8 +862,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "dont-verb-it",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "false-correction",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\b(?:don't|do\s+not)\s+(\w+)\s+it\b[^.!?]*[.!?]\s*\1\s+it\b/i,
       message: '"Don\'t X it. X it Y." reframing is a stock LLM move.',
       suggestion: "Drop the fake reframe and state the claim once.",
@@ -860,8 +874,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "sit-with-that",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two branches. The deictic object is the tic anywhere in a sentence, so
       # "sit with that/this/it" needs no anchor. Anything else needs the
       # sentence-initial imperative, which is where the tic lives and where the
@@ -888,12 +903,13 @@ module Sloplint
                  "The object does not matter: the tic is telling the reader to dwell instead " \
                  "of giving them something to dwell on. The sentence-initial imperative does " \
                  "flag the plain companion sense (\"Sit with the baby while I run out\"), " \
-                 "which is accepted -- hence warning, not error."
+                 "which is accepted."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "hold-onto-that",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Sentence-initial imperative only. Past tense and subordinate clauses
       # ("she held on to that letter", "if you hold onto that phrase") are a
       # different construction, not the tell. Everything AFTER that/this is
@@ -919,8 +935,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "cleanly",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The bare adverb was the whole rule, and the engineering idioms were
       # flagged on purpose. Technical prose says that was the wrong call: a
       # patch that applies cleanly, a build that compiles cleanly and a gear
@@ -936,7 +953,7 @@ module Sloplint
       # parts. The clause-final form ("the objection breaks down cleanly, and
       # neither half survives") is the same tell and is left out.
       #
-      # The frame is not the sense, and this rule ships at info because of it.
+      # The frame is not the sense, and the confidence here is medium because of it.
       # "The argument splits cleanly into two parts" and "the gear retracted
       # cleanly into the well" are one pattern apart only in their subject,
       # and a regex cannot see the subject -- the same limit that keeps the
@@ -971,8 +988,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "clean-count",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Needs a partition noun. The bare count reaches the laundry: Ulysses
       # has "four clean strokes", Jane Eyre "two clean tuckers".
       pattern: /\b(?:two|three|four|five|six|seven|2|3|4|5|6|7)\s+
@@ -998,8 +1016,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "cleanest-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Noun list only. "The cleanest way to install the driver" and "the
       # cleanest cut of meat" are ordinary English, so "way" is admitted only
       # in front of a speech verb, and the concrete-capable nouns (cut, line,
@@ -1027,10 +1046,11 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "clean-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
-      # The quiet half of cleanest-x, at info because the positive degree is
-      # where ordinary usage lives. "A clean separation of concerns" is
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
+      # The quiet half of cleanest-x, at medium confidence because the positive
+      # degree is where ordinary usage lives. "A clean separation of concerns" is
       # standard engineering English, so "separation" stays out of the list;
       # "break" is admitted only in "clean break between", never bare, because
       # "make a clean break with the past" is an idiom and not a tell.
@@ -1052,13 +1072,14 @@ module Sloplint
         "The report gives a clean bill of health."
       ],
       rationale: "'Clean' in front of an idea is evaluation, not description -- it says the " \
-                 "writer approves, and nothing about the idea. It ships at info because the " \
-                 "same words carry a plain sense a regex cannot separate from the tic."
+                 "writer approves, and nothing about the idea. The same words carry a plain " \
+                 "sense a regex cannot separate from the tic."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "you-already-know",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\byou\s+already\s+know\b/i,
       message: '"You already know…" is a stock LLM rhetorical setup.',
       suggestion: "Just make the point; don't tell the reader they know it.",
@@ -1068,8 +1089,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "is-the-entire",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\bis\s+the\s+entire\s+(?:point|game|thing|business\s+model|deal|story)\b/i,
       message: '"X is the entire point/game/…" is an LLM emphasis tic.',
       suggestion: "State the point plainly without the superlative frame.",
@@ -1079,8 +1101,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "the-entire-is",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\bthe\s+entire\s+(?:point|game|thing|business\s+model|deal|story)\s+is\b/i,
       message: '"The entire point/game/… is" is an LLM emphasis tic.',
       suggestion: "State the point plainly without the superlative frame.",
@@ -1090,8 +1113,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "is-real-and-not",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       pattern: /\bis\s+real,?\s+(?:and|but|not)\b/i,
       message: '"The X is real, and…" is a stock LLM concession move.',
       suggestion: "Drop the 'is real, and' scaffolding; assert the point directly.",
@@ -1112,8 +1136,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "real-x-real-y",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Ships at info, not warning: the only two hits the probe found in
       # 1.28M words were both false positives, and one corpus of one
       # register is thin evidence next to honestly, which sits at warning
@@ -1210,8 +1235,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "the-punchline-is",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Same reveal, three nouns. "honest answer" and "honest version" join
       # "punchline" because they do the identical job: rate the sentence as
       # the candid one before the reader gets it. "short version" was tried
@@ -1236,8 +1262,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "worth-naming",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Widened to optionally include a trailing "names" so the "naming
       # names" idiom is part of the matched text -- skip: checks the matched
       # text itself, and the tighter /\bworth\s+naming\b/ never captured
@@ -1274,8 +1301,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "worth-saying-plainly",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two branches, both sentence-initial.
       #
       # First: evaluative adjective + speech verb + manner adverb, all three
@@ -1327,8 +1355,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "not-nothing",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "false-concession",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two branches: spelled-out copula with an optional captured subject, and
       # the contracted "X's not nothing". The optional subject + skip: is the
       # load-bearing idiom -- skip: only sees matched text, so the personal
@@ -1382,8 +1411,9 @@ module Sloplint
 
     Rule.new(
       id: "exact-exactly",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Rewritten after 2.2M words of technical prose left ~111 of 125 hits
       # false. The shape was the problem, not the entries: the pattern matched
       # "exact" everywhere and subtracted an allow-list, and an open pattern
@@ -1489,8 +1519,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "load-bearing",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "borrowed-metaphor",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two guards, both structural, over the same noun list so they can't
       # drift apart. Forward: a physical building part right after it is the
       # literal sense, checked with a negative lookahead. Backward: the
@@ -1539,8 +1570,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "intersection-of",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "borrowed-metaphor",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # "at" is not load-bearing -- "explores the intersection of art and
       # technology" is the same move -- so the anchor is "the intersection of"
       # and the two guards carry the whole burden of separating the literal
@@ -1626,8 +1658,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "impact-verb",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "borrowed-metaphor",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # "impact" and "impacts" are also nouns, so they only count as verbs
       # behind an auxiliary or a subject pronoun. One optional pronoun may sit
       # between the auxiliary and the verb ("does this impact the date");
@@ -1731,10 +1764,11 @@ module Sloplint
     Rule.new(
       id: "impact-noun-vague",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "warning",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Only the puffed shapes: an intensity adjective, or make/have plus an
-      # article. "the impact of X" is left to impact-noun-bare, which sits at
-      # info because it is the standard word in research prose. "positive" and
+      # article. "the impact of X" is left to impact-noun-bare, which takes the
+      # bare form because it is the standard word in research prose. "positive" and
       # "negative" stay out of the adjective list on purpose -- they name a
       # direction, which is more than the intensity words do. "statistically"
       # is pulled into the match as an optional leading word so skip: can see
@@ -1782,8 +1816,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "impact-noun-bare",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "borrowed-metaphor",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Two shapes, each needing its own anchor: a measuring verb in front, or
       # "of" behind. That is what keeps the collision sense clear without a
       # list of collision verbs -- "the impact crushed the front bumper" has
@@ -1820,14 +1855,15 @@ module Sloplint
         "Torque the bolts with an impact wrench.",
         "Will the impact be permanent?"
       ],
-      rationale: "This one sits at info because 'the impact of X on Y' is the ordinary word in " \
-                 "research and policy writing, not a tell. Elsewhere it postpones the sentence: " \
-                 "the writer announces that an effect exists and stops before naming it."
+      rationale: "'The impact of X on Y' is the ordinary word in research and policy writing, " \
+                 "not a tell. Elsewhere it postpones the sentence: the writer announces that " \
+                 "an effect exists and stops before naming it."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "thats-how-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /(?:\A|[.!?]\s+|\n\s*\n)\s*(?:that|this)(?:'s| is)\s+how\b/i,
       message: '"That\'s how…" opening a sentence is a stock LLM aphorism closer.',
       suggestion: "Cut the closer, or replace it with the concrete result you mean.",
@@ -1843,8 +1879,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "announced-takeaway",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /(?:\A|[.!?]\s+|\n\s*\n)\s*(?:here'?s\s+)?the\s+(?:loop|pattern|trick|lesson|takeaway|playbook|framing|insight|kicker)\b[^.!?\n]{0,60}:/i,
       message: "Colon-led takeaway label announces the lesson before making it.",
       suggestion: "Give the observation first; let the reader decide it's the takeaway.",
@@ -1858,10 +1895,64 @@ module Sloplint
       rationale: "Labelling a claim as the portable lesson does the persuading that the claim " \
                  "should be doing — a model habit borrowed from thought-leader prose."
     ),
+    Rule.new(
+      id: "cataphoric-teaser",
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
+      # The forward-pointing tease: "Here's what nobody tells you", "the
+      # part most people get wrong". Three parts, each a closed frame. A
+      # sentence-initial position, optionally opened by a forward demonstrative
+      # (here's / this is; "that's what nobody understands" points backward
+      # and is left alone). A noun slot: what / the part / the thing / the
+      # bit / the secret. A subject that claims scarcity for the reader's
+      # benefit: nobody, no one, most people, few people, hardly anyone,
+      # they, people. Then up to two adverbs and a verb of telling, getting
+      # wrong, talking about, admitting or noticing. The bare subject form
+      # ("What nobody tells you ...") must also reach a copula or colon in
+      # the same sentence, since that is what makes it a setup rather than a
+      # plain report ("What nobody tells you gets forgotten."), and it may
+      # not take "they": without a demonstrative in front, "what they don't
+      # realize is" refers to the people the story is about, and narrative
+      # says it. Read across 8.7 MB of RAID that was the one human hit.
+      pattern: /(?:\A|[.!?]\s+|\n\s*\n|:\s+)\s*
+                (?:(?<demo>(?:\w+,?\s+)?(?:here'?s|here\s+is|this\s+is)\s+)|(?-i:(?=[A-Z])))
+                (?:what|the\s+(?:part|thing|bit|secret))\s+
+                (?:nobody|no[-\s]?one|most\s+\w+(?:\s+\w+)?|few\s+people|hardly\s+anyone|almost\s+(?:nobody|no[-\s]?one)|people|(?(<demo>)they|(?!)))\s+
+                (?:(?:will|won'?t|don'?t|doesn'?t|actually|ever|really|never|rarely|wants?\s+to)\s+){0,2}
+                (?:tells?|gets?|talks?|says?|admits?|mentions?|warns?|teach(?:es)?|explains?|notices?|realizes?|understands?|hears?)\b
+                (?(<demo>)|[^.!?\n:]{0,60}?(?:\s+is\b|:))/ix,
+      message: "Cataphoric teaser promises a hidden insight before giving it.",
+      suggestion: "Cut the tease and state the thing itself.",
+      examples_bad: [
+        "Here's what nobody tells you about hiring.",
+        "Here is the part most people get wrong.",
+        "This is the thing they don't tell you.",
+        "What nobody tells you is that the migration is the easy part.",
+        "The part nobody talks about is the rollback.",
+        "What most senior engineers won't admit is that the estimate was a guess.",
+        "So here's what few people realize: the cache is cold on every deploy."
+      ],
+      examples_ok: [
+        # Backward-pointing: the sentence reports, it does not tease.
+        "That's what nobody understands.",
+        "That is the part most people get wrong.",
+        # A bare-subject sentence that never reaches a copula is a report.
+        "What nobody tells you gets forgotten by lunch.",
+        # Mid-sentence, the phrase is an object, not a setup.
+        "I finally learned what nobody tells you about hiring.",
+        # Lowercase after a hard wrap is a continuation, not a sentence start.
+        "the reviewer read it and\nwhat nobody tells you is that she signed it anyway."
+      ],
+      rationale: "The tease sells the claim as rare knowledge before the claim exists, so the " \
+                 "reader is asked to rate it before reading it. Models reach for it as an " \
+                 "opener because engagement training rewards the hook."
+    ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "is-is",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # No anchor needed -- the doubled copula alone scored 0 across ~1.9M words.
       # The comma is allowed because "What it is, is a mystery" grates the same
       # way. Sentence and clause punctuation still block the weld ("what it is.
@@ -1896,8 +1987,9 @@ module Sloplint
 
     Rule.new(
       id: "earns-its-place",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The possessive is the narrowing. "earned a place on the team" and
       # "earn a place in the final" are ordinary; "earns its place" is the
       # metaphor, a thing paying for the room it takes up.
@@ -1921,8 +2013,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "does-a-lot-of-work",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two arms, both narrowed away from the ordinary sense.
       #
       # "a lot of work" needs a locative ("here", "in that sentence") because
@@ -1954,8 +2047,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "failure-mode-here",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "borrowed-metaphor",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # "here" is the whole narrowing, and it is doing a lot -- the bare "the
       # failure mode is" is ordinary engineering writing about real systems,
       # where the phrase means what it says. The deictic is what marks the
@@ -1981,8 +2075,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "thats-the-tension",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Sentence-initial, only two nouns, and the noun must end the clause.
       #
       # "tradeoff" and "catch" were tried and cut: both are ordinary English
@@ -2015,8 +2110,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "right-up-until",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The intensifier is the tell, not the reversal. "It works until it
       # doesn't" is an old human idiom and stays clean; stacking "right up"
       # in front of it is the model's version, and the two together are two
@@ -2041,8 +2137,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "two-things-true",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Closed phrase, no anchor needed. The optional "both" and the optional
       # "at once" tail are the two ways the sentence is padded; the count word
       # is fixed at two, because "three things can be true" is someone
@@ -2067,8 +2164,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "notice-what-there",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The self-referential half of the attention cue: the sentence points
       # at the writing rather than at anything in the world. Two frames, both
       # sentence-initial -- "notice what X did there" and the bare "read that
@@ -2096,8 +2194,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "notice-what",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The ambiguous half of the pair, and it ships at info because the
       # sentence-initial imperative is also how people point at something
       # real: "Notice what happens around Q3", "Notice what is not on the
@@ -2128,8 +2227,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "none-of-this-is-to-say",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Only the "none of" form. Every neighbouring phrasing is ordinary
       # English by an order of magnitude -- "which is not to say", "this is
       # not to say", "that's not to say" -- and admitting any of them would
@@ -2155,10 +2255,11 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "if-im-being-honest",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The "being honest" frame only. Plain "to be honest" and "I'll be
-      # honest" are how people talk and are excluded. info, not warning:
+      # honest" are how people talk and are excluded. Medium confidence:
       # writers really do say this out loud.
       pattern: /\bif\s+(?:I['’]?m|I\s+am|we['’]?re|we\s+are)\s+(?:being\s+)?honest\b
                 |\bhonestly,\s+the\s+(?:answer|truth)\b/ix,
@@ -2180,8 +2281,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "honestly",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The manner adverb, the way "cleanly" is the manner adverb: hung on a
       # subject that cannot be honest. Two guards, no verb list.
       #
@@ -2231,8 +2333,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "honest-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The noun list is short on purpose, and the words left out are the
       # point. "An honest answer", "an honest assessment" and "an honest
       # account" are ordinary English about people -- six hits between them in
@@ -2274,8 +2377,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "most-honest-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "self-rating",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The superlative frame carries the tell on its own, so this noun list is
       # wider than honest-x's -- "the most honest assessment" is self-ranking
       # in a way "an honest assessment" is not. The list still has to keep out
@@ -2310,14 +2414,14 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "genuinely",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "self-rating",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "low",
       # Off by default. There is no narrowing here: the word is ordinary
       # English at every frequency we measured, and the difference between
       # the tell and the real use is whether a contrast exists in the
       # surrounding argument, which no regex can see. Selectable when a
       # writer wants every occurrence listed back to them.
-      default_on: false,
       pattern: /\bgenuinely\b/i,
       message: '"Genuinely" asserts sincerity instead of earning it (heuristic; high false-positive).',
       suggestion: "Cut the adverb. If the sentence needs it, the claim is doing the work.",
@@ -2339,8 +2443,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "actually-not-x",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "false-correction",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two markers that each correct the reader, doubled up in one clause:
       # the adverb and the trailing "…, not X". Bare "actually" is not the
       # tell and is not matched, because "the build actually failed on the
@@ -2405,8 +2510,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "and-thats-fine",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Three narrowings, and the rule needs all of them. "and" is required:
       # bare "that's fine" is a reply people write constantly. The match must
       # open a sentence and close it, so the concessive clause -- "and that's
@@ -2430,8 +2536,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "and-nothing-else",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # This rule is deliberately wide, and the cost is known. There is no verb
       # list and no imperative requirement, so the only narrowing is structural
       # -- which means the pattern cannot tell a leaked instruction from the
@@ -2489,8 +2596,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "nothing-else-frag",
-      category: "rhetorical-tic",
+      category: "closer",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The same exclusion as its own sentence: "Return the JSON. Nothing
       # else." Built on the no-x-no-y-frag template -- the fragment must start
       # at a sentence boundary and the separator is at most two spaces or one
@@ -2526,18 +2634,18 @@ module Sloplint
         # letter guard is there to exclude.
         "and so on; nothing more."
       ],
-      rationale: "The fragment form of the same leaked instruction, and it reads the same way: " \
-                 "a second sentence that only says the first one was complete. It ships at " \
-                 "warning rather than info because the capital letter and the whole-sentence " \
-                 "requirement keep it off the continuation sense, which is where ordinary prose " \
-                 "puts the phrase: one hit in 1.92M words of public-domain prose and one in " \
-                 "461k words of pre-2022 Hacker News."
+      rationale: "The fragment form of the same leaked instruction, and it reads the same " \
+                 "way: a second sentence that only says the first one was complete. The " \
+                 "capital letter and the whole-sentence requirement keep it off the " \
+                 "continuation sense, which is where ordinary prose puts the phrase: one hit " \
+                 "in 1.92M words of public-domain prose and one in 461k words of pre-2022 " \
+                 "Hacker News."
     ),
-    # ── puffery ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Rule.new(
       id: "puffery-words",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "warning",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # "nestled" alone is the literal verb as often as the puffery sense --
       # a head nestling against a shoulder, a kitten nestling into a blanket
       # -- so it requires a following in/among/between, the same shape the
@@ -2573,7 +2681,8 @@ module Sloplint
     Rule.new(
       id: "stands-serves-as",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "info",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       pattern: /\b(?:stands|serves)\s+as\b|\bis\s+a\s+(?:testament|reminder)\s+to\b/i,
       message: '"stands/serves as", "is a testament/reminder to" is puffed AI framing.',
       suggestion: "Say what it does, not what it 'stands as'.",
@@ -2584,7 +2693,8 @@ module Sloplint
     Rule.new(
       id: "vital-role",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "warning",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\bplays?\s+a\s+(?:vital|crucial|pivotal|significant|key|central)\s+role\b/i,
       message: '"plays a vital/crucial/… role" is a stock AI puffery phrase.',
       suggestion: "State the specific role or effect instead.",
@@ -2595,7 +2705,8 @@ module Sloplint
     Rule.new(
       id: "underscores-highlights",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "info",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # "underscored/underscoring" are unambiguously the verb and flag bare.
       # "underscore/underscores" is also the character noun (a leading
       # underscore, snake_case docs), so those forms require a following
@@ -2636,15 +2747,16 @@ module Sloplint
         "Numbers accept underscores\n\nThe next section covers floats."
       ],
       rationale: "Models reach for 'underscore' as an all-purpose emphasis verb -- findings " \
-                 "underscore, outages underscore -- asserting significance without earning it. " \
-                 "Sincere journalistic and academic use exists, hence info: a flag means the " \
-                 "move is present, not that it's slop. The character noun never takes the " \
-                 "verb's frame and stays out."
+                 "underscore, outages underscore -- asserting significance without earning " \
+                 "it. Sincere journalistic and academic use exists: a flag means the move is " \
+                 "present, not that it's slop. The character noun never takes the verb's " \
+                 "frame and stays out."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "rich-tapestry",
       category: "puffery",
-      severity: "warning",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\brich\s+tapestry\b|\btapestry\s+of\b/i,
       message: '"rich tapestry"/"tapestry of" is a signature AI cliché.',
       suggestion: "Cut the metaphor; name the actual things.",
@@ -2653,11 +2765,11 @@ module Sloplint
       rationale: "'tapestry of' is one of the most reliable single-phrase model tells."
     ),
 
-    # ── structure ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Rule.new(
       id: "not-just-x-but-y",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "false-correction",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # Two branches, both anchored on an explicit escalation word. (1) The
       # copula escalation: "is not just/only/merely/simply/solely A … but B".
       # (2) "not because A, but because B". The escalation word is what makes
@@ -2701,10 +2813,11 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "not-x-but-y",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-correction",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The bare corrective: "is not A but B", no escalation word, comma or no
-      # comma. Ships at info because the line between a corrective ("not an
+      # comma. Medium confidence, because the line between a corrective ("not an
       # accident but a strategy") and an ordinary concession ("not warm but the
       # fire helped") is syntactic, and a regex cannot see syntax. What is here
       # is a set of cheap narrowings that cut the worst of the noise: A is
@@ -2718,7 +2831,8 @@ module Sloplint
       # ("was not warm but the fire helped") or a bare lexical verb ("was not
       # perfect but got us there"), because neither is distinguishable from the
       # corrective by surface form. That is the cost of the rule and the reason
-      # it is info: the agent reading the flag has the context to judge, and
+      # its confidence is medium: the agent reading the flag has the context
+      # to judge, and
       # should. Do not chase these by growing the B-list -- every word added
       # silently narrows recall with nothing pinning it.
       pattern: /(?:\bis|\bare|\bwas|\bwere|\bisn['’]t|\baren['’]t|\bwasn['’]t|\bweren['’]t|
@@ -2765,15 +2879,16 @@ module Sloplint
                  "escalation word dropped, and models reach for it constantly. It is the " \
                  "noisiest rule in the catalog by design: a loose version scored 174 hits " \
                  "before narrowing, cut to 15 here -- but not all 15 are correctives. Some " \
-                 "are concessions with an elided subject (Walden's " \
-                 "'It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it'), which no " \
-                 "surface pattern can tell apart from the real thing. Hence info: a flag here " \
-                 "means 'this has the shape', not 'this is slop'."
+                 "are concessions with an elided subject (Walden's 'It was not lonely, but " \
+                 "made all the earth lonely beneath it'), which no surface pattern can tell " \
+                 "apart from the real thing. A flag here means 'this has the shape', not " \
+                 "'this is slop'."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "isnt-x-its-y",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-correction",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The corrective with the conjunction dropped: one clause rejects a
       # description, the next supplies the replacement through a second copula
       # ("It isn't the tool. It's the habit."). Every copula tense is covered,
@@ -2789,7 +2904,8 @@ module Sloplint
       # guards cut a loose version from 19 hits to 4 over 889k words of
       # 19th-century fiction.
       #
-      # What survives is the reason for info. An adjective outside the list
+      # What survives is the reason the confidence is medium. An adjective
+      # outside the list
       # still slips through, and some hits are the same shape written by a
       # person -- "was not the wife; it was the children" is Conan Doyle. A flag
       # here says the sentence has the frame, not that a model wrote it.
@@ -2861,13 +2977,14 @@ module Sloplint
                  "one, so the sentence sounds like a correction while correcting nobody. It " \
                  "is 'not A but B' with the conjunction dropped and the second half promoted " \
                  "to its own clause, which is the form models reach for most. Ordinary prose " \
-                 "contrasts two things this way too, so the rule ships at info: it reports " \
-                 "the shape, not a verdict."
+                 "contrasts two things this way too, so the rule reports the shape, not a " \
+                 "verdict."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "not-by-x-but-by-y",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-correction",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The corrective built on a repeated preposition: "not by A, but by B",
       # "not from A but from B". The copula rules above cannot see it because
       # nothing precedes "not" but the verb or a dash, so the anchor here is
@@ -2908,16 +3025,16 @@ module Sloplint
         "We won not by luck\n\nBut by then it hardly mattered."
       ],
       rationale: "The 'not A but B' corrective with the copula swapped for a repeated " \
-                 "preposition, which is how a model corrects a claim about means or " \
-                 "cause ('not by luck, but by design'). People write it too -- Thoreau " \
-                 "and Melville both lean on it -- so the rule ships at info. It reports " \
-                 "the shape; a human reader decides whether it earned its place."
+                 "preposition, which is how a model corrects a claim about means or cause " \
+                 "('not by luck, but by design'). People write it too -- Thoreau and Melville " \
+                 "both lean on it -- and the rule reports the shape; a human reader decides " \
+                 "whether it earned its place."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "rule-of-three",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
-      default_on: false,
+      confidence: "low",
       pattern: /\b[\w'-]+,\s+[\w'-]+,\s+(?:and\s+)?[\w'-]+[.!?]/,
       message: "Three single words in a comma series closing a sentence (heuristic; high false-positive).",
       suggestion: "Fine in moderation; watch for the AI habit of ending on triplets.",
@@ -2943,8 +3060,9 @@ module Sloplint
     # CLAUDE.md: some tells can't be regexes; this was one.
     Rule.new(
       id: "everyone-nobody",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The comma-spliced antithesis on quantifier subjects: "Everyone wants
       # the dashboard, nobody maintains it." One clause opens on
       # everyone/everybody, the other on nobody/no one/none or "one N"
@@ -3015,9 +3133,84 @@ module Sloplint
                  "or give the problem its own sentence."
     ),
     Rule.new(
-      id: "np-fragment-and",
-      category: "structure",
+      id: "punch-sentence",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
+      # The mid-paragraph punch: a verbless beat of one to three words wedged
+      # between two long sentences. "...for the third time that quarter. Not
+      # anymore. The new rota puts..." mic-drop-closer and
+      # bare-auxiliary-closer take the long-then-short shape at the end of a
+      # paragraph; this is the one in the middle, which the closer rules
+      # refuse. The setup is the shared sixty-character prefix, and a
+      # sentence of forty or more characters must follow on the same
+      # paragraph, so a closer and a run of short sentences (short-run's
+      # tell) are both left to their own rules.
+      #
+      # Read against RAID, the first draft fired on human prose at four
+      # times its model rate, and every kind of hit is now a guard:
+      #
+      # A title or initial before the stop ("Mrs. Cadaver.", "John F.
+      # Kennedy.", "St. Petersburg.") makes the proper name after it look
+      # like a one-word sentence, so the stop the punch follows may not
+      # close a capitalised word of one to four letters, or a lone lowercase
+      # letter ("Swift v. Tyson"). The same guard on
+      # the punch's own last word ("When Mr.", "Felix and Rev.") is why a
+      # lone word must be five letters or more when capitalised; a lowercase
+      # last word ("Not anymore.") is never an abbreviation.
+      #
+      # A short clause with a pronoun subject ("He agrees.", "She complies.",
+      # "Both die.") is how a plot summary and a news brief move the story
+      # along, and an imperative with a name or a noun subject ("Dawes
+      # refuses.", "Set aside.") reads the same to a regex as a beat, so the
+      # punch is two closed shapes: a negator (Not, No, Never, Nothing,
+      # None) with up to two lowercase words after it, or one capitalised
+      # word of five letters or more. A one-word imperative in procedural
+      # prose ("Drain.", "Repeat.") still lands in the second shape, at about
+      # one per 25,000 words of recipes, which the info severity allows for.
+      pattern: /#{SENTENCE_OF_SIXTY_CHARACTERS_ENDING_IN_PUNCTUATION_AND_SPACE}\K
+                (?<![A-Z]\.[ \t]|[A-Z][a-z]\.[ \t]|[A-Z][a-z]{2}\.[ \t]|[A-Z][a-z]{3}\.[ \t]|[ \t][a-z]\.[ \t]
+                  |[A-Z]\.[ \t]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]\.[ \t]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]{2}\.[ \t]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]{3}\.[ \t]{2}|[ \t][a-z]\.[ \t]{2})
+                (?:(?:Not|No|Never|Nothing|None)(?:(?:[ \t]|\r?\n(?!\s*\n)[ \t]*)[a-z][A-Za-z'’-]*){0,2}
+                  |[A-Z][A-Za-z'’-]{4,})\.
+                (?=[ \t]{1,2}[A-Z](?:[^.!?\n]|\r?\n(?!\s*\n)){40,})/x,
+      message: "A verbless beat of three words or fewer between two long sentences is the AI punch.",
+      suggestion: "Fold the beat into the sentence before or after it, or cut it.",
+      examples_bad: [
+        "The on-call engineer had been paged for the same cron job three nights running that week. Not anymore. The job now checks the lock file before it starts and exits quietly.",
+        "The reviewers spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether the migration should run in one pass. Never again. The first half ran on Tuesday and the second half is still waiting on a sign-off.",
+        "Every team we talked to had a wiki page describing the release process in loving detail. No exceptions. The page had not been touched since the person who wrote it left the company.",
+        "The retry loop was supposed to give up after five attempts and page someone with the error. Simple. Instead it kept going all night because the counter reset on every restart."
+      ],
+      examples_ok: [
+        # Paragraph-final: that is the closer rules' shape, not this one.
+        "The reviewers spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether the migration should run in one pass. Not anymore.",
+        # Followed by another short sentence: short-run's territory.
+        "The reviewers spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether the migration should run in one pass. Not anymore. Nobody minded. The second half is still waiting on a sign-off from the platform team.",
+        # A short clause with a pronoun subject is narrative, not a beat.
+        "The reviewers spent the whole afternoon arguing about whether the migration should run in one pass. It didn't. The first half ran on Tuesday and the second half is still waiting on a sign-off.",
+        "Every team we talked to had a wiki page describing the release process in loving detail. Nobody read it. The page had not been touched since the person who wrote it left the company.",
+        # A title or initial with its complement on the far side of the stop.
+        "The committee met for the last time on a wet Thursday in the back room of the library annex. Mr. Whitaker moved that the minutes be approved as read and the motion carried without a vote.",
+        "The only survivor of the crash on the coast road that spring was the widow of the lighthouse keeper, Mrs. Cadaver. The inquest sat for two days in the town hall and returned no verdict at all.",
+        "The freight line ran west from the river through three counties before it reached the yards. St. Louis was the end of the line for most of the crews and the start of it for the rest.",
+        "The freight line ran west from the river through three counties before it reached the yards. Cyrus M. Jarrett owned the yards and every siding on the line from the river to the state line.",
+        "The rule that a federal court sitting in diversity applies general common law was set out in Swift v. Tyson. The decision stood for nearly a century before the court overruled it in Erie.",
+        # Digits are data, and a quotation mark is dialogue.
+        "The freight line ran west from the river through three counties before it reached the yards. Fig. 2 shows the route as it stood in 1890 and the sidings that were added after the flood.",
+        "The freight line ran west from the river through three counties before it reached the yards. \"Enough.\" The foreman waved the crew back toward the sheds and nobody argued with him.",
+        # Four or more words is a sentence, not a beat.
+        "The freight line ran west from the river through three counties before it reached the yards. The crews liked it. The foreman waved the crew back toward the sheds and nobody argued with him."
+      ],
+      rationale: "The beat withholds the verb and the object the long sentence set up and " \
+                 "hands the reader a pause instead. People write one on purpose; a draft " \
+                 "that keeps doing it is the tell, which is why it ships at info."
+    ),
+    Rule.new(
+      id: "np-fragment-and",
+      category: "cadence",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # A whole sentence that is two noun phrases and an "and": "A named owner
       # and a quarterly review." It is the fix half of a model's
       # problem-then-fix pair, with the verb left for the reader to supply.
@@ -3028,7 +3221,7 @@ module Sloplint
       # anywhere in it, contractions included, so "A man and a woman were
       # there." and "A man and a woman aren't here." never match.
       #
-      # Ships at info, and this is why: a lexical verb is invisible to the
+      # Medium confidence, and this is why: a lexical verb is invisible to the
       # pattern, so "A car and a truck collided." has the same shape and
       # flags. The corpora say that sentence is rare (one hit in 1.25M words
       # of public-domain prose, most of it narrative), but it is a complete
@@ -3071,8 +3264,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "quip-question",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "reader-address",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The verbless question that opens a pitch: "No invite?", "New to the
       # tool?", "Still stuck?", "Ready to start?". It must start a sentence,
       # open on one of a short list of words, run one to four more words, and
@@ -3118,8 +3312,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "mic-drop-closer",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The kicker: a sentence of at least sixty characters, then a closer of
       # two to eight words that ends the paragraph and opens on a quantifier
       # ("Nothing here needs a new login.", "Most teams end up
@@ -3142,7 +3337,7 @@ module Sloplint
       # position." The quantifiers carry the tell; the demonstratives are
       # ordinary, and no examples_bad used one.
       #
-      # Ships at info, and the rationale says why: people end paragraphs this
+      # Medium confidence, and the rationale says why: people end paragraphs this
       # way too, at about 150 per million words on Hacker News. One is
       # nothing. A draft where most paragraphs end this way is the tell, and
       # an agent that sees the flag repeat should read the family as a
@@ -3199,9 +3394,10 @@ module Sloplint
                  "warning, and the fix is usually to delete the closer outright."
     ),
     Rule.new(
-      id: "ellipsis-closer",
-      category: "structure",
+      id: "bare-auxiliary-closer",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The same long-sentence-then-short-closer shape as mic-drop-closer,
       # but the tell lives in the verb, not the subject. mic-drop-closer's
       # closer opens on a quantifier and keeps a full verb with its object
@@ -3278,14 +3474,15 @@ module Sloplint
       ],
       rationale: "The closer withholds exactly the thing the long setup built toward -- the " \
                  "verb and its object are gone, and only the bare confirmation that something " \
-                 "happened is left standing. Ships at info: plenty of ordinary writing drops " \
-                 "the verb the same way when it confirms an expectation, and one flag proves " \
-                 "nothing; a draft where it repeats is the tell."
+                 "happened is left standing. Plenty of ordinary writing drops the verb the " \
+                 "same way when it confirms an expectation, and one flag proves nothing; a " \
+                 "draft where it repeats is the tell."
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "short-run",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "cadence",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # Three consecutive sentences of thirty characters or fewer, each
       # opening on a letter and closing on a full stop, with no quotation
       # mark or digit in any of them: "Nobody used it. A named owner. Then a
@@ -3422,8 +3619,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "em-dash",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "punctuation",
       severity: "info",
+      confidence: "medium",
       pattern: /—/,
       message: "Em dash — an AI punctuation tell.",
       suggestion: "Recast with a comma, parentheses, or a separate sentence.",
@@ -3442,8 +3640,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "em-dash-overuse",
-      category: "structure",
+      category: "punctuation",
       severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /—(?:[^\n]|\n(?!\s*\n))*—(?:[^\n]|\n(?!\s*\n))*—/,
       message: "Three or more em dashes in one paragraph — an AI punctuation tell.",
       suggestion: "Recast with commas, parentheses, or separate sentences.",
@@ -3465,8 +3664,9 @@ module Sloplint
 
     Rule.new(
       id: "question-isnt",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-correction",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The resolving clause is required, so a plain rhetorical question never
       # matches. "The real question is" is ordinary English and is excluded by
       # the adjacency of "question" to the negated copula.
@@ -3492,8 +3692,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "less-about-more-about",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
+      category: "false-correction",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "medium",
       # The full frame is required at both ends. Bare "less about" and bare
       # "more about" are ordinary English on their own, and the subject slot
       # is limited to the pronouns so that a sentence with a real subject --
@@ -3519,8 +3720,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "trailing-significance-participle",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "puffery",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       # The verb list is closed and short on purpose. Wikipedia's "signs of AI
       # writing" names eight watch words for this construction; half of them
       # did not survive probing. In 1.85M words of pre-2022 Hacker News and
@@ -3597,9 +3799,9 @@ module Sloplint
     ),
     Rule.new(
       id: "trailing-restatement",
-      category: "structure",
-      severity: "info",
-      default_on: false,
+      category: "closer",
+      severity: "warning",
+      confidence: "low",
       # The restating tail: "…, which means working through the process
       # rather than around it". A regex sees the connective and not whether
       # the tail says the head again, and the sentence that prompted the rule
@@ -3687,11 +3889,11 @@ module Sloplint
                  "use the same connective to state a consequence, and the pattern cannot " \
                  "tell the two apart, so the rule is off by default."
     ),
-    # ── hedging ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
     Rule.new(
       id: "vague-attribution",
-      category: "hedging",
-      severity: "warning",
+      category: "false-concession",
+      severity: "error",
+      confidence: "high",
       pattern: /\bsome\s+(?:critics|experts|observers|scholars|analysts)\s+(?:argue|say|believe|contend|maintain)\b|\bit\s+is\s+widely\s+(?:regarded|considered|seen|believed|acknowledged)\b|\bmany\s+would\s+argue\b/i,
       message: "Vague attribution ('some critics argue', 'it is widely…') — an AI hedging tell.",
       suggestion: "Name the source, or drop the appeal to unnamed authority.",