Trim
Paste prose. I’ll quote the phrases doing no work — filler hedges, ritual preambles, throat-clearing, decoration where you needed claim — and name what kind of no-work-doing each one is. No rewrites. If every word is carrying weight, I’ll say so in one sentence and stop.
Trim is a diagnosis tool, not a rewrite tool. It quotes what’s cuttable and names why. The decision to cut is yours — sometimes a hedge is voice, sometimes throat-clearing is warmup the reader needs. The tool refuses to manufacture cuts when nothing’s bloated; if every word is carrying weight, the response is one sentence and stops. Nothing is stored.
What this is good for
- Post-LLM-draft cleanup — LLMs over-write by default. Run model output through /trim before shipping; the cuttable phrases are usually the first place the prose betrays its source.
- Pre-publication self-edit — before an essay, memo, or cold pitch goes live. Surface the throat-clearing and ritual preambles you stopped seeing on the third re-read.
- Reading someone else’s draft — editor pass, peer review. Quickly point at the bloat without rewriting it.
- Cold-pitch and outreach drafts — bloat in the first paragraph is where most cold emails lose the reader. Surface what’s not pulling weight at the top.
The tool refuses to suggest rewrites — the cleaned version is the writer’s decision. It also refuses to cut load-bearing prose just because it’s long, or voice just because it’s hedge-shaped. The test is whether the phrase is doing work in this writer’s register, not whether it would survive a copyeditor.