The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer

The AI writing tic I couldn't stop seeing after building a humanizer I built unslop to strip the tells that mark text as AI-generated. I thought I knew what they were. I was wrong about which ones hurt most. The one I keep catching: the tricolon. "X, Y, and Z" where all three are the same abstraction level. Every AI output does this. Not because the writer means three things. Because the model learned that three parallel items feel rhetorically complete. Before: Modern software engineering requi