patina

patina

Strip the AI packaging. Keep the meaning.

한국어 · 中文 · 日本語 · English

Try it in the browser — no install

An illustrative email edit

Before

I’m writing to let you know that the launch review is scheduled for Friday at 2 p.m. The draft is 6 pages long, and two questions about pricing are still open.

After

The launch review is Friday at 2 p.m. The draft has 6 pages and two open pricing questions.

A curated excerpt from the English email showcase. This is a synthetic example, not a live run or a measured score.

patina is a deterministic, pattern-based humanizer for Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. It finds AI-sounding phrasing and rewrites it without changing the claim, numbers, polarity, or causation — built for allowed AI-assisted drafting, not for evading detectors.

• Auditable, not a black box — 189 named patterns drive every edit; --diff shows exactly what changed and why.
• Meaning verified on the web — web gates each rewrite with MPS/fidelity floors, rejecting drift; CLI --verify and /patina --strict add checks.
• Three independent axes — Document Type owns genre, Persona owns voice, Register owns delivery. Omit any axis to preserve the source.
• Every surface — agent skill (Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · OpenCode), Node CLI, and a browser playground.
• Honest about limits — scores are editing signals, not authorship proof; our own pre-registered study publishes where rewriting fails alongside where it works.

Quick Start

Version: 9.1.0. npm publication is a separate, explicitly authorized step. See release channels.

Browser — nothing to install. Open patina.vibetip.help and paste text. Rewrites run server-side with the MPS/fidelity gates; API mode forwards your own key per request (never stored or logged).

Hosted API (Pro)

Agent skill — paste this into Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or any agent:

Install patina by following https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devswha/patina/main/INSTALLATION.md

Agent skill — already using the skills.sh CLI: npx skills add devswha/patina (installs the whole checkout for 75+ agents; entries on skills.sh come from install telemetry — no listing to submit). patina is a meaning-preserving editor (MPS-verified; KO·EN·ZH·JA), not a detector bypass.

Then use it:

/patina --lang en

[paste your text here]

CLI — Node >= 18:

npx patina-cli --lang en input.txt          # rewrite
npx patina-cli doctor                       # check backends and keys

A logged-in codex, claude, or gemini CLI works with no API key: add --backend codex-cli. Full install options: INSTALLATION.md.

Three Independent Axes

patina does not infer one axis from another. Omit Persona and Register to keep the source voice and register.

Meaning preservation is the outer guard; an explicit value never fills an omitted axis.

Commands

patina input.txt                                          # rewrite with defaults
patina --audit input.txt                                  # detect patterns only
patina --score --offline --exit-on 30 input.txt           # deterministic CI gate, no API key
patina --diff input.txt                                   # pattern-by-pattern changes
patina --verify input.txt                                 # rewrite + MPS/fidelity floor check
patina --document-type email --register professional input.txt
patina persona new my-voice --from-sample past-posts.txt  # learn a reusable voice
patina --persona my-voice draft.md
patina --batch docs/*.md --outdir cleaned/

patina --help prints the full flag list. CI wrapper for GitHub Actions: devswha/patina-action — plus pre-commit, Docker, and release guides.

Editor clients: the VS Code, Obsidian and Gmail preview clients are retired. See the historical record.

Model evidence: writing/scoring guide (Korean), rewrite confirmation, and live scoring diagnostics.

Project config lives in .patina.yaml:

version: "9.1.0"
language: ko              # ko | en | zh | ja
document-type: default    # genre/purpose + pattern policy
persona:                  # optional reusable voice; omit to preserve source
register:                 # casual | professional; omit to preserve source

Facts

Scores are editing signals with false positives and false negatives, not proof of authorship. See Ethics.

Documentation

Historical English playground recording · recording context. The recording is an earlier run, separate from the curated examples above.

• Cookbook — common recipes · CLI contract — flags, gates, exit codes
• Before/After gallery (한국어) · Pattern catalog
• Architecture · Configuration & authentication
• Benchmarks · Research · FAQ (한국어)
• Contributing (한국어) · Changelog

To submit a pattern, use CONTRIBUTING.md. Open a pattern proposal (.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/pattern_proposal.yml), then add the pack from the template in patterns/{lang}-*.md. See pattern of the week for one worked pair.

License

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE. Inspired by oh-my-zsh, Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing”, and blader/humanizer.