I had to hazmat my entire AI setup

Like every good sci-fi movie, it happened because I created an AI who creates other AIs.

(Okay technically I created a skill that makes other skills but still.)

Basically I took all my prompt engineering knowledge, plus all my best prompts from the last few years, and wrote a super-skill with them to make other skills.

Gave it to Claude and Codex.

Added a mode to self-improve skills. (This is the one that got me.)

The skills it made were amazing.

But if I needed to course correct my AI, I’d ask it to log the learnings and fold that back into the skill prompts and references and things.

A self-improvement loop.

If you own Personal OS, this is ✨ os-skillify (make skills my way) and ✨ os-tune (update skills and processes, like tuning a guitar to make it sound better).

For a while, all the skills and SOPs I'd co-written with AI were working well, especially for coding.

BUT

when I started to go heavy on business and content systems again recently, the outputs were just… TERRIBLE.

AI-isms everywhere.

Em-dash-apocalypse.

<Noun> <weak-verb> <noun> constructions everywhere.

Really painful to read and edit this kind of stuff. And here's why it happened.

AI outputs are influenced by two categories of factors:

• Explicit - what you tell the model to do in your instructions

• Implicit - the style, format, and other patterns present in the input itself

Implicit factors are more subtle.

But with writing, that subtleness is everything.

What happened was, over time, re-running os-skillify and os-tune to update my skills had slowly made them read more and more like AI wrote them from scratch.

It put the overfitted patterns and biases of AI into the skills.

Worst hit was this project called content-studio-os I’ve been working on for a while.

Content Studio OS has A LOT going on, and a lot of its skills, references, and SOPs had gone into full AI mode.

The content brief wrote like AI... which made the researcher write like AI... which made the writer write like AI... which made all the editors write like AI.

Which was making all the content go FULL AI.

And I was like, awwww man.

Honestly really upset.

Like after you put too much pepper in the dinner you've been cooking for the last 25 minutes and you're like... oh no. How am I gonna get that out?

I'm thinking, this is spread across hundreds, if not thousands, of files... Skills, plans, resources, everything.

I can’t manually fix this. I need AI to help, but it was AI that did this to me in the first place.

Still. I had to try.

I created a new skill. A new process. A dedicated system with one goal only: clean up the mess.

I called it ✨ os-hazmat.

And it’s kinda funny.

Hazmat is actually based on my os-editing skill’s humanize mode, which looks for AI tics and traits in writing.

I realized that I needed to humanize EVERYTHING. Not just content. Humanize the skills, the explanations, the planning docs.

ALL OF IT.

Tested a few approaches.

Only Fable 5 was able to do it.

Talked with Fable for two days, going file-by-file, making Before/After tables together, explaining all the edits, until Fable was able to do a pass on a skill file and I had zero complaints. AI-ness removed without removing what made the skill great.

And then I swept all my skills and SOPs and process docs across about 8 different setups. Burned my entire Fable budget (Claude Max plan) for the week in about 30 hours.

Which is how the great AI uprising of 2026 was quelled. Or something like that.

The lesson is this:

Don’t forget about the implicit pattern-matching aspect of AI.

Just because today’s AI is better at following instructions than it was a year ago doesn’t mean patterns aren't still leaking into outputs.

If you feel like things are coming out too AI-ish, run a humanize pass on your skills, process docs, etc.

De-AI-ifying is not just for content anymore.

And PLEASE ->
If you own Personal OS, go to the portal, download the latest .zip. Then tell your AI “I have a .zip of a new Personal OS version in my downloads folder. Update personal-os for me.”

It’ll check your setup for any modifications you’ve made, preserve those, and patch the rest.

Cheers.

Get Personal OS

— Rob Lennon

PS - BTW, If you did my Content Reactor 3.0 program, this is why we spent all that time creating exemplars. To load up the context with patterns so that the content that was being created would match those patterns.

PPS - For a while, exemplars stopped working well when thinking/reasoning models first came out, but they seem to back in play as a strategy and I'm revisiting that whole setup now.

PPPS - This email is 100% human-written except for spell check.