Sniff Test

Does the draft pass the sniff test?

Sniff Test reads Markdown and plain text and checks it against your house rules. It prints one line per flag with the file, the line, the rule that tripped and how sure it is.

There are two kinds of rule. Countable rules are regular expressions. Long dashes, a paragraph with three colons, a banned word, every sentence the same length. They run on your machine, cost nothing and send nothing anywhere. Judgment rules need something read rather than counted. A closing sentence that only restates the paragraph, a claim hedged three times, a line that talks the reader out of the offer. For those it sends one paragraph at a time to a small hosted judgment model and gets back one probability per rule. It only does that after you have said yes.

Two things it is not. There is no general model in the loop; the judgment model returns one probability per question and nothing else. And it will not rewrite your text. A flag is a sentence for you to fix.

npm install --global snifftest
snifftest check --dry-run draft.md

That runs the countable rules and nothing leaves your machine. To run the judgment rules too, put a TypeSafe key in TYPESAFE_API_KEY and drop --dry-run. The first time, it prints exactly what it is about to send and where, and waits for your answer.

It exits 0 when nothing tripped, 1 when at least one rule did, 2 when the tool could not do its job, and 3 when the judgment rules needed a yes and did not get one.

The nose is the mascot. It is one hand-drawn SVG with six expressions, in assets/nose/, and snifftest serve opens a local page where you type and the nose reacts.

Reading a flag

draft.md:14 dash_present 1.00 A long dash. Give the sentence a full stop instead.
draft.md:31 restating_closer 0.84 The last sentence says the paragraph again. End one sentence earlier.

The number is how sure the checker is, between 0 and 1, and it says nothing about how bad the problem is. A countable rule always scores 1.00. A judgment rule counts as a flag at or above the threshold, which is 0.7 unless the ruleset or --threshold says otherwise. A reading between 0.4 and 0.6 is reported as no judgment and never becomes a flag or a pass. That band exists because the judgment model answers about 0.5 on text it cannot read, and a flat middle number is the one failure that looks like a clean draft.

--format json prints the same flags for a machine, with every reading including the ones under the threshold. snifftest rules prints the ruleset in force and which file each rule came from, which is the quickest answer to "why did that flag".

The rules

The default ruleset ships in rules/default.yaml. Fifteen rules, and the file itself is the documentation. Ten apply to most prose and five are conventions of copy meant to sell.