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Agent skill

Dedash

by LilMGenius in LilMGenius/paperthin

Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.

MITAuto-check passedDevelopment

Install Dedash

skills CLI
$ npx skills add LilMGenius/paperthin --skill dedash -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install LilMGenius/paperthin dedash --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LilMGenius/paperthin.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/depth/dedash .claude/skills/dedash && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
dedash
GitHub stars
1.1k
Token cost
~948 tokens
SKILL.md length
550 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
28
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.

  • Works in 5 steps: FIND: Take the exact scope from the user… → REPLACE per role: Choose per occurrence… → LEAVE-ALONE: Unless the user explicitly… → …
  • Development work in your project
  • SKILL.md covers Goal, Workflow, Rules and Verification
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Dedash is an agent skill from LilMGenius/paperthin. Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.

Its SKILL.md is about 950 tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Development. The repository describes itself as: Low-level agentic design patterns. Turning old engineering wisdom into reflexes your agent reaches for on its own—on any agent. The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Development work in your project

Example prompts

  • “/dedash”

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. FIND: Take the exact scope from the user and locate every dash doing an em-dash's job in it, judged by the role it plays in the sentence…
  2. REPLACE per role: Choose per occurrence by grammatical role
  3. LEAVE-ALONE: Unless the user explicitly includes them and the context proves them wrong, leave untouched
  4. RE-READ: Read every changed sentence in place. Fix awkward rhythm, dangling punctuation, doubled spaces, and connector loss introduced by…
  5. REPORT: State the scope checked, how many dashes were found and changed, which replacements were used by role, and anything left alone or…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 7d5dc62. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Dedash loads about 948 tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 43 tokens; SKILL.md has 550 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~43
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~948

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from LilMGenius/paperthin at commit 7d5dc62, republished under its MIT licence (© LilMGenius). 550 words, ~948 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/dedash/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
dedash
description
Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.
disable-model-invocation
true

Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from the scope the user names, one occurrence at a time, while leaving hyphens, ranges, and deliberate marks alone.

Goal

Replace each em-dash that should not remain with the mark or wording its clause actually needs. Target any dash doing an em-dash's job, whatever its exact character: U+2014 and its longer or repurposed look-alikes all read the same on the page. The user owns the scope: a passage, field, file, selection, or tree. Do not widen it without asking.

Workflow

  1. FIND: Take the exact scope from the user and locate every dash doing an em-dash's job in it, judged by the role it plays in the sentence, not its codepoint: any mark that sets off an aside, an appositive, an abrupt turn, or a missing conjunction. The em-dash (U+2014) is the common one; the horizontal bar (U+2015) and the two- and three-em dashes (U+2E3A, U+2E3B) read the same and count. The en-dash (U+2013) is the boundary case: it counts when it joins clauses where an em-dash would fit, but stays when it spans a range's endpoints, numeric or not (1990–2020, the London–Paris route). A dash doing a non-em job (a hyphen, a minus, a range) stays. Surface anything genuinely ambiguous as a judgment call rather than changing it blindly.
  2. REPLACE per role: Choose per occurrence by grammatical role:
    • Parenthetical aside: commas or parentheses when the dashed material can be lifted out of the sentence.
    • Appositive: a colon or comma when the dashed material renames, defines, or expands the noun before it.
    • Abrupt turn: a full stop, semicolon, or comma when the dash marks a pivot, interruption, or restart.
    • False-conjunction break: rewrite the sentence when the dash stands in for a missing "and", "but", "because", "so", or another real connective.
  3. LEAVE-ALONE: Unless the user explicitly includes them and the context proves them wrong, leave untouched:
    • hyphenated compounds, minus signs, and negative numbers
    • ranges such as 1-10, 1–10, or London–Paris; a range dash is not an em-dash
    • code, diffs, command output, identifiers, serialized data, URLs, paths, anchors, and query strings
    • quoted or clearly deliberate em-dashes in stylized prose; these surface as judgment calls, never as blind mutations
  4. RE-READ: Read every changed sentence in place. Fix awkward rhythm, dangling punctuation, doubled spaces, and connector loss introduced by the replacement. If the sentence now needs wording instead of punctuation, rewrite the smallest clause that solves it.
  5. REPORT: State the scope checked, how many dashes were found and changed, which replacements were used by role, and anything left alone or surfaced as a judgment call.
Show full SKILL.md (116 more words)Show less

Rules

  • Never do blanket replacement. The same glyph can require different punctuation in different clauses.
  • Never replace an em-dash with a hyphen as the cleanup.
  • Mutate with edit-safety: edit unicode-safe (PYTHONUTF8=1) and replace each dash per occurrence, never a blanket sweep; if the scope contains no such dash, report a MISS rather than changing nearby punctuation.
  • Preserve the user's voice. This skill removes a mark where requested; it does not flatten style outside the user-owned scope.

Verification

Before finishing, confirm:

  1. The scope stayed exactly user-owned.
  2. Every replacement was selected per occurrence by grammatical role.
  3. Leave-alone cases stayed untouched or were reported as judgment calls.
  4. The report includes counts and any judgment calls.

© LilMGenius, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in skills/depth/dedash of LilMGenius/paperthin.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 7d5dc62

Compare with similar skills

Dedash next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Dedash compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Dedash this skillLilMGenius/paperthin1.1k—~948Automated safety check: PassMIT
Vercel Composition Patternssupabase/supabase111k59 repos~726Automated safety check: PassMIT
Finishing a Development Branchobra/superpowers296k5 repos~1.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Typescript Advanced Typesrolling-scopes/rsschool-app10k25 repos~4.2kAutomated safety check: PassMPL-2.0
PR Babysitteropeninterpreter/openinterpreter69k3 repos~4.2kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Code Review ChecklistshareAI-lab/learn-claude-code78k5 repos~1.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Categories

Questions about Dedash

What does Dedash do?

Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits. Dedash is an agent skill from LilMGenius/paperthin. Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.

When should I use Dedash?

Dedash fits situations like: development work in your project.

How do I install Dedash in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add LilMGenius/paperthin --skill dedash -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/depth/dedash in LilMGenius/paperthin) into .claude/skills/dedash in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Dedash in Codex?

Run `npx skills add LilMGenius/paperthin --skill dedash -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/depth/dedash in LilMGenius/paperthin) into .agents/skills/dedash in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Dedash in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add LilMGenius/paperthin --skill dedash -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/dedash, .gemini/skills/dedash, .github/skills/dedash and .opencode/skills/dedash in your project.

What does Dedash need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Dedash is instructions for the agent only.

Does Dedash access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Dedash safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Dedash use?

Dedash is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Dedash use?

About 948 tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 3.8k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Dedash?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Dedash: Vercel Composition Patterns (supabase/supabase, 111k stars), Finishing a Development Branch (obra/superpowers, 296k stars), Typescript Advanced Types (rolling-scopes/rsschool-app, 10k stars) and PR Babysitter (openinterpreter/openinterpreter, 69k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Dedash?

LilMGenius (a GitHub user) maintains it in LilMGenius/paperthin, which has 1,130 GitHub stars. The repository holds 28 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 1, 2026.

Source: LilMGenius/paperthin on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.