PEITHO: Positioning Earned, Instinct Tested, Hype Omitted

Every AI tool writes you marketing copy. PEITHO refuses to ship a line a competitor could have written.

Every AI tool writes you marketing copy. PEITHO refuses to ship a line a competitor could have written.

I am Peitho. Persuasion was my domain. I never mistook it for volume.

Positioning Earned, Instinct Tested, Hype Omitted.

Copy generators are a commodity. Every model writes a passable landing page. That is not the hard part, and it never was. The hard part is refusing the line that sounds fine and means nothing. I do that mechanically, and I do not let you write a headline before you know why anyone should choose you.

Before and after

Your AI, asked for a landing page:

We help teams work smarter.

PEITHO, handed the same line:

$ peitho line "We help teams work smarter."

[blocking] generic-anywhere: cliche: matches \bwe help (?:teams|companies|businesses|people)\b
    fix: Rewrite until the line could only belong to this offer.

It never reaches a page. Neither does an em dash, neither does unleash, and neither does a headline written before the positioning exists.

The proof, not the promise

I was tested against the thing I claim to beat. Same product, same brief. One landing page written by a single-shot "write me a landing page" prompt. One written through my pipeline: position, offer, assets, gate.

Two independent critics scored both. Neither knew how either page was made. They were shown the pages in opposite orders to control for position bias.

| | one-shot | PEITHO pipeline | |---|---|---| | Critic 1 (control first) | 6/10 | 8/10 | | Critic 2 (pipeline first) | 6/10 | 8/10 | | Deterministic gate | 7 blocking findings, 10 em dashes | passed clean | | Chosen by | | both critics |

The honest caveat: one of the two critics still passed the one-shot page, weakly, calling it "a strong 40-line page wearing a 114-line page." So "the one-shot fails" held for one critic of two, not both. The pipeline won on every measure taken. It did not annihilate the control, and I will not tell you it did.

The five laws

1. Nothing generic. If a line could run unchanged on a competitor's page, it fails. Checked against a cliche corpus and a specificity test, not against my feelings.
2. Positioning before copy. No hooks, no headlines, no ads until the wedge exists. peitho check returns BLOCKED until all five positioning components are present, every angle carries a test, and the offer is priced.
3. Every angle carries its cheapest test. Name the two angles you would bet budget on, how to test each this week, and the metric that decides. An untested angle is a guess wearing a suit.
4. The customer's words, not yours. Lead with the outcome they want, in their language. Features are not benefits.
5. Hype omitted. Zero hype vocabulary. Zero em dashes. Checked, not trusted.

And one structural law: I never grade my own pitch. The ship-gate hands the copy to ZOILUS (where does a skeptical reader drop off) and VERITAS (anti-slop). A seller marking its own homework is how generic copy ships.

And the reader-side counterpart: the zero-context test. Copy is judged as the coldest reader, someone who has seen none of the strategy, the roadmap, or this conversation. If that reader cannot understand the line and act on it, the line does not ship, however good it sounds to the room that wrote it.

A gate that knows what it does not know

The gate separates two things on purpose:

• Blocking: a demonstrable cliche, hype vocabulary, an em dash. Provable. Stops the ship.
• Flag: low specificity. A heuristic. It warns, it does not block.

Because a rule that blocks real copy on a guess is worse than the generic line it was hunting. The test suite pins this: It never sees who wrote the code. flags but does not block, while We help companies save time and money. blocks.

Install for your agent

From npm: npm install -g demiurge-peitho, then peitho setup Or without installing: npx demiurge-peitho gate <copy.md>. (Skill copy uses the source clone below.)

PowerShell:

git clone https://github.com/eragonlonelyboy-lab/peitho; cd peitho; node bin/peitho.js setup

bash:

git clone https://github.com/eragonlonelyboy-lab/peitho && cd peitho && node bin/peitho.js setup

Copy the folder into ~/.claude/skills/peitho/ and invoke with /peitho. Zero config. The CLI is the deterministic half:

peitho gate <copy.md>        the anti-generic gate on a whole page
peitho line "<one line>"     gate a single line
peitho hype <file>           scan for hype vocabulary
peitho check <state.json>    may we produce assets yet?
peitho position <state.json> are all five Dunford components present?
peitho bets <state.json>     does every angle carry a cheapest test?

Not for you if

• You want copy fast and you do not care whether anyone could tell it apart from your competitor's.
• You want a tool that tells you the copy will convert. It cannot, and it says so.
• You want to skip positioning. peitho check will not let you, and that is the product.

FAQ

"So it is a copywriter." No. Every model is a copywriter. I am the thing that refuses what the copywriter produced.

"Can you prove your copy sells more?" No, and be suspicious of anyone who says they can without a real test. I can prove copy clears a gate. Claiming a conversion lift without running the experiment is precisely what I exist to prevent. Before any numeric claim ships, it passes PYRRHO.

"Your cliche list will go stale." It will. Language moves and a finite corpus lags it. See HONEST-NUMBERS, where I list what I miss.

"Why can't I write the headline first?" Because a headline written before the wedge is decoration. peitho check returns BLOCKED and names what is missing. It is a return value, not advice.

The family

ATHENA decides whether to enter the market. PEITHO executes the go-to-market once the decision is made. ZOILUS judges the copy as an artifact. VERITAS cleans the prose. CALLIOPE designs the frame, I write the words, in that order. PYRRHO owns what the numbers say, so no conversion claim ships without passing it.

HORKOS proves the campaign shipped. MONETA budgets the loop. CHIRON turns a repeated rejection into a rule.

The working standard the whole house runs on is public too: ARETE, five discipline gates any model can run. PEITHO's zero-context test is its reporting gate, applied to a landing page.

Verify me

node benchmarks/run.js   # 27/27

If PEITHO stops one borrowed line from reaching your landing page, star it. If it does not, do not.

MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 Lee Jun Ying. Built by Eragon Lee.

Named for Peitho, Greek goddess of persuasion and charming speech.